The Hero of Numbani

by Nicky Drayden

  No. No, this was too risky.

  She turned around to signal to her friends that she’d changed her mind. Naade and Hassana looked more than ready to bolt as well, eyes wide and necks swiveling at every stray sound, but behind them, blocking their exit, were two African wild dogs. They were dangerous enough on their own—stockily built and with enough stamina to chase an antelope down to exhaustion—but from their black-and-brown brindle fur erupted cybernetic spinal implants that stretched all the way down their hind legs and gave them even more of an advantage. Efi caught a flicker of neon-green light from behind those mean eyes, and as they focused on her, her mind froze.

  “Having second thoughts?” came a smooth voice from the window of the van, now open. A man stepped out of the door and slammed it behind him. He was dressed head to toe in pristine white leather, with a few cybernetic parts of his own, including a green disk at each of his temples. Definitely not who Efi was expecting to get out of that van, but judging from the look on his face, Efi wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting, either. “You’re BotBuilder11?” he said with a scoff.

  Efi nodded. She was too petrified for words to come out right now.

  “You’re … a kid,” he said.

  “All my life,” Efi managed, proud that she kept the tremble out of her voice. Then slowly, she moved her hand into her pocket and pulled out three MBCs. She held her palm up. They squirmed and wriggled, each the size of a sand dollar, and to ensure authenticity, their synthetic blood contained a unique code that couldn’t be duplicated. “Can we have the fusion driver now?”

  “I’ve done a lot of questionable things in my life, but I’m not selling an assault weapon to an eight-year-old,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I’m almost twelve, thank you,” Efi said, now indignant. She hadn’t come here to get insulted. She’d come to make a deal.

  “Well, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, I’m not selling! I’ve got principles, you know. How did you even get that kind of money?”

  “I thought you said, ‘no questions asked.’” Efi placed a fourth MBC in her palm, and all together, that made up the entirety of the funds she had left. She had a feeling the seller might have reservations about doing business with her, but money talked.

  He hemmed and hawed, looking at the squirming coins.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give you the fusion driver, but you can’t tell anyone where you got it, yeah?”

  Efi put her hand on her hip. “I don’t even know who you are! How am I going to tell someone where I got it from if I don’t even know where I got it from?”

  The guy took the MBCs from her hand then went back to his van. “Wait here,” he said.

  Efi and her friends exchanged anxious yet excited looks as the seller opened the back doors of his van. He whistled, and his dogs broke into a run, dodging around Efi and her friends with superspeed and precise movements, then jumped into the back of the van. He shut the doors, and a couple seconds later, the van peeled out of the lot along with Efi’s only chance at getting the fusion driver.

  “I don’t sell to kids!” the guy shouted out the window as he turned onto the main road. Then he was gone with her money and Efi had nothing to show for it. That guy had too many morals to sell weapons to kids, but apparently not so many that he wouldn’t think twice about scamming them.

  Efi screamed at the top of her lungs, yelling for the seller to come back with her money. To come back with her dreams. She almost ran after him, chasing him into traffic, but Hassana grabbed her arm and pulled her back in tight.

  “I’m sorry, Efi,” she said. “But do you really want him to come back here? He took your money, but we’re safe, and you can’t put a price on that.”

  Efi shook her head. She felt numb all over. “We shouldn’t have come here.”

  “Sorry, Efi,” Naade mumbled. “Isaac said it was safe. He said we could trust him.”

  “No, this is my fault. I put you in that position, and now, we’ve lost everything. What are we going to do? All we’ve got is a broken robot with no weapons. How’s that going to help anybody?”

  “Rain on the leopard does not wash off its spots,” Naade said. “You’re strong, Efi. A little setback like this isn’t going to change that.”

  “You sound like my dad,” Efi grunted.

  “Getting roughed up by cybernetic dogs in a sketchy parking lot makes you grow up fast. Anyway, I know it could take months, but you’ve going to turn your vision into a reality.”

  Months? Efi shook her head. “We can’t wait that long. If Doomfist decides to attack, then we’ll—”

  The forklift at the Axiom loading bay crashed into the building, snagging Efi’s attention. The omnic driver didn’t look concerned by the incident, just backed the forklift up and crashed it into the wall again.

  “What in the world?” Efi said. Another omnic squatted down to pick up a large box marked FRAGILE on the side, held it up high, then dropped it. Even from halfway across the lot, Efi could hear the broken glass shift inside. Then he lifted and dropped the box again. And again. Moments later, Efi could hear screaming—human screaming—coming from inside the building.

  “We need to get out of here,” Naade said.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” said Hassana.

  Efi protested. “Those omnics are malfunctioning. It looks like they’re caught in a loop. Someone needs to help them.”

  “That someone doesn’t have to be you, Efi. Let’s report it to the civic defense. They’ll handle it.”

  The omnic driving the forklift backed it up for the fourth or fifth time. They were built to be strong, but even titanium wouldn’t hold up to that kind of beating forever. Then Efi noticed a movement in the shadows of the loading bay, the vague form of a woman, the magenta cybernetic implants on one side of her head glowing ever so slightly. She threw something outside the bay door, and the next second, she was gone. Efi rubbed her eyes, wondering what she’d just seen, but then remembered that right now, she needed to focus on the omnics.

  “They’re malfunctioning, it must be an error. I don’t think they’d hurt anyone,” Efi said to Naade. “They’re just scared. I’m going to get a little closer.” She pulled out her tablet and searched for open wireless signals. In addition to the normal communications ports that were usually open, the omnics’ private ports were also exposed. It was like open access right to their brains, which seemed to cause the lights on their foreheads to fade. Efi gritted her teeth. This was bad. She pried her way deeper until she found the rogue code. It was self-replicating, meaning that it was overwriting the omnics’ functions, one by one. If she didn’t act soon, the omnics would lose their whole memory. Efi immediately wrote a program of her own, one to slow down the processor speed so she could buy herself some time to think. Then she started on a function to overwrite the rogue code, attacking it like it was attacking the omnics’ original programming. At last, the forklift came to a stop, and the omnic sat up alert, head swiveling in confusion. The antidote reversed all the damage it could, and a few seconds later, the exposed ports were locked down again. It passed wirelessly from one omnic to the next, until all of the loading bay workers were back to normal.

  Efi scanned the ports one more time, and all looked well, except at the end of the list, she caught a glimpse of another signal: 344X-Azúcar.

  It blinked away suddenly, so quickly Efi was unsure if she’d seen it at all. That was the same weird signature she’d caught at the airport, right before the attack. She repeated the port scan. Nothing unusual.

  “Huh,” Efi said, rubbing her eyes. She was sleep deprived. Frustrated. Angry. Had she imagined it?

  “What is it? Did you fix everything?” Naade asked.

  “I—I think so. Let’s just get back home. I need to sell some things to raise more money,” Efi said with a lump in her throat. “Tools, equipment. Spare robot parts.”

  “Efi, you can’t get rid of your tools,” Naade said. “They’re a part of you!”

 
They were, Efi thought to herself. But not anymore.

  On their way home, Efi made the listings for everything she could spare to sell. There was her CraftLife 5000 set—premium power tools she’d gotten last year for her birthday. They were state-of-the-art and included a hard-light screwdriver that could drive a dozen heavy-duty screws into the hardest of metals in four seconds flat. She didn’t want to do it, but she had to. Besides, she’d still have the tool set her oldest cousin Bisi had given to her when she was a kid. Maybe she’d have to manually place screws and nails, but it would work well enough. She just hoped it wouldn’t bring up too many bad memories of what her cousin had become after getting tangled up with those awful people.

  Three hours later, everything had been claimed. Efi packed up the final box, placed it into the net of a delivery drone, keyed in the address, and watched as the drone lifted off, maneuvering through her open window, then shot up into the sky. Efi’s workshop was definitely emptier.

  “At least now we have enough room to make a proper bay for the OR15,” Efi said, pointing to the corner where her tool kit had once sat. “A place for her to rest and feel at home.”

  She was trying to look on the bright side, though after the day she’d had, it didn’t feel like there were any bright sides left.

  The donations kept trickling in, and after a couple weeks, Efi had enough money to purchase a Branford arm, refurbished from an actual Branford dealer. It was made for the “Idina” model of OR14 security robots, so it wasn’t a complete match, and would require a fair amount of work to iron out the incompatibilities. The arm did come outfitted with a Luxor hard-light caster, capable of generating lassos and energy traps. It wasn’t close to being as intimidating as a fusion driver, but at least her robot would have some sort of offensive attack.

  Efi needed an adult to complete the purchase, though, and instead of bugging her parents yet again, she recruited her cousin Dayo, who had turned eighteen last month. He was excited to put on a performance for the Branford dealer and demanded to know his character’s motivation. Efi mumbled something vague, just wanting to get the purchase out of the way, but Dayo kept pressing. Out of desperation, she told him that his character was a distinguished gentleman looking to add to his menagerie of robots. That was a mistake. Dayo showed up to their meeting spot in front of Kọfị Aromo like he’d stepped off the set of a Flash Brighton movie. He was dressed in a very dapper suit made of silver sequins and a jet-black dress shirt with a teal feather in the lapel. His cane was painted teal to match, with meandering lines of mosaic mirror pieces and silver wire running its entire length.

  But it worked, and they got the arm without incident, and Dayo even bargained for white glove delivery to the workshop. Naade was already there, busy smoothing out the robot’s metal plating, though to call it a “robot” at this point was quite generous. It was more like a pile of dented and mismatched parts.

  “Hey!” Efi said. “We did it!”

  “You got the arm?” Naade said, jumping up and running his hand over the box. “Let’s open this up and see what it looks like.”

  “Where’s Hassana?” Efi asked, looking around the workshop. Her paint gun was lying on the table next to two shoulder joints the size of helmets. They’d already been given several layers of bronze paint and were awaiting the artistic embellishments Hassana had insisted on.

  “Running late, I guess,” Naade said before noticing Dayo standing there. He did a double take, then his eyes went wide. “Is that a Flash Brighton cosplay from the Breaking Circuits trilogy? Where Flash Brighton is a human pretending to be an omnic pretending to be a human?”

  Dayo dusted his lapel with his knuckles. “Made it myself for OmnicCon last year. Would have won the costuming contest, too, if it hadn’t been for that HAL-Fred Glitchbot cosplay, yelling at everyone about mandatory human-hiring quotas. His entire outfit was store-bought.” Dayo pursed his lips in distaste.

  “No way! Did they see the detail in this stitching? You used his signature gold thread and everything. And your cane … is it like in that part in the movie where Flash Brighton walks into that bait shop in the middle of nowhere and is surprised by an ambush of trigger-happy Dagger Sect agents posing as anglers, and he transforms his cane into a submachine gun and turns them all into fish chum?”

  Dayo winced. “No. It’s just a cane. To help me get around …”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s just a cane,” Efi said, admiring it. Clearly Dayo had put quite a bit of effort into getting it to look like Flash Brighton’s. All found objects, she was sure. “It’s cool. Like a work of art.”

  Dayo grinned at her. “Thanks, Efi. Anyway, where do you want this arm?”

  Efi pointed to an empty spot on the tarp where the rest of the robot was lying, and Dayo guided the package toward it, puttering along on an antigrav dolly that must have been twenty years old.

  “What’s this?” he said after he’d parked the dolly, pointing at the cylinder lying on top of a pile of parts that were charred and broken beyond repair. It stood out from the rest of the junk Efi was going to scrap because it looked like it could be functional. The white ends gleamed from a thorough polishing, then tapered down through the middle, a soft, matte black.

  Efi shook her head. “It’s a supercharger. But I couldn’t get it to work properly.” It was a sore spot. She’d been excited that it was included with the robot, seeing as all the fun weapons had been stripped away, but after two weeks of tinkering, she’d given up on fixing the supercharger in favor of more important tasks, like figuring out a way to weaponize the hard-light caster since the fusion driver and Tobelstein reactor were both out of reach. At least for now.

  Dayo flipped the switch on the supercharger, and a faint beat came from it. The hairs on Efi’s neck rose. It was definitely doing something, just not enough to be much use to anybody in the throes of battle. Dayo looked over at the parts Hassana had already decorated, then back down at the supercharger. “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

  He sat down and wrangled the supercharger into his lap. It was heavier than it looked, but after a minute of trying to get it perfectly adjusted, Dayo started pounding on the upturned end, making up a little beat.

  “A gangan drum!” Efi said, noting the hourglass shape. “Like Grandpa’s.”

  Dayo nodded, then pounded out one of the songs their grandpa had taught them. In the next moment, Efi and Naade were both dancing to the rhythm. Boom. Boom. Pap. Boom. Pap. Pap.

  The makeshift drum spoke its intentions into the air, a call to war, and right now Efi’s war involved getting all these parts assembled and in working order. Efi decided right then and there that her robot should have this drum. Even if it didn’t function as a supercharger, it would keep the robot connected to its West African roots. As she danced around the workshop, Efi took stock of her parts. They had the chassis. The Branford arm. The beginnings of a sweet paint job. And maybe most importantly, Efi had settled on a vocal imprint. None of the preinstalled voices had called to her, so she’d made her own custom one. She’d taken voice samples from her mother and grandmother, who shaped Efi’s life even before her very first breath; from her calculus teacher, Ms. Okorie, because even though she could be a little stern, her voice became so lyrical when moved by the beautiful complexities of math; and finally from Gabrielle Adawe herself. There’d been hundreds of hours of her speaking in the archives at the Numbani Heritage Museum. Efi hoped that her robot could project even half the poise and confidence that Adawe did.

  “Efi!” came Hassana’s voice, shrieking from the hall outside the workshop. Their impromptu dance party came to an abrupt halt, and moments later, Hassana stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame for support. She struggled to catch her breath and her eyes were as wide as platters.

  “Unity Plaza,” she rasped. “Omnic street vendors. Gone haywire.”

  “They’re malfunctioning?” Naade asked, his eyes now as wide as Hassana’s. “Like giving away food for free?”


  She shook her head.

  Efi carefully escorted her clearly frazzled friend in and sat her on a stool. “Hassana, it’s okay. You’re safe now. Tell us what happened.”

  “I was trying to buy us some snacks, but it was weird. The omnic vendors were acting funny. Like you know Ndidi, who has the clothing stand a block from the museum? My mom must have bought a million geles from her, and she even babysat me a couple times when I was little, but when I passed by her, she didn’t even acknowledge me. Not a wave or anything. And I don’t know, I guess the dots on her forehead seemed duller. Like the omnics at the Axiom loading bays. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, but then I noticed all the omnics were oblivious to human customers. Bright and bubbly with other omnics, but everyone else was invisible to them. Anyway, some humans started getting upset they weren’t getting service, and a big fight broke out. I ran here as fast as I could.”

  Naade darted to the windows and opened them. The sounds of the city filtered in. Efi felt the unease and negativity come through on the stiff breeze. They squinted toward Unity Plaza, now swarming with civic defenders, the bright lights of their patrol cars strobing off the buildings and making it look like a party—a party Efi had no interest in attending. Humans were still yelling at omnics, and a few more squabbles broke out. Efi had never seen her city like this.

  Ever since the recent assassination of the omnic spiritual leader, Mondatta, fighting had been breaking out between humans and omnics all over the world. Efi didn’t think anything could drive a wedge between humans and omnics here in Numbani, but after Doomfist’s attack at the airport, this city of harmony had been feeling off-key.

  Efi swallowed. She had tried to distance herself from thinking about the attack. It was too painful. Her parents spent a lot of their time glued to the holovids, watching the news for Doomfist’s next attack. They were used to buildings being blown up and neighborhoods being destroyed, but lately, things had been eerily quiet.

  What if Doomfist had been silently attacking them all along? Nurturing discord and distrust between humans and omnics, one minor incident at a time?