After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  Witness 3: Handsome Amaechi, Kano State:

  I’m a fast runner, so I was close to him when he disappeared. We came to the building and he looked sick. What do I mean by sick? Like when you are about to vomit. His body pulled forward like this. [He acts as if his body is lurching.] It looked like someone knocked him over onto his face. Maybe the blood is what he vomited. I don’t know where he went after that. The little pot—he took it with him, I think. It was in his hand. Yes, Handsome is my given name.

  The men left and Bracket was finally alone. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, going through a breathing exercise his daughter had taught him.

  Breathe in.

  From the very beginning, there had been countless obstacles at the spaceport. He’d needed to find oversized earthmovers in Kano, and they weren’t easy to locate, since they were mostly owned by Chinese parastatal companies; he’d also had to secure a large supply of diesel fuel on his own because the program hadn’t allocated him enough fuel to power the generators, thinking that the pool would already be linked to the solar array.

  Out.

  That effort alone had been a logistical nightmare, more from the standpoint of figuring out how to bargain with local suppliers, who tried to fleece him, than installing the tank. The sheer size of Naijapool demanded extra grading of the earth, as well as reinforced rebar that was rare in this part of the country. On top of this, the electrical equipment ran on different voltages depending on their supplier, and the specifications could either be Imperial or metric.

  In.

  And then there had been the other things. The things that could not be described as the normal course of trying to launch a rocket from Africa. Many of his electronics spat out inaccurate or unreliable data. This wasn’t because of the heat, but some kind of electric discharge that the on-site technicians couldn’t explain. Bracket had since reinforced much of the hardware—at premium prices—and then placed the servers on rubber mats so that they were air-gapped from the wall. He’d also mandated regular data backups on numerous devices. And yet, the failure rate of his equipment seemed to increase the further they dug into the ground. And he wasn’t alone either. His colleagues told him that they often received skewed data on routine technical tests. Not to mention that the political status of the project always seemed to be wavering, with many pundits and politicians wondering why Nigeria was wasting its resources and funds when the country faced so many other challenges.

  Out.

  And now this. He started composing an incident report for Op-Sec that included the testimonies, but found himself deleting it midway through. If he contacted Op-Sec, word would soon get to his boss, Josephine Gauthier, that something had gone wrong. And Josephine did not like surprises, especially not surprises that could lead to a police investigation. He was on bad enough terms with her already, as she’d attributed nearly every unforeseen setback at Naijapool to problems of his own making. And in truth, if he hadn’t run out to the antenna array himself, he never would have believed the workers’ stories. He needed to bring this to her in person.

  Bracket searched for his Geckofone to reach out to her, but couldn’t see the device anywhere. He called for it. It blinked green on the ceiling next to an overhanging lamp, where it was drawing solar power. He snapped his fingers twice, and the Geckofone obediently slithered along the ceiling and down the wall, allowing him to pluck it off with his hands. The G-fone flattened its body and retracted its legs once in his palm, so that it looked more like an ordinary phone. He could swipe through screens, use gestures, or give it commands through its microphone. Its legs, head, and tail—formed from interlocking graphene scales—could extend and scale up sheer walls like an actual lizard. Indeed, the effect was so convincing that real geckos would slither over to inspect the device and occasionally attack it. Most of the time Bracket kept it in his pocket, where it would draw energy from his body heat.

  He logged on to the Loom, the spaceport’s secure network, by wrapping all four fingers around the skin of the G-fone and saying a random passphrase aloud to gain access. He quickly fired off a note to Josephine Gauthier:

  Need to meet. Important. KB

  The Loom had originally been called the Akwete Network, after the exquisite cloth weavers from the town of Akwete, but the astronauts had christened it the Loom and the name had stuck, because people treated the astronauts like royalty, even if Bracket felt they didn’t deserve it.

  He checked his inbox.

  Message 1: PRIORITY MESSAGE

  Message 2: Weather Report—NIGMETSAT

  Message 3: Consecration of the Masquerade

  To read the priority message, he had to take out a key that looked like a straw from his desk and then check the calendar. The kola nut was designated for Tuesday. He opened up a small jar, extracted a kola nut, peeled it, and took a bite, feeling a sharp rush as the stimulant coursed through his taste buds and gums. Kola was still used in Nigeria as a traditional greeting, part of a ritual to begin conversation among a number of tribes, and this, along with many other traditions, had been integrated within the facility’s security systems. The nut tasted of metal, like a cool can of Coke, and exhilaration at the same time. After chewing for a moment, he inserted the straw into his Geckofone and blew into it. The device analyzed the particles in his breath and opened the message.

  A convoclip from Sybil.

  “Hey, Dad! I’m doing good down here in Grenada. Second month of classes.”

  “How’s the weather, baby?” he whispered to his daughter. The rest of the world seemed to dissolve around him.

  “It’s all right,” she responded. “Hot all the time, but at least we can go swimming in the sea. Thurston bought me some snorkeling gear, and he said he’s going to teach me how to dive next week. We might even see some sharks!”

  “Who’s Thurston?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know the answer to that. Have another question?”

  “Is Thurston your boyfriend?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know the answer to that. Have another question?”

  “Are you dating someone right now?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know the answer to that. Have another question?”

  In.

  Convoclips took up less data than video clips and could get through the Loom firewall, but they were frustrating, designed to make the messages more intimate by simulating a conversation. It didn’t always work.

  Out.

  “How do you like Yale, Sybil?”

  “I’m doing good down here in Grenada. Second month of classes.”

  Doing well, he thought. She’d picked that poor grammar up from his ex-wife, and she kept saying it much to his irritation.

  Seeing that he wasn’t going to get anything more out of her, probably on purpose, because Sybil was clever when it came to talking about her boyfriends, he said: “You got enough money, baby?”

  “Thanks for asking, Dad. I received your cowrie transfer so I was able to pay this semester’s tuition. It didn’t leave a lot of money for living expenses, but it’s all right, I’m going to get a job on campus somewhere. Hopefully Dr. Crother’s lab. He’s an expert on limb transplants.”

  The medical school in Grenada had officially been taken over by Yale when the Northeast went dark, and the Ivy League school now occupied the complex that had once been invaded by President Reagan in the 1980s. Many people had flocked to the south Caribbean, and Grenada was viewed as a safe haven from the Wallers. The libertarians preferred the Silicon Territories. It could be difficult to keep track of the isms—the Flare had rearranged the geography of political philosophies.

  “You still doing your paintings, Sybil?”

  “Mom made it to Santa Cruz with Ramsey. She said they found a house in one of the enclaves. They have a redwood in their backyard! If I can save up enough, I’m going to go visit them at the end of the semester, since you said I can’t come to Nigeria.”

  Now the convoclip fe
lt positively toxic. Bracket didn’t know his ex-wife’s new husband, Ramsey, well, other than he lived beyond his means and had a daughter of his own from a previous marriage whom he lavished with gifts. He was a selfish prick. The visa into the Silicon Territories must have cost a fortune, a land-settlement claim even more so. Yet somehow Ramsey couldn’t scrape together any cowries to send to Sybil for her studies. Bracket wanted his daughter to come visit him in Kano, he really did, but the spaceport was no place for a kid like her to live, not now at least.

  “Tell your mom I said hi,” he said, the words grating against his tongue.

  “I’m doing good down here in Grenada. Second month of classes.”

  “Can you send me a photo?”

  “Good-bye, Dad. Irie! Love you!”

  “Love you too, babe.”

  He closed the message, thinking: I need to send her more money. Then: Fuck Ramsey, I can’t lose my job right now, and: Who the hell is Thurston? He hoped he wasn’t some local gangbanger. He hoped she was smarter than that.

  Come see me at the Nest. JG

  Josephine had written back. It was time to go.

  Finally, he looked at the weather report:

  NIGMETSAT-12 Report. Kano. Tuesday. High 35 degrees Celsius. Low pressure detected over the Gulf of Guinea, with accompanying high pressure over eastern Sahara and dust plumes rising to two kilometers above sea level. Harmattan may begin as many as four weeks early.

  As if there wasn’t enough trouble, Naijapool would be filled with sand from the Sahel if they didn’t begin pouring the water soon.

  CHAPTER 4

  A muezzin sent out an amplified, wavering call from the spaceport mosque as Bracket made his way toward mission control to meet with his boss. His crew began setting down their tools along the pool deck to pray. Outside in the half-light, the oblong angles of the mission control tower cut sharply against the sky. The building, which staff called the Nest, stood atop six enormous pylons of concrete and was ringed by giant windows of photosensitive glass. Thick conduits of fiber-optic cable pulsed with light from information networks extending along the equator to the spaceport. Crystalline antennae poked this way and that, transmitting wireless signals throughout the country, creating the feel of glowing twigs lining the top of a bird’s nest.

  Josephine Gauthier was the mission director of the Nigeria Rescue Venture, and she had already cleared Bracket to enter the Nest—but the steel door at the entrance remained closed as he approached it.

  “Turn off your identity,” Josephine announced over an intercom. “You’re not cleared under Hausa.”

  “It’s my default.”

  “Switch your tribe to American. That’s what you are.”

  Bracket reluctantly switched from Hausa back to American, and the door slid open. The Geckofone allowed you to alternate rapidly between multiple ethnic identities—Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, or even Ijaw and Ogoni—each isolated from the next identity at the root level, meaning that the tribes couldn’t be compromised by malflies, dumb microdrones that hovered around electronics trying to inject malware. The identities were more than avatars, since they changed the inflections of your voice and exaggerated your physical gestures too. It allowed for security and anonymity and in theory served as a defense against violence caused by tribalism.

  His identity switched, he climbed the stairs and emerged in the mission control room, a voluminous, domed structure packed with screens displaying locations all around the spaceport. One set of screens showed the interior of the International Space Station, where the astronaut Masha Kornokova was evidently asleep, strapped into a sleeping bag on a wall of the capsule, strands of her blond hair drifting above her brow. Through the exterior windows, which wrapped 360 degrees around the Nest, Bracket could see the lights of the airstrip illuminated in the distance. The building felt like a control tower at an airport because Josephine had designed it that way.

  His boss sat within a circle of monitors at the very center of the control room. Her hair was tied into a ponytail, the tips of her dreadlocks dyed orange, like a tarantula. Josephine was of French-Guadeloupian descent, so in the United States people might have guessed she was Dominican or mixed race, or certainly a person of color. But her skin color didn’t stop her from saying some of the most discriminatory things about Africans that Bracket had ever heard. On the console in front of her, Bracket could see a video of a crane lowering a strut into place, probably at the engine-testing facility run by the Indians.

  “Controlled burn,” Josephine explained. “Third test today.” She spoke some commands to an on-site engineer, and data from the burn appeared on her screen.

  “We’re going to have to do better than that, Raj,” she said. “I want another test tomorrow morning.”

  The engineer on the screen signed off. During a real mission, Josephine would be hooked into a heads-up display with haptic feedback, which would buzz based on the importance of any issues that might arise. For now, she appeared to be keeping an eye on things without hooking in.

  “Have a look, Kwesi,” she said. She swiped to a new screen. Bracket could now see a video of himself in his office at Naijapool: the black plastic glasses, the overhanging brow, the sharp-edged, wide-flared nose, and the light gray stubble poking around his thick jaw. The broad shoulders and muscular forearms. The circles under his hazel eyes blackened like a catfish. Standing next to Josephine, he rubbed at his eyes and felt dirt peel away.

  I need coffee, he thought. Or a drink.

  “You were at your desk and then you bolted, Kwesi,” Josephine said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “How often do you look at that camera?” Bracket retorted.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not spying on you. I look when something happens. Your G-fone showed your pulse going through the roof.”

  He looked around the room to see who else was within earshot. Her staff all appeared to be deeply engaged in their tasks, but someone might be paying attention to their conversation. People gossiped at the spaceport as much as anywhere else.

  “It’s confidential,” he said.

  “All right,” she said, and nodded. “Duck.” She reached down to pull a lever at the base of her command chair. A yellow warning light spun around her desk as four milled alloy wedges emerged from the floor around them. Soon they were encapsulated in a metal shell lit by infrared lighting, and a manual keyboard popped up. A ventilation fan buzzed on, keeping the chamber cool.

  “Nothing’s getting in or out of here except through the keyboard,” Josephine explained. “You can speak openly.”

  Bracket cleared his throat. “My workers found something at the site, a piece of old pottery. One of them took off with it, and we chased him down. But by the time we got there he had disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “We couldn’t find him anywhere. There was some blood, but we don’t know if it was his. No one saw where he went.”

  She leaned back in her chair, thinking it through. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “We searched everywhere for him and didn’t turn up anything. He could have been working with someone else. I think it could have been a trick too, although I’m not sure why he’d trouble himself with it. The pottery looked old, I mean real old. Like an artifact of some kind. My workers dug it up near Naijapool.”

  “Merde putain,” Josephine swore. “You’re sure they found it near the tank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell Op-Sec?”

  “I wanted to bring it to you first.”

  “Good. You’d better not tell them, Kwesi. Don’t tell anyone. We’re on federal territory, but Bello was only able to buy the land from the Emir of Kano by promising to turn over any cultural patrimony—anything with historical value. There are rigid protocols for that. We’ll have to halt the mission, bring in an archaeologist, catalog the site, everything. We can’t afford to do that right now, not on the schedule we’re pushing. People have been living in Kano for a tho
usand years. I already warned Bello that we can’t stop for every little calabash we find in the ground. What’s the worker’s name, the one who ran away?”

  “Abdul Haruna. Quiet guy. No one expected it of him. All I know is he’s not coming back here again.”

  “I’ll delete his employment file. He’d better keep his mouth shut. You think he’ll do that?”

  “If you ask me there might have been someone else involved. I had three witnesses come forward and give me their testimonies, but they didn’t see anyone besides Abdul.”

  “Give me their names,” she said. “I’ll delete their files too.”

  He shook his head. “I gave them my word their jobs would be safe if they came forward.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she snapped. “Now you have to watch them too.”

  “They won’t talk, Josephine,” Bracket insisted. He wasn’t sure of it, but he felt his crew was ultimately loyal to him.

  “They’d better not talk. At least scrub their testimonies. And another thing,” she went on, “you should never have left your G-fone unattended. That’s a major security risk. If you had been injured, we would not have known how to respond. I can’t find you if you don’t take it with you.”

  “Won’t happen again,” he said. He didn’t like bowing to her every criticism, but she seemed to be coming at him from every angle of attack today.

  “Kwesi, I truly don’t have time for this. We needed to begin filling Naijapool yesterday.”

  They glared at each other for a moment—he wasn’t going to serve as her punching bag either.

  “We’re scheduled to begin pouring the water on Thursday, Josephine. I told you that the cabling isn’t up to scratch. I want redundancy before we drop anyone in the water.”

  “It’s not my fault you ordered inferior cable.”