After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “The refrigerator,” she whispered.

  “I’ll move it, and you take the damn thing out.” He stepped close to it, feeling his heart pounding.

  “Maybe I should call for backup—” the officer began, but Bracket was already wrenching the refrigerator from its socket. The spider was about twice the size of his hand, covered with furry bristles, and had a body the color of sand. It had eight optical cameras and one hardwired data transmission fang that poked out from its orifice. The electrical circuits had been woven into the carapace of the insect. Exposed in plain sight, it splayed out all eight of its legs. Then it shot out its bristles, which stung Bracket’s skin.

  “Damn! Shoot it!”

  The spider scurried up the wall before the officer could fire, leaving a trail of bristles behind it. Bracket retreated to the door to close off its escape. It skittered across the ceiling, moving too quickly for a natural insect. Now it was over his head, its sensors scanning for an exit. It spied the G-fone in Bracket’s pocket and reared up its forelegs. It leapt for Bracket’s chest.

  He saw a flash of light above his eyes as he ducked to the floor.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Bracket?”

  “You get it?”

  “Yes, I’ve disabled it. You can open your eyes now.”

  “I was protecting the Geckofone.”

  “I’m sure you were, Mr. Bracket. I caught it in a Faraday cage. Sorry I had to shoot so close to your head. With all its sensors active, I wanted it to think I was firing a Taser. It wasn’t prepared for the cage.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “No, it has microphones and full speech recognition. If someone is operating it remotely they would have known. The Faraday cage has neutralized it for the time being.” She stooped down over the spider. “Now quite harmless with its circuits disabled. Looks like they removed the poison sac. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Bracket watched the docile thing in the cage. It didn’t try to escape. It just sat there.

  “This is really quite fascinating, sir. It’s very sophisticated. It was probably designed to infect the Geckofone with spyware. We’ll take it back and analyze its code—you’re lucky you bought that battery. The spider wasn’t prepared for the Geckofone to lose its tail. Old defense against a new adversary.”

  “I’ll have to thank my friend for that. Thanks for your help, Ini.”

  She smiled at him. “How did you know my name?”

  “It’s on your badge.”

  “Ah, of course. I’ve restored your basic communications functions, but I’m going to have to limit your access to the Loom in case it managed to slip in code we can’t detect at the moment. You can keep your phone. Just give me permission to access it remotely.” He pressed his thumb onto the screen of her device. “Thank you, sir.”

  Bracket watched her carry the revolting creature away, thinking, Brave soul.

  He checked in with Josephine to give her an update on the pool and the film shoot, but she was preoccupied with mission testing. The spider caught her attention, though. “Did it get anything?” she asked.

  “We don’t know. DigiSec is going to check it out. We should be careful what we say.”

  “All right, let me know what else you learn. Don’t say anything critical over these channels.”

  “Could have been the Jarumi, or someone trying to sabotage us.”

  “What did I just say, Kwesi? Don’t say anything over these channels. Come see me if DigiSec learns something useful.”

  After signing off, his G-fone indicated that it had downloaded something. He thought Ini might already be poking around from her remote connection, but instead he found a message from his friend Onur, the geologist:

  Kwesi,

  How’s the cycling there, eh? Been too long, buddy. I looked at the photos. It could be a meteorite but I cannot tell. There is one expert I know who is specialized in meteorites and archaeology. His name is Dr. Wale Olufunmi. Last I hear, he is in South Africa and he is not in good health. A warning to you, my friend: he can be very crazy. Last time, he almost killed me.

  Wife and son are in good health. Too much soybeans. We stay on base at Ellington Field now and I ate a big piece of steak. Delicious! Transformers coming to Houston next year. Until then, we run emergency drills for the satellites when they begin to fall. We pray they will burn up—God help us! Can you send me one of those Geckofones? I hear they’re cool. Be safe, my friend.

  Onur

  The fact that the transformers had not yet arrived did not bode well for Houston, because it meant the city would be dependent on solar arrays or wind farms. Even then, those power sources were of limited utility without transformers, which were manufactured in Europe. And Europe had been knocked offline too. Onur and his family would be safe on the military base—Ellington Field—yet prisoners of sorts within its borders.

  He took Onur’s advice and sent Dr. Olufunmi a message with photos of the artifact attached, which would sit in his outbox until Ini over at Digital Security cleared his G-fone, so it might take some time to reach him. Outside at the pool, Xiao’s last tanker dumped its load of water, and Bracket’s crew switched back to the local supply to fill the rest of it. The mock-ups of the space station modules were now fully submerged, rippling below in the cloudy water. The air on the pool deck too had changed, the humidity of the water soothing Bracket’s skin. He couldn’t help but enjoy the immensity of it, an aquifer of water rippling through the Sahel like an oasis.

  Then he saw a diver sitting on the far edge of the pool, his fins dangling over the side.

  “What the hell are you doing, Santander?”

  Santander was a marine biologist from Mozambique who had run a dive shop off its beautiful coastline before joining the spaceport. He was busy smearing toothpaste inside his mask to keep it from fogging up.

  “Inspecting the pool, Kwesi. Sixty freeze to death in Chicago.”

  “That water hasn’t been cleaned yet. Besides, you should have a dive buddy with you.”

  “I have dived in worse conditions, Kwesi. I saw something alive in the water. Hurricane-force winds pelting the island of St. Kitts.”

  “You’re telling me you went down there already?”

  “I did a quick swim around. Won the Nairobi Grand Prix with seven seconds to spare.”

  “We have no idea where the water was sourced from, Santander. There could be water-borne diseases, E. coli, anything. You shouldn’t have gone in there.”

  “Okay, no problem. Tranquilo. An outbreak of rhesus disease.”

  The divers had been waiting for months to dive in the water, and in the meantime, Santander had become a newshound. Newshounding was an addiction that had devastated entire populations after the Flare, who had flocked to any Internet connectivity with obsession. You subscribed to a newsfeed and you were informed by multiple forms of breaking information based on your attention span. The feed was adjusted accordingly so that you could be jolted out of a daydream by a headline. Newshounds typically had jerky, unpredictable movements as they weaved through crowds. The worst services were illegal and combined haptic feedback with visualizations and heads-up displays. In areas cut off by the Flare, newshounds were sometimes worshipped as oracles. Santander had somehow devised his own newsfeed off the Loom, an impressive feat of engineering when information was so tightly controlled by the government. On a practical level, it made him annoying to talk to. He had the attention span of a gnat and interjected headlines into conversation without context.

  “Take your suit back to the washing facility,” Bracket ordered. “We need to disinfect it.”

  “I found a spotted stingray on the bottom, and I think it’s blind,” Santander said. “The fish are schooling. I’ve never seen anything like that—they have vestigial adipose fins—and their schooling patterns are phenomenal.”

  “We’re not starting an aquarium,” Bracket snarled. Watching the police torture that boy back at the police station in Kano had drawn out a hidde
n anger in him. “They’ll all be dead by morning. We need everything decontaminated now. No more diving until I give the okay.”

  “We can’t kill fish like that, Kwesi.”

  “We can kill them”—Bracket shook his head in disbelief—“and we will.”

  “I don’t think you understand. These are special fish. Their schooling behavior is unusual—we need to research them. I mean, where is this water sourced from? That would be a start. Cowries at four-point-one Naira at the close of trading in Johannesburg.”

  It was a good question, Bracket realized. Where had Xiao gotten the water? From a lake? As powerful as the filters were, they would get clogged if they sucked a stingray through their pipes. But he wasn’t about to negotiate over this. “We are not keeping them. We are not studying them. We are getting rid of them.”

  He tried to catch the fish with a skimming net, but the water was too cloudy to see properly. The fish schooled in tight bunches, as the diver had said, and when Bracket swept the net through the school they flitted away.

  “I will go get some meat,” Santander suggested. “Chinese medical supply ship seized in Sea of Molucca.”

  “You’re going to throw meat in the pool?”

  “No, you’ll see.”

  He returned a short while later with strips of dried tilapia and two fishing rods. “I fish in the River Kano,” he explained, “when I’m off duty. Catch and release into this bucket. Then I can study them properly.”

  Together they began fishing by the side of the pool, using the tilapia as bait. The stingray, surprisingly, was easy to catch once they found a line long enough to reach the bottom. It greedily ingested the bait and the hook, causing Santander some consternation as he tried to remove it without tearing a gill. The other fish only warily nibbled on the tilapia, zipping into the underwater modules of the space station every time Bracket jerked on the rod.

  “I’m going to see if we can track them on camera,” he decided. He climbed the stairs to the operations room and turned on the cameras, switching between viewing angles until he spotted the fish hovering nearly motionless in a school, their mouths sucking water in and out through their gills. Each little fish was dark brown with a singular bright green circle near its smallest fin, which looked like an eye. That’s when he saw it: the school rapidly shifted shape into a perfect half-circle. Then the fish moved again to form a sort of zigzag shape. Just as quickly they returned to a normal circling vortex.

  “Santander, get up here,” he said over the intercom.

  “I told you,” Santander declared triumphantly when he saw the video screen. “Special fish.”

  “What in hell could be making them do that?”

  Again the fish finned into a new position, this time an almost flawless square.

  “Schooling fish use sensory cells called neuromasts to detect subtle changes in movement. That is how they school to evade predators. Tech riots plague Guayaquil again.”

  “No predators are shaped like squares.”

  “You’re right,” the diver conceded. “It’s a shape that’s rarely found in nature.”

  A triangle this time, back to a half-circle, and then a sort of zigzag. It was hypnotizing to watch and also made Bracket’s skin tingle. Their movements seemed unnatural, paranormal.

  “You said something about movement,” he said, to stamp some reality on the situation. “That they follow each other’s movements.”

  “I meant vibrations,” the diver admitted. “The neuromast cells enable the fish to detect subtle, infinitesimal vibrations so they can school. You’ll see that their movements are too fast to allow for other forms of communication.”

  “So they’re responding to vibrations in the pool?”

  “Most likely. It could be a machine or some other signal. This is not their natural environment, so they may be disoriented. Fish are often harmed by electromagnetic signals—take the great white shark, for example, which has never been successfully domesticated in an aquarium—”

  “I’m going to record this,” Bracket concluded, as the fish schooled into a circle again. Seeta would want to see this for herself, but she had been so busy lately that he had hardly spoken to her. “Did you hear anything while you were underwater? Any sounds, like a whale?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Santander said. “I’ll run an image search of the fish on the Loom. More details emerge on Reims nuclear spill.”

  The diver slid his mask down over his face, where Bracket could view his newsfeed deluge on the built-in heads-up display. Santander muttered under his breath as he navigated through the various screens for several minutes. Soon he lifted the mask from his face.

  “They’re a variant of the Lake Rukwa minnow, from the Congo. Most likely Lake Kivu.”

  “You’re telling me this water is from a thousand kilometers away?”

  “I believe so. I can find no record of their schooling in such patterns in the scholarship. They’re an endangered species that has been closely studied.”

  Endangered, Bracket thought. No wonder Xiao sold me the water for so cheap. The trader had somehow acquired illegal shipments of water and must have been willing to offload it at a cut-rate price to the first buyer. But Bracket would have to deal with him later.

  “Let’s keep this quiet for now.”

  “Of course. There’s no sense in sharing our findings until we have more data.”

  “No, Santander,” Bracket corrected. “There’s no sense in sharing our findings because if anyone learns we’ve got endangered fish in this tank they’ll shut us down. Don’t get too attached to them either. The chlorine will kill them all by morning.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Nurudeen Bello’s face leapt onto the wall twenty meters across. He was wearing an emerald-green fila cap and sitting on a chair, with a round-edged granite monolith towering above him in the distance.

  “Aso Rock,” someone in the crowd whispered.

  “Can’t be. He’s not the president.”

  “That’s the view from the villa. I’ve been there. That’s what it looks like.”

  “It must be doctored.”

  Aso Rock, someone was kind enough to explain to Bracket, was where the presidential villa in the capital of Abuja was located, and that Bello’s appearance there was somewhat akin to a U.S. senator calling a press conference from the Oval Office.

  The room was packed to the brim with scientists from Nigeria, India, and all across the African diaspora. On the other side of a scientist from Gujarat was a Trinidadian; next to her was a French-speaking Yoruba from Benin. Bracket didn’t see Seeta anywhere and she hadn’t responded to his message about the fish he’d found in Naijapool.

  “My esteemed colleagues,” Bello began, “as we approach our historic launch, we deserve a moment to pause and commemorate our achievements. I’m pleased to present to you a film featuring some of Nigeria’s best actors about Nigeria’s new frontiers. We believe their artistic expression will properly celebrate our grand forays into space.” He explained that the film was being broadcasted on all networks throughout the country and then signed off.

  Bracket eyed Josephine to see her reaction, and she edged closer to him.

  “Where the hell is he?” she whispered.

  “Someone said Aso Rock.”

  “He showed me that recording three weeks ago. That wasn’t live.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen Bello since he visited the tank.”

  “I’m concerned,” she admitted. “He’s not returning my messages.”

  “You think something happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. There was a brawl in the National Assembly. He’s losing control of the legislature.”

  The film opened with an eagle soaring above a cliff, the bird’s tail feathers pivoting in a majestic aerial display of strength and cunning. The clip made Bracket think of the Jarumi and the caged eagle he’d seen in Kano and the torture of that boy.

  “Do you think the Jarumi sent the spide
r?” she continued.

  “Could be, although I don’t know why they’d be interested in our internal communications. Ini’s looking into it.”

  “Ini?”

  “Over at DigiSec. What I do know is that the Jarumi are on the move.”

  “How?”

  “I have a source in town.”

  “I told Bello we need more protection,” she complained. “We’re vulnerable here. Our perimeter is set up to defend against organized soldiers, not terrorist attacks. Bello thinks the military will root them out. But where’s the NAF? They haven’t sent any troops.”

  “You think the mission is at risk?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. He cares about the mission. But he behaved poorly the last time someone threatened the space program.”

  “What last time?” Bracket asked.

  She shushed him when an engineer crowded too close to their conversation. They moved to the rear of the mess hall, Bracket feeling tempted now, encouraged by her rare show of trust, to tell her about the school of fish he’d seen and the strange recordings Seeta had made in the tank. But he’d learned after Abdul’s disappearance that Josephine liked facts. And when the facts were bad, she wanted solutions—none of which he could provide at the moment.

  “Bello never tells me where he’s going,” she complained. “He’s so secretive that I don’t know if we have anything left in our budget.”

  “What about his investors?”

  “I’ve never met them. I don’t know what he’s promised them and I don’t know who they are.”

  The film now showed footage of the solar flare rippling through the International Space Station. Interior shots depicted instrument panels shorting and the astronauts frantically rushing forward to seal off the module to stop a fizzling wire of electricity from striking oxygen and igniting the entire station. You could see the interior powered down with emergency lights and the now-famous image of Masha Kornokova flipping through a glossy binder as they prepared to leave her behind in the Soyuz capsule, a tear dripping from her eyelid into a tiny globule that drifted toward the camera and smeared the lens.

  Josephine turned away from the film. “I shouldn’t be here. I should be working.” She paced quickly out of the mess hall.