After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  On the big screen, the actors Baba George and Omotola Taiwo appeared together, causing excited cheers to ring out from the Nigerians when they recognized the actors. The next shot was so well edited that Bracket nearly missed the sleight of hand. Omotola Taiwo and Baba stood outside the neutral buoyancy pool, putting on their elaborately embroidered space suits. The shot seamlessly shifted to the two actors in their costumes at Ibrahim Musa’s compound. The final scene depicted both of them thrusting their arms to their sides like superheroes, mingled with images of them making the same motion in Musa’s swimming pool as they prepared to save Masha Kornokova. Once aboard the “space station,” which was clearly filmed on a green screen and edited in later, the actors kicked off a heart-pounding, zero-gravity dance number, while residents of Mumbai—saved now from pieces of the station plummeting into the city—danced gleefully in the streets.

  The room burst into applause as the film ended, and Bracket couldn’t help but clap his hands too. They had shot and edited the film far faster than any Hollywood production could have. Josephine may have had her share of criticisms of Nurudeen Bello, but the man was a master of PR. And for all the difficulty of dealing with their entourage, Baba and Omotola Taiwo had both proved their on-screen talents. Bracket felt proud to have contributed to the blatantly propagandistic film. He liked the vision. The bombast.

  And the timing was right—today would mark the first simulated space walk in Nigeria and all of Africa: a four-hour simulation that wouldn’t end until evening. Naijapool, now smelling of chlorine, was like what you’d find at any swimming pool, if on the bottom of that ordinary pool was a mock-up of a space station. Cranes and hooks dangled into the water, and you could hear the skimming sound of the filtration system. The fish were gone now. The crew had run through the checks many times already, testing the hoses, the power, the cranes, and the communications systems. The divers waded slowly into the lukewarm water, checking their weight belts before strapping on their fins. Things could go badly quickly on a simulation. The astronauts were essentially locked into a 125-kilogram space suit, and if they sucked in water, they could drown within moments.

  Bracket bit his lip as the crane lowered the Naijanauts into the water. Soon their helmets were fully submerged, their faces stretching behind their visors as mission control went through various safety checks over the comms channels. The Naijanauts began bounding smoothly through the bluish water with confidence, the divers closely circling them, keeping the supply lines untangled and double-checking their suits.

  It works, Bracket thought, and smiled to himself. Naijapool is operational.

  It was well after ten o’clock when the simulations finally ended for the day, and another hour before Bracket locked down the facility. The creature had not erupted from its walls, and the fish were nowhere to be seen. Nor had anyone reported any eerie sounds in the water. But he felt it was too early to celebrate—every time he had let his guard down in Kano, it seemed, some new problem arose to waylay his plans. “You should keep your eyes on where you’re going,” his crew liked to say to him, “not where you’ve stumbled.” But in Nigeria, he feared that if he cast his gaze too far ahead he might not like what was planned for him.

  Outside, he saw the hot yellow heat of a ground burn in a thruster test, fire and smoke and clouds burning amber beneath the stars. Scientists were peering over diagrams through their safety goggles as they performed their experiments—Seeta would no doubt be running acoustic scans as soon as the burn finished. Hoping to find Ini, he walked to Digital Security, which occupied a wing of the complex for Operational Security. A guard directed him to the rear corner of the building, and Bracket passed through a clear PVC strip door to get to her office. Inside, the walls were painted dark green and LEDs lit plants ensconced in the corners—ferns, ivies, epiphytes, and dieffenbachias. The air felt close on his skin and he could smell the moisture from the plant soil.

  “Ini?” he called out. A large moth fluttered across his face. He swatted it away.

  “Don’t hurt it!” Ini said. She was huddled over a long white table, dressed in a full-length green jumper, the kind of tracksuit assigned to the Naijanauts. One of them must have given it to her.

  “You let that thing fly around in here?” Bracket asked.

  “Of course! It’s a fascinating specimen. Its behavior is remarkably well adapted. Someone picked it up in Port Harcourt last year.”

  “I didn’t know moths could live that long.”

  “They can’t,” Ini said. “At least not without being modified. Hold on, let me see if I can attract it.”

  She pulled a clear wand of plastic from a pencil case. She walked over to a sink, pouring some sugar and water into a little cup. Then she shut off the lights, giving the wand a shake until it emitted ultraviolet light and quickly dipping it in the cup. The moth soon appeared, circling the wand before landing on it and extending a proboscis to lap up the sugar. He now saw that its antenna looked thick, almost rigid.

  “You’re saying it’s been modified.”

  “Yes, like the spider. It’s a cybernetic organism developed by the Cameroonian military, I think. It has camouflage capability. Someone caught it outside her home, hovering around the lights. The antenna had been damaged, so it could only broadcast on a limited spectrum, and it lost contact with whoever was controlling it.”

  Bracket felt something tugging on his pants leg. He brushed at it and felt scales slip across his shin. “Shit!” he said, and kicked out.

  Ini threw the lights back on just in time for Bracket to see a fluorescent green snake slithering out of view. “Stay where you are,” Ini advised. She ran over to a desk and flicked on a screen. “That’s great!”

  “What’s great?” Bracket said, looking about nervously. “What was that?”

  “Body temperature thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Blood pressure at a hundred twenty-five over eighty-five. Then you can see the spike in your heartrate. I got it working again. It wasn’t sending me back any data before.”

  “That was a snake?”

  “It’s a green racer. Poison’s gone, of course.”

  “What else is in here?” Bracket winced.

  “I’ve got about twenty specimens of varying sophistication and health,” Ini said. “Almost all of them are designed to camouflage themselves, so you won’t see them.” She beckoned to Bracket with her finger and pulled him over to a white blooming orchid. “See this on the stem? It’s a cicada—the height of biomimicry. It evolved in nature to imitate a leaf, and then was hacked with optrodes. Its motions are very basic but I love the audacity of it—a computer imitating a bug imitating a leaf. Genius.”

  Bracket could see two dark gray graphene wafers poking out of the insect’s underbelly. Its green skin had healed around the wafers, but the wounds still had an oozing, disturbed quality. “Doesn’t look very healthy,” he said.

  “Oh, it will live,” Ini explained. “But you’re right. All of these cyborgs are suffering in some way, because their immune systems reject the technology. I try to make it less painful for them. They’re quite rare. We don’t get to see too many cyborgs, not since the hacking of live creatures was banned under the Tallinn Agreement. That’s why devices shifted to biomimicry—your G-fone, for example—and not to using real animals. Hacking animals was shoved underground to the black market and to the military. The fact is that evolution is still way ahead of us. People find these for me. I pay what I can, usually not a lot. Though I’ll admit I paid a lot for the green racer. I love the efficiency of its movements. I can’t always save them, though. Many of them die. Which reminds me—the spider—I was able to coax some information from it.”

  “Is it still alive?” Bracket asked, looking around the room. The last thing he wanted was for the thing to try to leap at his head again.

  “Sadly, no.” She sat down at a long countertop covered with metal tools and held up the curled-up light brown carcass with a pair of forceps. “I would have liked to have spent mo
re time with this.”

  He found himself comforted by watching her. Something in her furrowed brow and her concern for the welfare of these creatures, maybe, reminded him of Sybil.

  “I was able to salvage the electronics,” Ini went on. “Most of the memory was still intact. The spider used a zero day attack against your G-fone, a vulnerability in the code that could give a remote adversary control of your device. You see, the G-fone code is patched almost instantaneously—it’s self-repairing—so zero days are extremely difficult to find. I’ve never even seen a successful deployment before. In fact, we’re lucky we caught this spider, because it appears to have infected a number of other G-fones around the base. Your device was warned of the attack by others. The remarkable thing is that it came up with the solution on its own of dropping its battery to escape.”

  “So you’re saying the spider infected other devices.”

  “Eight other devices, to be exact, all in upper management. I believe they have been infected for about three months.”

  “Three months!”

  “Yes, we have to assume that all their communications were compromised. We have sequestered the other devices. But the infiltration was limited to the identity each user selected to communicate on the phone. It appears you used the default identity, which in your case was Yankee.”

  “American.”

  “Yes, American. We’re recommending that you use Kalibari from now on.”

  “I can’t just be myself?”

  “Not anymore, I’m afraid. Thankfully each identity is partitioned off from the next. You’ll have to shed your Yankee roots, but you may find that changing your identity can work to your advantage. I know that I have. I never would have gotten my job if I’d signed up as a woman. The first question on the application was my gender.”

  “I would have liked to have seen that job interview,” he said, laughing.

  She smiled, and he realized it was the dimple on her left cheek that made her seem familiar. Just like Sybil. “When you shed your identity it can be liberating enough to discover who you really are. My favorite is Wodaabe.”

  “I haven’t seen that as an option.”

  “It’s not on the top-level Loom. Did you know that their men carry mirrors and are constantly touching up their makeup? Many of them use fake kohl made from battery acid to accentuate their eyes. It’s terrible for them, but they take beauty to the extreme. One day I hope to catch a Geerewol ceremony. That’s when they compete to be the most beautiful member of the clan. I can’t attend a real one, of course, because I wouldn’t be accepted, but there’s a Geerewol happening on Naijaweb next month that I’ve signed up for. You should join, Mr. Bracket. I think you’d have a chance at winning with those lashes of yours. First you have to get used to wearing the Wodaabe tribal identity. It’s not the same as the others.”

  Bracket told Ini to transfer him the tribal identity, thinking he might learn more about those women he had seen at the marketplace. It couldn’t hurt.

  “Either way,” Ini went on, “we don’t have much more information about the attacker, but we hope to find it soon. Zero days are worth a lot of money on the black market. Combined with a cyborg, you’re talking about a hundred thousand cowries at least. I ran a search and this particular species of spider is not endemic to this region. The cyborg itself also appears to have been made in Nigeria. Whoever sent it must be extremely wealthy or connected to underground markets. You should be flattered—you’re one of the most important people in the Nigerian space program.”

  “I don’t really see it that way.”

  “Maybe your new identity will help you believe it. We’ll send you more information as we receive it.”

  “Thank you, Ini.”

  “One more thing,” Ini said, pointing at the data the snake had sent along. “Your blood pressure is a little high. You should try to relax.”

  As he walked away, frightened by the news, he started replaying his conversations over the Loom. Who had he talked to during the past three months? Sybil, mostly by convoclip. Seeta had sent him songs. He’d shared his blueprints of Naijapool with Josephine and had spoken with her daily. Whoever had been listening in would know about the progress of Naijapool and a little bit about Sybil. He’d sent a note about the artifact they had found too, but he doubted someone would be able to make any sense of that. Where had his Geckofone been when he’d slept with Seeta? In his pocket? On the ceiling? It angered him. They had no right to spy on him. He didn’t think it was the Jarumi, either. They could send eagles to peck at drone cameras—and maybe even dig tunnels—but a biohack seemed beyond their means if it was as expensive as Ini reported.

  He found himself meandering from his usual path home toward Seeta in her quarters, who slowly opened the door, wrapping him in her arms. Her tangled, thick black hair was unkempt, with clumps sticking out from the sides. She smelled as if she needed a bath but he liked the honesty of it, the grit. She was wearing pajamas. On the floor he could see a pair of muddy trousers and blouses scattered around.

  “We’re not crazy,” she said.

  “Did you see it again?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Me either. And no one has reported another break-in. Makes me think that the creature is able to hide itself.”

  “Like a cloaking device?” she asked.

  “Or stealth technology. It’s strange that no one else saw it, not after it made so much noise in my quarters. And Op-Sec didn’t find anything on the tapes. Also it had that glow to it. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “I wish I had recorded the bloody thing,” Seeta said. “I’ve never heard a sound like that before.”

  “I’m not sure if I want to hear it again.”

  He slumped down on the edge of her bed. Bracket was tired as hell from the double shifts and now thirsty for a drink. He told her about the zero day spider that had attacked his G-fone and what Ini had explained to him.

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  “No. That nasty thing was designed and built by humans.”

  Since Seeta wasn’t a director, her quarters were about half the size of Bracket’s. There was a tiny bathroom, and she had crammed a desk into the space, leaving barely enough room for the single bed and her audio equipment. She had dangled an ivy plant from the ceiling, and a bright red succulent was perched in a window the size of a shoe box. He smelled sagebrush in the air, and sure enough, a dry smudge of sage dangled over the entryway.

  “Did you learn anything more about the artifact from your friend Onur?” Seeta asked.

  “No, he passed me along to a contact of his. Detective Idriss mentioned Bayero University in town. We can try one of the professors there.”

  “I won’t be able to get off the spaceport until after the test launch.” She sighed. “I’m completely spent as it is. Did you tell him about the creature?”

  “I spoke to him about it, but he didn’t believe me any more than Op-Sec did. He mentioned an albino—something about child abductions. Anyway, he said he can’t conduct an investigation here without an official invitation.”

  “Maybe we should talk to Nurudeen Bello,” she suggested. “He might listen to us since Josephine isn’t taking us seriously.”

  “No one knows where he is.” He explained how Josephine suspected he had disappeared, but Seeta was too exhausted to do more than sigh again. “One more thing. When we filled the pool, we saw some strange behavior from a school of fish.”

  “You put fish in Naijapool?” she laughed. “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “They came through the water supply. I brought you a recording.”

  Together they watched the film as the school of fish quickly shifted between different shapes, Seeta’s face growing more and more alarmed. “That’s bizarre. It’s almost as if they’re following a set pattern. They might be genetically modified.”

  “One of my divers managed to trace them to Lake Kivu in the Congo.”

  “You s
ourced your water from the other side of Africa?”

  “Trust me, it wasn’t on purpose, Seeta. Josephine forced me to go to a local trader to fill the pool on schedule, and he offloaded it to us. Anyway, the diver – he’s a biologist – said the fish have been closely studied, and no such behavior has been seen in the wild.”

  “I’d like to speak with him.”

  “All right, but I’ve got to warn you—he’s been mainlining news off the Loom for months now.”

  “Oh no. I can’t stand bloody newshounds.”

  Pypers and newshounds had a reputation for not getting along, she explained, because newshounds consumed DJ sets that Pypers spent weeks assembling in moments, compressing their playlists into audio files that the newshounds played back at ten, twenty, or even thirty times the usual speed. Pypers tried to help people center on the moment, while newshounds compressed moments into as little time as possible. “Did he find anything else? Any vocalizations like the ones I shared with you before?”

  “I’m afraid not. Just these fish.”

  “If it’s not a genetic modification, it’s almost certainly related to signal interference,” Seeta observed. “But it’s not enough to draw any conclusions.”

  “It might mean the creature is still close by.”

  “We should be careful,” she agreed.

  They both stood there watching the video of the fish in the pool, hoping their schooling patterns would shed some secret. They were exhausted from their double shifts, and the mounting list of questions was only draining their energy further. She brushed a dark curl from her brow.

  “Can you spin something?” Bracket suggested. “How about that ‘Aesop’s Fables’ thing you did before?”

  Seeta perked up. “Always in search of a happy ending, aren’t you, Kwesi?”

  “Never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to. It’s written all over your face.” She swiped through some tracks on her stereo. “How about we listen to Addama instead? She’s the musician I recorded at Lake Chad.”