After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “We need gloves,” Wale declared, holding up his hands. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Clarence brought them each a pair of latex gloves, and they carefully collected the broken pieces of the artifact. Wale picked up the inky black rock, which was pocked with crystalline structures. They carried the fragments upstairs to Bracket’s desk in the operations room.

  “Careful,” Wale said, “careful. We’ll have to number these shards.” Once they placed everything on Bracket’s desk, he bent over the objects. “It’s true then. This is almost certainly a meteorite. It looks like a monomict brecciated eucrite. The outer layer has annealed as you would expect, and it’s glassy in appearance, but these etchings are unusual. They appear to have been carved in a geometric pattern by a human hand. Only diamond could have cut this. You didn’t touch it, did you?”

  “We used the gloves as you said. But the tones the rock responded to. They reminded me of something…” She trailed off, looking past all of them.

  “What you recorded in the pool?” Bracket volunteered.

  “No, but close. Of…Addama. They reminded me of a song that Addama played on her lute. The very same notes. Not in the same order, but they were there.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Wale asked.

  “I recorded a musician near Lake Chad who played a lute and sang the most lovely melodies, an ethereal voice. And it all fit the soundscape, Wale, in a way that only the best musicians can. While I listened to her, the timbre of her voice made me feel as if I were there and somewhere else at the same time. This meteorite responded to the same frequencies as her own notes. There is a connection. I don’t know how or why, but there is a connection to her.”

  “Out by Lake Chad, you say?” Wale asked.

  “Yes, about fifty kilometers from your dig.”

  “That would fit if the oral traditions had been passed down. The Nok mixed with peoples from all over the region—there is evidence of their settlements over an enormous area.”

  “Maybe their civilization didn’t totally disappear,” Seeta agreed. “Maybe they passed along their music.”

  “We’re not going back to Lake Chad,” Bracket declared, anticipating where this was going.

  “I agree, boss,” Clarence chimed in. “It’s not safe with the Jarumi in the area.”

  “I suppose that’s reasonable,” Wale conceded, disappointed. “It could be the way the meteorite is carved. A eucrite like this shouldn’t have any unusual response to air pressure.”

  “What does air pressure have to do with it?” Bracket asked.

  “Sound is caused by the vibration of air molecules,” Seeta explained. “The frequency tells you how much air is displaced. The lower the frequency, the more air that is displaced. That’s why you feel deep bass in your chest and high notes in your ears.”

  Bracket felt he was onto something. He remembered the strange patterns he’d seen on the artifact, the script that Wale said no one had yet deciphered. “You said the sounds made that thing shatter, right, Seeta? The music?”

  “Yes.”

  “If it is music, maybe the markings on the artifact weren’t an accounting system as you suspected. It could have something to do with the music instead.”

  “You mean like musical notation?” Seeta said, growing animated. “It could be. Wale, pull up images of the artifact.”

  Wale obediently displayed the images from his cane on the wall of the operations room, and they closely inspected the markings. “It’s not like any musical notation I’ve seen before,” she said. “I’ll need more time with them. Do you have any more samples from your dig, Wale?”

  “I have thousands of images.”

  “We could run them through a pattern recognition program on the Loom,” Seeta said. “That could be the key that we’ve been waiting for! It may take a skillful musician to play the right melody. The astrolabe didn’t contain the coordinates to find the Nok. The coordinates must come from the music.”

  They arranged for Wale to access the artificial intelligence systems embedded in the Loom—a difficult task because of the proximity to the launch, when departments would be running final calculations. But they managed to find a half-hour window when the AI had not been booked—at 3:30 in the morning. Together, Wale and Seeta would build on the work of Ahmat, the researcher who had been overseeing the archaeological dig at Lake Chad. Santander hailed Bracket on his Geckofone as the scientists were discussing how to design the algorithm to feed into the Loom.

  “What is it, Santander?”

  Wale leaned over to see Santander’s image. “What’s wrong with that man? What is that all over his face?”

  It was true, the diver’s face appeared to be covered in insects. “They’re malflies,” Santander explained.

  Bracket shuddered. The most hard-core newshounds willingly accepted malflies into their feeds, knowing that even though the microdrones carried malicious code, they also contained information about trends: who was sending viruses or launching botnet attacks; what product was being peddled; giving insight into the black market. It was dangerous work, but expert newshounds could isolate the malflies in digital honeypots so that they were unable to infect anything else.

  “Disgusting habit,” Wale frowned.

  “What did you find, Santander?”

  “I tapped into my feed again like you said.”

  “See, an addict!”

  “Ignore him, Santander. What did you find out?”

  “Nurudeen Bello lost a motion in the Senate. He was formally requesting a budgetary allocation to fund the space program beyond the interim period of the rescue mission, but the Senate delayed the vote.”

  So Bello lost, Bracket thought. Josephine would not be pleased at the news. “Anything else?”

  “I only report the news. Mr. Bello was last spotted,” he added, “in a silver Mercedes in Abuja, which was driving at high speed out of the city.”

  “What about military support to stop the Jarumi?” Bracket asked. “Did your newsfeed say anything about that?”

  “I don’t know about that. You asked me to scan for news about Bello, not the Jarumi.”

  “That’s right,” Bracket said, trying to encourage the man.

  “Would you like other news, Mr. Bracket? Perhaps something more local?”

  “What else you got?”

  “I don’t have any news about the Jarumi.”

  “That’s fine. Tell us what you have.”

  “Some citizens captured an albino magician in Kano.”

  “What does that even mean?” Seeta asked.

  “An albino has been accused of child abductions,” Bracked explained. “The locals sometimes sell off their body parts for medicine, thinking they have magical properties.”

  Seeta looked confused. “You mean—”

  “It was recorded on personal devices,” Santander chimed in.

  “Go ahead, show us.”

  Santander patched his newsfeed into Bracket’s G-fone, which projected the image on the wall. At first, random streams of characters moved across the screen in various directions. The most recent news items scrolled quickly in the foreground in bold colors, while the older items hovered slowly behind, gradually fading as they left the news cycle. Every newshound organized his feed differently. Some color-coded them by mesh, others by type of news, such as sports or entertainment, and still others by their emotional content. It was maddening to watch, like looking into the subconscious of a deranged man.

  “Can you isolate the video?” Seeta said.

  “I do not like so many distractions,” Wale agreed.

  “Here it is,” Santander said. “Unedited.”

  On the screen, the first video showed a group of people standing by the side of the road, mostly merchants and pedestrians. An okada scooter weaved through the traffic. It appeared to be dusk. You could hear a shout go up and the camera suddenly shifted its angle to the side. Now people were running toward something in the bramble along the road.
Then, far in the distance, a bluish glow emerged in the corner of the picture, like a spark igniting a fire, and it shot impossibly fast out of view.

  “What was that?” Wale asked.

  “It moved too quickly,” Bracket agreed.

  The second video was shot from farther away with a higher resolution. The person also had a steadier hand. You could see that several men were running off into the distance between some bushes. Then, as they faded out of view, the bluish field appeared and rushed across the distance as rapidly as before.

  “Slow it down,” Bracket said. “Half speed.”

  This time they saw the blue field rise up and begin to dance about, and the thing bounded at impossible speed into the distance. It looked fast even in slow motion, skipping across the video frames.

  “That’s it,” Seeta said. “That’s the creature.”

  “What creature?” Wale asked.

  “It’s the same thing that Kwesi and I saw.”

  “But you said you thought it was the Nok. That’s supposed to be an albino.”

  “Good point,” Bracket agreed. “Santander, how do you know it’s an albino?”

  “There is a malfly feed of the albino being captured,” Santander explained. “I’ve stripped the bad code from the video.”

  So it was true—an albino had conducted magic. Had Detective Idriss been right all along? The creature in his quarters had been an albino?

  “Albinos don’t have magical powers,” Seeta argued, folding her arms. “They lack melanin in their skin. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in—the biology is the same. Right, Wale?”

  But a change had come over Wale’s face, and he looked frightened. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You all right, boss?” Clarence asked.

  “Get me a glass of water.”

  The bodyguard quickly left the room.

  Seeta put her hand on his arm as he stared absently ahead. “Wale, have you seen something like this before? Like the flash on the video?”

  “No,” the scientist said, leaning on his cane. He drew his finger along his chest. “These wounds. An albino woman gave them to me. She attacked me in my laboratory in Cape Town. She had skin that glowed in the moonlight.”

  “What happened to her?” Bracket asked.

  “She disappeared,” he mumbled. “She was last seen in Nigeria.”

  “You don’t think this albino is the same woman, do you?” Seeta asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Wale said, shaking his head. “But it’s not likely. That was a long time ago.”

  Clarence came back carrying the water. Wale mopped his brow and then said to Bracket, “Play the video.”

  Bracket watched the video closely as the cleaned image appeared on the screen. The feed started with an albino man urging a motorcycle rider to drive ahead. The albino had the features of a Nigerian man but his skin was white, lighter even than Bracket’s, and his eyes were faded blue. It was as if a makeup artist had swept in and powdered a black man with talcum. A mob of people clouded the screen and it was too late—some angry men wrested the driver to the ground and kicked the motorcycle to pieces. The albino started shrieking for mercy. As the video rolled, the mob began battering him until someone arrived with a machete and the crowd cleared a way to let him through. The albino held his hands together, imploring them to spare him. But he was quickly slashed through the throat. The rest of the mob descended on him until all you could see was the blood beginning to flow.

  The room grew quiet.

  “Should I play it again?” Santander asked.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Wale said. “It wasn’t her.”

  “Then who was it?” Seeta asked. “And why didn’t he use any magic?”

  “Maybe he was too frightened,” Bracket volunteered.

  He kept seeing the machete go up into the air and slash down again as the man screamed. It reminded him of watching Abdul Haruna’s blood oozing near the tracking station—only this time the evidence was obvious for anyone to see. Wale looked crestfallen, but it wasn’t clear whether he was saddened by the killing, or because the video meant the Nok still being alive might be a product of their collective imaginations.

  CHAPTER 22

  The model for the Masquerade’s mission to the International Space Station was the rescue of the Salyut 7, the 1980s-era station operated by the Soviet Union that preceded the Mir. On that mission, two cosmonauts revived the offline Salyut as it spun dangerously out of orbit, without power, meaning that they had to work largely in the dark in subzero temperatures. Technology had improved a millionfold since the Salyut, and the current mission benefited from the fact that Masha Kornokova could communicate with ground control.

  Josephine Gauthier had done everything in her power to rescue Kornokova and had found the engineers the materials they needed. She had secured for the astronauts the best training, equipment, food, tech, and resources to achieve their objectives. But she had offered nothing about albino magicians.

  “We found out about the intruder that broke into my quarters,” Bracket told her on the deck of Naijapool. She was wearing a turquoise head wrap, looking nervous, a hint of self-doubt that he’d rarely seen in her. “He was an albino man who was caught outside Kano.”

  “Op-Sec didn’t report anything to me.”

  “They wouldn’t have. They didn’t know about it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead,” Bracket said.

  She shook her head, taking another glance at Bracket, surprised that he knew more than she did. “I’ve ordered Op-Sec to increase their patrols.”

  “Good. We’ll be all right,” he reassured her, touching her arm.

  She flinched: “Shit!”

  “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have done that.”

  But he could see blood seeping through her shirtsleeve.

  “You’re injured, Josephine! Let me see that.”

  She turned away from him. “It’s nothing.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Finally, she sighed and peeled back her sleeve. He saw a thick, macerated scar on her forearm. It had scabbed over and bled out many times in clumsy lettering: MASHA.

  “I need to see her again,” she said softly.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “Oh, don’t act like a fool, Kwesi! You knew that Masha was my lover. I never should have told Ini about my identity. I’m sure she told everyone.”

  Her lover, Bracket thought. Ini had never mentioned that.

  “I didn’t know that you were connected, Josephine. What identity are you talking about?”

  “Caucasian, all right? I use it to talk to her.”

  She rolled her sleeve back into place, obviously in pain. How many times has she cut her arm? Picked at it like a flagellant? Bracket knew Josephine was feeling enough pain, but he couldn’t help but wonder: Caucasian? Why? Why would she communicate through a Caucasian identity? Especially if they had known each other in the flesh?

  She stared down at the ISS on the bottom of the empty pool. The simulations had stopped so the Naijanauts could prepare their bodies for the launch.

  “Masha is the daughter of a logger,” Josephine added. “She comes from a poor family. Grew up with nothing. No hope. Made it into the Russian air force through her hard work and brains. Bello talks about black empowerment and Indian achievement, or whatever you Americans call it. But I don’t believe in such propaganda. She’s trying to accomplish the same thing we are.”

  “That’s what Bello wants,” Bracket said. “Except he wants to include Africans. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  She plugged a cigarette into her mouth. Bracket didn’t remember her smoking, but he let her puff on the pool deck even though it was strictly off-limits, seeing that she needed whatever it represented to her.

  “Merde putain. Bello. I warned him about the Jarumi.”

  “He had to leave Abuja.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “H
e lost a vote in the Senate and it looks like he fled.”

  She narrowed her eyes, and he could feel her calculating who might have told him. Then she relented, snubbed out her cigarette on the floor, and hoofed away.

  Bracket returned to Digital Security, where he found Ini huddled over the carcasses of various machines. This time he ducked his head as he entered the room, checking to see if any of her bio-computers were going to pester him. He had already seen a green racer, a cicada, and a moth, and he had a feeling there were more sinister creatures waiting to spring out from the murky corners of her lab.

  Her face lit up when she saw him. “Mr. Bracket! A pleasure to see you again.” She was wearing a tight-fitting velvet tracksuit that showed off her butt, causing Bracket to frown with disapproval. He never would have let Sybil wear a tracksuit like that. She also wore new press-on fingernails that clicked against the screen as she typed.

  “I’ve been able to dissect the spider,” she explained, getting up from her desk. “The cyborg is so complex that I knew it would hold some more clues. You see, the engineers were forced to make certain design decisions that would be unique, leaving a sort of fingerprint. And I found this.” She displayed an article on one of her monitors.

  Port Harcourt—The Rivers State Zoo reported the theft of a number of animals yesterday. No suspects have been apprehended. The thieves appear to have climbed over a low wall in the gorilla pit after sedating the animals with tranquilizers. They proceeded to break into the reptile pit, bird aviary, and insect hut. The thieves made off with a green spitting cobra and a large bird-eating spider.

  “We don’t know why they took these things,” zookeeper Roderick Kachikwu said. “They are not popular animals.”

  While rare, the stolen specimens do not carry a special value on the black market because they are extremely venomous. Police are continuing their inquiries.