There were more people walking around the terminal than I had ever seen in my life. And so many different people! There were Africans from many different countries speaking languages that I could not even guess at. There were Chinese businessmen running down the corridors as though they were losing a game of chase. And there were Europeans and Americans.
As I pushed my way through these masses, I recalled with much mirth the first time I saw a person with pale skin. I was scared near to death. I had assumed the man was dead! A ghost! My father got many great laughs from that experience.
These thoughts cheered me, but the crush of the many travelers did not. Though likely the crowds were not nearly as large as they typically were, I am a child of open spaces, and being inside a building with so many people made me anxious. I kept my eyes on the windows and the night sky beyond in the vain hope it would ease my panic.
It did not.
I was in the line to have my meager bag checked by security officials in military uniforms, some of them with rather frightening-looking guns, when it all came crashing in on me. The emotion, the stress, my aching muscles … Though it was a great embarrassment, I put my bag down and sat upon it on the floor and refused to move. I have always known that if one bottles up his or her emotions, they will manifest again in illness or pains. Admitting I was overwhelmed was a good thing. I needed assistance. Unfortunately, doing this at an airport in a line to check baggage was not the best idea.
I was immediately swept up by several armed security officials who demanded to see my papers and then unceremoniously ushered me down a long, blank hallway to a back room.
Thus, my trip to the Game truly began.
5.2
I cannot say how long I was in this back room.
Inside was a table with two chairs. In one corner was a second table and on it sat several laptop computers. They were all tagged with evidence stickers. I assumed they had been confiscated from travelers unfortunate to be caught up by the security system. Several looked quite new.
By the time the door finally opened, I had fallen asleep and had to be roughly awakened by a very strong officer who did not take my confusion lightly. He sat me at the table and told me I was in great trouble.
“Abeg make you no wex for me oh,” I said as I cringed.
The man sat across from me and pushed on the table a folder that contained all of my documents, a plastic bag with the cell phone General Iyabo had given me, and the bracelets they had removed from my wrists when I was forced into the room. He asked, “Why are you so afraid? Why did you come here acting this way?”
I shook my head. “I have never been in the city this long. I have never been to the airport or inside rooms like these.”
“That is because you are a village person.”
“Yes. Akika Village, to the north.”
“Tell me why a boy from the bush would have these documents?”
“General Iyabo gave them to me.”
The officer exploded with laughter. “Bomboy, you are a funny little man!”
“It is the truth,” I said. After his laughter had stopped, I asked, “Tell me, have I already missed my flight? Will there be another plane today?”
The officer immediately grew serious again. “You will not be boarding a plane today, my friend. Nor will you be boarding one tomorrow. I am not convinced by your story and your lies do not work, either. This is a very serious concern. You dey wan go crench?”
He was talking about prison and the very word made my mind reel.
“Listen, please,” I told this man. “These documents are very real.”
“You expect me to believe this?”
To emphasize his point, the officer leaned back in his seat and removed his revolver from the holster on his belt. Then, with a smile, he spun out the cylinder to show me the weapon was loaded. I stopped breathing, but my heart kept racing and it grew louder and louder in my ears. So loud that I worried it might overwhelm me and I would not hear what he had to say next. But that did not happen.
“It is very late,” the officer said. “I should be at home. I should be sleeping right now. There is this fine shikala I have had my eyes on. Dis babe has fine bakassi. That is where I should be, not here. I will give you thirty seconds to tell me why you are here. Why you are acting like a fool in the airport. If it does not make sense, then I will have to be less … relatable.”
Two years ago I encountered a lion.
They are exceptionally rare where I live, and prior to my encounter the last lion sighting was a generation earlier. I was on my way back from the junkyard, hauling an ancient motorcycle engine through the brush, when the lion crept into my path. It was female and thin. Lions are dangerous animals on any occasion but a hungry female lion is the most dangerous kind.
I stood still and quickly considered my options. I could not run. At full bore, lions attain a speed of forty-nine miles an hour. There is no way a skinny African kid could outrun such a powerful creature. I could attempt to talk the lion out of leaping upon me and eating me whole, but lions do not reason. So I did the most logical thing and, as always, omo, the most logical thing works best.
Knowing lions are creatures that crouch low before leaping, I made myself as large as possible. I stood on my heels and raised my arms above my head and stretched my spine to the point of near fracture. Then, as loudly as I could, with the deepest possible voice I could muster, I did the craziest thing I could contemplate.
I roared at the lion.
I felt silly doing this and the lion looked at me as though I dey act like mumu, like a fool. But it was a triumphant moment. Face to face with impossible danger, I did the unthinkable and challenged my assailant head-on. My breast swelled with pride. I was a warrior! I was the top of the food chain. And do you know what happened?
The lion attacked me.
With a roar that could have easily been the sound of a volcano erupting, the lioness leaped at me. Her teeth were bared and her claws slashed through the air. And I, I stood my ground certain that I understood her better than she understood me.
I was right.
The lioness landed just in front of me and growled. I did not flinch, though everything in my nature told me to tear race on the spot. Every nerve in my body fired at once in a vain attempt to send my body into a spasm of marathon speed. But no! I overcame my instinct and my body and I stayed right where I was.
The lioness surely took me for a chieftain or a rampaging rhino.
She growled, then turned and retreated to the long grass in which she had lain lurking all afternoon. I felt sorry for her and her hunger but was pleased she did not use me to soothe her pains.
The officer in the airport holding room was the same as this lioness.
He was wrong. He had threatened me.
I would show him the error of his ways.
“You are wrong,” I told the officer. I sat very tall and locked eyes with him as I said this. My voice did not waver and my hands did not shake. “You are wrong and General Iyabo will hear of your insubordination.”
The officer gave a throaty chuckle, but it was tinged with nervousness.
“You are a crazy,” he said as he glanced at his weapon. “I give you fifteen seconds now. Do not waste—”
“Do not waste my time!” I shouted at this man.
He jerked upright in his seat like a puppet whose strings had been pulled violently by a strong hand. “How dare you speak this way!”
“How dare you!” I said to him.
He glared at me and his eyes shone with fury but he did not move.
I pointed to the cell phone in the plastic bag. “Look at this phone. Dial the number that you find.”
The officer did not like taking orders from a village runt such as myself, a loki, but after a single moment of hesitation, he reached for the bag and removed the cell phone. He dialed the number and then sat back with a very smug and angry look upon his face.
“If this is a joke,” he said, �
�you don die oh.”
He was a man who believed he did not make idle threats.
This certainty drained from his face the minute the phone was answered. Even from across the table, I could hear the booming voice of General Iyabo.
“What is it?” he snarled.
“Uh…” The officer could not answer. His voice was caught in a trap.
“Who is this?” the general asked.
“Um, this is Officer Okah with the department of—”
I did not listen too closely to much of what was said after that moment but I had never in my life up until that moment heard so many foul and disturbing expressions. It was both repelling and fascinating.
Officer Okah was reduced to a blubbering wreck, about as useful as an adjustable wrench, and before he allowed me to collect my stuff and leave the room he had been transferred from his position and would spend the next five years cleaning latrines. I did not feel bad for this man.
Just before I was escorted from the room to my flight, I pointed at the stack of laptops. “The general has requested that I have one of those as well.”
Officer Okah scrambled over to the laptops.
He held up a black one, at least five years old, for my approval.
“I will take the one to the right of that.”
It was new. Perhaps only two months old.
Shoulders slumped, Officer Okah handed me the new laptop. “Thank you,” I replied courteously.
I was then escorted to my flight with half an hour to spare.
5.3
I had always wondered what it would feel like to be inside one of the machines I worked on, to travel the conduits and pipes and wires, and stepping aboard the airplane gave me the answer.
It was packed like a tin!
I was directed to my seat by a helpful woman in a uniform and found myself at the back of the plane between a businessman from Lagos and a Cameroonian football player.
I have studied the intricacies of how planes work. I have read about propulsion and how turbines spin and the way an atmosphere of only gas can lift a metal giant into the sky and leave it there, floating.
Aircraft engine doodles by Tunde Oni
But the feeling of being aboard a plane and the exhilarating power of the thrust, of the buildup of energy as it raced down the runway toward the sky, was beyond all rational thought!
It was an experience of wordless power.
And then we were airborne!
The whole of the first flight was a blur. While I occasionally glanced outside at the landscape of clouds that passed below the plane, most of my time aboard was spent on my new laptop working on the schematics of the jammer.
It was only when the plane began to descend that I snapped out of my spell.
Landing a plane requires an equal amount of energy as lifting one off the ground. Given the mass of the airplane, which I calculated in my head, the force required to stop the forward motion once the wheels touched the ground was immense.
Equation by Tunde Oni
Ah, the marvels of human engineering!
Masters of the sky!
I even imagined I could smell the burn of the tires on the tarmac. The smell reminded me of the time I melted rubber to insulate wires on the Okeke power station. There is a consistency to the world, a uniformity that, regardless of size, keeps everything in balance.
We changed planes at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
I had never seen such a castle!
As my flight to the States was two hours off, I sat and watched the thousands of people walking by.
There was a fat man, the fattest I had ever seen, who had a walking problem. Would you believe he was deeply upset when I asked him about his legs? I recommended he rub honey on his knees. I told him it always worked for my uncle.
Then there was the big Indian family who were going away on vacation. I tried hard to imagine my mother and father on vacation and could not even picture it. What would they do? Where would they go? The Indian family told me they were heading south to Cancún in Mexico. I had heard of this place! Rex and I had chatted only a few months earlier about the pyramids lost in the jungles there. Pyramids larger than the very plane I had just traveled on.
Tired of sitting, I decided to explore the shops.
The bookstore I found was a wonder. Oh, how I wanted to read so many of those books! But where to start? It was overwhelming and I was somewhat thankful that my bladder soon had me in search of a bathroom.
Here, too, there were many surprises. There were grand toilets with liquid soap that you could use as much of as you wanted. And it was so clean! There were water fountains that provided endless amounts of refreshment. The water was so pure and cold that I drank until my stomach almost burst. It had a very pleasant temperature and I wondered how they distributed so much water inside an airport. What pumps would they use? Where did the water come from?
When I got out of the bathroom it was time for me to make my way to another part of the airport and the gate for my second flight.
Along the way I could not help but stop at a bank of power outlets at a kiosk. Amazingly, these were free for anyone to use! I booted up my laptop and made my way online with blazing speed. Speed I had never experienced before. I logged in to the LODGE home page and sent messages to Rex and Painted Wolf. I wanted them to know that I had managed to make it out of Nigeria and that I would soon be joining them.
After I boarded the second flight, I sat down and closed my eyes. Even at this early step of the trip, I knew I had made it.
This was the last lap. It was the final push.
I had traveled from my village all the way to Europe and now I was to step into the new life that awaited me across the endless waters.
6. CAI
03 DAYS, 20 HOURS, 56 MINUTES UNTIL ZERO HOUR
A cold, hard fact of life in China is that if you’re honest and straightforward, everyone will think you’re naive and maybe even stupid.
If you don’t lie, you won’t get anywhere.
Like it or not, our culture is in full-bore barrel-ahead mode. Everyone is out for any opportunity they can grab. That translates very simply: Bosses lies to their employees, teachers lie to their students, parents lie to their children, friends lie to friends, and everyone always lies to strangers. These are not typically white lies, either. When you live in a society that doesn’t just accept lying but actively embraces it, lying loses that amoral sheen.
I lie to my parents all the time.
The video of Mr. Shifu and Mr. Lu’s under-the-counter deal that I uploaded to the LODGE site went viral, as I’d hoped it would.
But it was even bigger than I’d ever imagined.
The reaction was swift. The government shut down every mirror site and blocked every link as soon as they saw them flicker into existence. But they were too slow, the video’s infectious spread too rapid. Before the week was out, both Mr. Shifu and Mr. Lu were out of jobs and looking at lengthy court battles. I was celebrated as a game changer in the corners I frequented, but in the establishment salons and offices, I was considered a dangerous element. I was a rogue particle, as destructive as dark matter.
Sadly, my parents didn’t see Painted Wolf’s “antics” the way I did.
As my father sat at the dinner table and talked about the news, he and my mother would shake their heads and scoff at the latest online scandals. While he wholly embraced the idea of rooting out corruption and promoting hard workers like himself, he was dismissive of the new revolutionary tools.
“Subterfuge, disguises,” he’d say, holding up a newspaper with a screen grab of one of my most recent Painted Wolf videos. “This girl plays at revolution. She should lose the wigs and sunglasses and challenge these people in the courts.”
I suggested that Painted Wolf, regardless of her (admittedly pretty cool) wardrobe, was doing more to change the status quo than a dozen lawmakers. If going to court worked, then she wouldn’t be needed.
My father
disagreed. The establishment had worked for him. My mother refused to take a side; instead she worried.
“I can’t imagine what this girl’s parents must go through. What she does is so dangerous. I don’t even like to think about it.”
“She’s celebrated,” I said. “There are people looking out for her.”
My father shook his head at that.
So, rather than admit that I was the notorious Painted Wolf and that I’d been accepted into a competition on the other side of the world, I lied to my parents and told them that I’d be joining my cousin Lin Lin on holiday for a week at a resort in Suzhou, just west of Shanghai.
They were surprised.
Going to a resort and relaxing seemed so far from my usual routine that they were actually worried I was ill. My mother lit frankincense candles in my room while I slept. My father studied the maps and website of the resort as though he was scouring a contract for hidden deductions.
I had to recruit Lin Lin to convince them. Luckily, she’s twenty-three, works as a secretary at my uncle’s bank (this impresses my parents), and loves espionage and playacting even more than I do. Though she comes from money and lives an ostentatious life, she and I have been close friends since we were little and she used to babysit me on trips to see her parents in Guangzhou.
Of course, she doesn’t know I’m Painted Wolf, either.
When we met at an organic café at Jiashan Market, I told Lin Lin that I’d been asked to take part in a game theory symposium at the American Technical University campus in Changzhou. That it was a real honor but one I couldn’t disclose to my parents because I’d be traveling with an Indian colleague. A guy.
Lin Lin squealed at that news. “Are you a couple?” she gasped.
“Oh no. Absolutely not,” I said. “My parents would have my head.”
I did tell her, however, that this mysterious colleague had a crush on me but his culture forbade him from making any outward expressions of his desire. As Lin Lin panted over her coffee, I explained that he was a prominent tech figure in India and had made many enemies. He’d called for this closed-door symposium, locked down, with incredible security, to meet with several high-achieving students who were outspoken on technology. Somehow, he’d heard about me and we’d been chatting, very formally, online for several weeks.
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