Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies

by Neal Stephenson

  Latifa’s skin prickled with fear. “Me? What for?” Did Ezatullah want to quiz her about her knowledge of retail fashion for the modern Iranian woman—or had his digging already exposed her other interests?

  “Most of the money’s going straight to Fashard, but we’ll need some cash at our end too,” her grandfather explained. “He doesn’t want me coming and going from the house, but no one will be suspicious if you’ve struck up a friendship with his daughter.”

  Latifa had asked the electricians to come at seven to switch on the power to the kilns, but when they hadn’t shown up by eight she gave up any hope of making it to her history class.

  For the first hour she’d killed time by sweeping; now she paced the bare wooden floor, optimistically surveying her new fiefdom. Finding the factory had been a huge stroke of luck; it had originally produced ceramic tableware, and when the tenants went out of business the owner of the premises had taken possession of the kilns. He’d been on the verge of selling them for scrap, and had parted with them for a ridiculously low price just to get her grandfather to sign the lease. The location wasn’t perfect, but perhaps it was for the best that it wasn’t too close to the shop. The separation would make it less likely that anyone would see her in both places.

  When the electricians finally arrived they ignored Latifa completely, and she resisted the urge to pester them with odd questions. What would you do if you cut into an overhead power line and found that its appearance, in cross-section, wasn’t quite what you were used to?

  “Delivery for Bose Ceramics?” a man called from the entrance.

  Latifa went to see what it was. The courier was already loading one box, as tall as she was, onto his trolley. She guided him across the factory floor. “Can you put it here? Thank you.”

  “There are another two in the truck.”

  She waited until the electricians had left before finding a knife and slicing away the cardboard and Styrofoam—afraid that they might recognize the equipment and start asking questions of their own. She plugged in one of the cable winders and put it through a test sequence, watching the nimble motorized arms blur as they rehearsed on thin air.

  One machine would unpick, while the other two wove—and for every kilometer of cable that came into the factory, two kilometers would emerge. With half as many strands as the original, the new version would need to be bulked out from within to retain the same diameter. The pellets of ceramic wound in among the steel and aluminum wouldn’t form a contiguous electrical path, but these superconducting inclusions would still lower the overall resistance of the cable, sharing the current for a large enough portion of its length to compensate for the missing metal.

  So long as the cable was fit for use, the Iranian contractors who bought it would have no reason to complain. They’d pocket the difference in price, and the power grid would be none the worse for it. Everyone would get paid, everyone would be happy.

  Latifa checked her watch; she’d missed another two classes. All she could do now was write the whole day off and claim to have been sick. She needed to chase down the heat-resistant molds that would give the ceramic pellets their shape, and try again to get a promise from the chemical suppliers that they could deliver the quantities she was going to need to keep the kilns going day after day, week after week.

  “Do you have this in size sixteen?” the woman asked, emerging from the changing room. Latifa looked up from her homework. The woman was still wearing the oversized sunglasses that she hadn’t deigned to remove as she entered the shop, as if she were a famous singer afraid of being mobbed by fans.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t.”

  “Can you check your storeroom? I love the colors, but this one is a bit too tight.”

  Latifa hesitated; she was certain that they didn’t stock the blouse in that size, but it would be impolite to refuse. “Of course. One moment.”

  She spent half a minute rummaging through the shelves, to ensure that her search didn’t seem too perfunctory. It was almost six o’clock; she should close the shop and relieve her grandfather at the factory.

  When she returned to the counter, the customer had left. The woman had taken the blouse, along with two pairs of trousers from the rack near the door. Latifa felt a curious warmth rising in her face; most of all she was annoyed that she’d been so gullible, but the resentment she felt at the brazen theft collided unpleasantly with other thoughts.

  There was nothing to be done but to put the incident out of her mind. She looked over her unfinished essay on the Iran-Iraq war; it was due in the morning, but she’d have to complete it in the factory.

  “Are these goods from your shop?”

  A policeman was standing in the doorway. The thief was beside him, and he was holding up the stolen clothes.

  Latifa could hardly deny it; the trousers were identical to the others hanging right beside him.

  “They are, sir,” she replied. He must have seen the woman emerging, hastily stuffing everything into her bag. Why couldn’t she have done that out of sight?

  “This lady says she must have dropped the receipt. Should I look for it, or will I be wasting my time?”

  Latifa struggled to choose the right answer. “It’s my fault, sir. She must have thought I’d given her the receipt along with the change—but she was in a hurry, she didn’t even want one of our bags ...”

  “So you still have the receipt?”

  Latifa pointed helplessly at the waste-paper basket beside the counter, full to the brim with discarded drafts of her essay. “I couldn’t leave the shop and chase after her, so I threw it in there. Please forgive me, sir, I’m just starting out in this job. If the boss learns what I’ve done, he’ll fire me straight away.” It was lucky that the thief was still wearing her ridiculous glasses; Latifa wasn’t sure how she would have coped if they’d had to make eye contact.

  The policeman appeared skeptical: he knew what he’d seen. Latifa put the back of her hand to her eyes and sniffed.

  “All right,” he said. “Everyone makes mistakes.” He turned to the woman. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”

  “It’s nothing.” She nodded to Latifa. “Good evening.”

  The policeman lingered in the doorway, thinking things over. Then he approached the counter.

  “Let me see your storeroom.”

  Latifa gestured to the entrance, but stayed beside the cash register. She listened to the man moving about, rustling through discarded packaging, tapping the walls. What did he imagine he’d find—a secret compartment?

  He emerged from the room, stony faced, as if the lack of anything incriminating only compounded his resentment.

  “ID card.”

  Latifa produced it. She’d rid herself of her accent long ago, and she had just enough of her father’s Tajik features that she could often pass as an Iranian to the eye, but here it was: the proof of her real status.

  “Ha,” he grunted. “All right.” He handed back the ID. “Just behave yourself, and we’ll get along fine.”

  As he walked out of the shop, Latifa began shaking with relief. He’d found an innocent explanation for her reticence to press charges: the card entitled her to remain in the country at the pleasure of the government, but she wasn’t a citizen, and she would have been crazy to risk the consequences if the woman had called her a liar.

  Latifa wheeled her bicycle out of the storeroom and closed the shop. The factory was six kilometers away, and the traffic tonight looked merciless.

  “I had a call from Ezatullah,” Latifa’s grandfather said. “He wants to take over the transport.”

  Latifa continued brushing down the slides from the superconductor hopper. “What does that mean?”

  “He has another partner who’s been bringing goods across the border. This man has a warehouse in Herat.”

  Herat was just a hundred kilometers from the border, on the route from Kandahar to Mashhad. “So he wants us to make room for this other man’s merchandise in our trucks?” Lat
ifa put the brush down. It was an unsettling prospect, but it didn’t have to be a disaster.

  “No,” her grandfather replied. “He wants us to bring the wire across in this other man’s trucks.”

  “Why?”

  “The customs inspectors have people coming from Tehran to look over their shoulders,” her grandfather explained. “There’s no fixing that with bribes, and the clothes make too flimsy a cover for the real cargo. This other man’s bringing over a couple of loads of scrap metal every week; hiding the wire won’t be a problem for him.”

  Latifa sat down on the bench beside the winders. “But we can’t risk that! We can’t let him know how many spools we’re bringing in!” Ezatullah had kept his distance from their day-to-day operations, but the black market contacts to whom they passed the altered wire had long-standing connections to him, and Latifa had no doubt that he was being kept apprised of every transaction. Under-reporting their sales to hide the fact that they were selling twice as much wire as they imported would be suicidal.

  “Can we shift this work to Kandahar?” her grandfather asked.

  “Maybe the last part, the winding,” Latifa replied. So long as they could double the wire before it reached Herat, there’d be no discrepancies in the numbers Ezatullah received from his informants.

  “What about the kilns?”

  “No, the power’s too erratic. If there’s a blackout halfway through a batch that would ruin it—and we need at least two batches a day to keep up.”

  “Couldn’t we use a generator?”

  Latifa didn’t have the numbers she needed to answer that, but she knew Fashard had looked into the economics of using one himself. She texted him some questions, and he replied a few minutes later.

  “It’s hopeless,” she concluded. “Each kiln runs at about twenty kilowatts. Getting that from diesel, we’d be lucky to break even.”

  Her grandfather managed a curt laugh. “Maybe we’d be better off selling the rest of the wire as it is?”

  Latifa did a few more calculations. “That won’t work either. Fashard is paying too much for it; we’d be making a loss on every spool.” After sinking money into the factory’s lease and other inputs to the doubling process, any attempt to get by without the benefits of that doubling would leave them owing Ezatullah more cash than the remaining sales would bring in.

  “Then what choice is left to us?”

  “We could keep making the superconductor here,” Latifa suggested.

  “And get it to Kandahar how?” her grandfather protested. “Do you think we can do business with anyone working that route and expect Ezatullah not to hear about it? Once or twice, maybe, but not if we set up a regular shipment.”

  Latifa had no answer to that. “We should talk about this in the morning,” she said. “You’ve been working all day; you should get some sleep now.”

  At her insistence he retired to the factory’s office, where they’d put in a mattress and blankets. Latifa stood by the hopper; the last batch of superconductor should have cooled by now, but she was too dejected to attend to it. If they moved the whole operation to Kandahar, the best they could hope for was scraping through without ending up in debt. She didn’t doubt that Fashard and her other cousins would do whatever needed to be done—working unpaid, purely for the sake of keeping her grandfather out of trouble—but the prospect of forcing that burden onto them filled her with shame.

  Her own dawdling wasn’t helping anyone. She put on the heat-proof gloves, took the molds from the kiln and began filling the hopper. She’d once calculated that if Iran’s entire grid were to be replaced with a superconducting version, the power no longer being lost in transmission would be enough to light up all of Afghanistan. But if that was just a fantasy, all her other plans were heading for the same fate.

  Latifa switched on the winders and watched the strands of wire shuttling from spool to spool, wrapping the stream of pellets from the hopper. Of all the wondrous things the superconductor made possible, this had seemed the simplest—and the safest way to exploit it without attracting too much attention.

  But these dull gray beads were all she had. If she wanted to rescue the whole misbegotten venture, she needed to find another way to turn them to her advantage.

  Latifa’s grandfather ran from the office, barefoot, eyes wide with fear. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

  Latifa could see dents in the ceiling where the pellets had struck. “I’m all right,” she assured him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” She looked around; the kilns and the winders were untouched, and there was no damage to the building that a plasterer couldn’t fix.

  “What did you do? I thought something exploded—or those machines went crazy.” He glared at the winders, as if they might have rebelled and started pelting their owners with shrapnel.

  Latifa switched off the power from the outlet and approached what remained of her test rig. She’d surrounded it with workbenches turned on their sides, as safety shields. “I’m going to need better reinforcement,” she said. “I didn’t realize the field would get so strong, so quickly.”

  Her grandfather stared at the shattered assembly that she’d improvised from a helix of copper pipe. The previous tenants had left all kinds of junk behind, and Latifa had been loathe to discard anything that might have turned out to be useful.

  “It’s a storage device,” she explained. “For electricity. The current just sits there going round and round; when you want some of it back you can draw it out. It’s not all that different from a battery.”

  “I’d say it’s not all that different from a bomb.”

  Latifa was chastened. “I was careless; I’m sorry. I was impatient to see if I could make it work at all. The current generates a strong magnetic field, and that puts the whole thing under pressure—but when it’s built properly, it will be a solid coil of superconductor, not a lot of pellets stuffed inside a pipe. And we can bury it in the ground, so if it does shatter no one will get hurt.”

  “How is this meant to help us?” her grandfather asked irritably. He lifted his right foot to examine the sole; a splinter of superconductor was poking through the skin.

  Latifa said, “The mains power in Kandahar is unreliable, but it’s still far cheaper than using a generator. A few of these storage coils should be enough to guarantee that we can run the kilns through a blackout.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Latifa hesitated. “Give me a few days to do some more experiments, then we’ll know for sure.”

  “How many days of school have you missed already?”

  “That’s not important.”

  Her grandfather sat on the ground and covered his eyes with one hand. “School is not important now? They murdered your mother because she was teaching girls, and your father because he’d defended her. When she grew so afraid that she sent you to me, I promised her you’d get an education. This country is no paradise, but at least you were safe in that school, you were doing well. Now we’re juggling money we don’t have, living in fear of Ezatullah, blowing things up, planning some new madness every day.”

  Latifa approached him and put a hand on his shoulder. “After this, there’ll be nothing to distract me. We’ll close the factory, we’ll close the shop. My whole life will be school and homework, school and homework all the way to Eid.”

  Her grandfather looked up at her. “How long will it take?”

  “Maybe a couple of weeks.” The coils themselves didn’t have to be complicated, but it would take some research and trial and error to get the charging and discharging circuitry right.

  “And then what?” he asked. “If we send these things to Kandahar—with the kilns and everything else—do you think Fashard can put it all together and just take over where we left off?”

  “Maybe not,” Latifa conceded. Fashard had wired his own house, and he could repair a sewing machine blindfolded. But this would be tricky, and she couldn’t talk him through the whole setup on the phone.


  She said, “It looks like Eid’s coming early for me this year.”

  In Herat, in the bus station’s restroom, Latifa went through the ritual of replacing her headscarf and manteau with the burqa and niqab that she’d need to be wearing when she arrived in Kandahar.

  She stared through the blue gauze at the anonymous figure reflected in the restroom’s stained mirror. When she’d lived in Kabul with her parents, she’d still been young enough to visit Kandahar without covering her hair, let alone her face. But if anything, she felt insufficiently disguised now. On top of her anxiety over all her new secrets, this would be her first trip home without Amir traveling beside her—or at least, ten meters ahead of her, in the men’s section of the bus. Fashard had offered to come and meet her in Herat, but she’d persuaded him to stay in Kandahar. She couldn’t help being nervous, but that didn’t mean she had to be cowed.

  It was still early as the bus set out. Latifa chatted with the woman beside her, who was returning to Kandahar after visiting Herat for medical treatment. “I used to go to Quetta,” the woman explained, “but it’s too dangerous there now.”

  “What about Kabul?” Latifa asked.

  “Kabul? These days you’ll wait six months for an appointment.”

  The specialists in Herat were mostly Iranian; in Kabul, mostly European. In Kandahar, you’d be lucky to find anyone at all with a genuine medical degree, though there was a wide choice of charlatans who’d take your money in exchange for pharmaceuticals with expiry dates forged in ballpoint.

  “Someone should build a medical school in Kandahar,” Latifa suggested. “With ninety percent of the intake women, until things are evened out.”

  Her companion laughed nervously.

  “I’m serious!” Latifa protested. “Aren’t you sick of traveling to every point of the compass just to get what other people have at home?”

  “Sister,” the woman said quietly, “it’s time to shut your mouth.”

  Latifa took her advice, and peered past her out the scratched window. They were crossing a barren, rock-strewn desert now, a region infamous for bandits. The bus had an armed guard, for what that was worth, but the first time Latifa had made the journey Amir had told her stories of travelers ambushed on this road at night. One man on a motorbike, carrying no cash, had been tortured until he phoned his family to deposit money into his assailant’s account.