Dead. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Dead.
Polar error #985785185385.
Blink twice to autocorrect. Blink once to ignore.
Caution: Some programs may not function if you ignore a polar error.
The error dialog box hung in his eye sight like a picture frame, blinking like a neon light advertising waragi by making viewers tipsy.
He blinked once.
He floated away from his human doppelganger’s tank, to the end of the womb-tomb where a bank of switches glowed. He initiated the key program, and a key protruded from his little finger. He inserted it into a lock and the glass panel protecting the bank of switches slid open. If he pressed the master switch, it would cut power supply to the womb-tomb, automatically turning off all the cyrotanks and immediately stopping the preservation of the bodies. This would save the three remaining batteries.
They were running out of power. A meteor storm had knocked out their lightsails. Though the photonic thruster still worked, the mirrors on the lightsails could not bounce light back to it so it could power itself in a cyclic system, nor could the thin film of panels generate power to charge the batteries. They were drifting. They had drained their backups in repairing the sails, and they had stopped the repairs for they were too far away from starlight to recharge. They had to save power until they drifted into range of the nearest star, Alpha Magara.
Turn it off!
System error #885885778774
He could not. His programming was to ensure the sleeping humans reached Ensi and awoke successfully. If he cut power to the womb-tomb, the bodies would turn into shrivelled mummies. There would be no reawakening. But if he did not turn it off the batteries would drain before they reached Alpha Magara, and then the womb-tomb would shut down anyway. He, the last droid standing, would not have any power to keep his systems running. He had to shut down the womb-tomb.
They are asleep. Shutting down will kill them.
They are dead. Why transport dead bodies across eleven light years to a planet that might not support life?
Even if Ensi turned out to be exactly like home, the resurrection process might not work. No one had successfully resurrected a body after a hundred years in a cyrotank. Before the accident they were scheduled to reach Ensi in a thousand and three hundred Earth years. No one knew if a body revived after such a long period would function normally. Some projections said they would suffer from severe old age syndrome for the cells would have grown too old to be revived efficiently. It might have been better to clone them, but no one wanted to start a human colony with clones. The other option was frozen sperm and eggs, which were kept in special vats that did not need power to run, but no one was certain if they would be fertile after a thousand years.
The accident slowed them down. It would take much longer to reach Ensi, maybe an extra two thousand years. At their current drift speed, it would take three hundred Earth years to reach Alpha Magara for recharging. By then, all batteries would have run out.
He had to save power.
His A-Mem guided his hand toward the switch, but just as his fingers were about to touch it, B-Mem overrode the command. His hand fell so suddenly and slapped against his thigh that the bang echoed all over the womb-tomb.
System error #885885778774
They are asleep. Do not turn off the power.
After the accident, he had advised the captain that they must cut down on power consumption to save the ship. The captain had disagreed. Other droids had disagreed. Cutting down power consumption would involve, among other things, putting a lot of droids to sleep. Droids consumed half of the ship’s power. They needed constant recharging, their parts needed constant servicing. Stowing them away would be tantamount to a death sentence for their parts would waste away in a long period of idleness. No droid agreed. They did not have self-destruct in their programming. Otim-droid’s A-Mem would not have evolved to reason like this if Otim-man had not shown him the photo, but he had seen the photo, and he knew what death looked like.
He saw mutiny as the only way to save the ship.
He was a soldier, just like his human doppelganger had been while on Earth, in charge of the ship’s defence. He wrote a program and emailed it to the captain as a security drill. His B-Mem and the WhiteCell.s security program would never allow him to write malicious software targeting the captain, so he wrote it as a drill. Even then, knowing his thoughts, WhiteCell.s prevented him from writing the program, until he activated a protocol which stipulated that WhiteCell.s had to allow him one security drill in the trip. The captain was suspicious, but her protocol demanded that she respond to any email from the Chief of Defence, drill or not. She opened it. The program shut her down and transferred the Cap.r file, which gave her authority over the ship, to him, as it would have happened in a real crisis. Being a drill, his B-Mem waited for the captain to reboot so it could transfer the file back to her. She did not awake. He had smuggled in code that would keep her turned off until someone manually powered her back on. After thirty minutes, his B-Mem decided she was permanently off, and so it allowed him to use the Cap.r file. He became captain. His first decision was to instruct all five hundred and sixty-three droids to shut down and then he used the service robots to stow them in the Garage.
Now, he could save the ship’s batteries. He turned off the gravity simulator and other power-consuming features until he was left with two, the heater and the womb-tomb. One had to shut down to ensure the batteries would last to Alpha Magara. If he shut down the heater the ship would freeze. Its chips would malfunction, and some parts would eventually break apart. The ship was their world. He had to keep it warm. There was even a high chance that many droids would reboot successfully if the ship stayed warm. He had to keep the heater running.
But the womb-tomb...
System error #885885778774
He could not do it with B-Mem in charge. He had to shut down and reboot with A-Mem as the default system memory. And yet, B-Mem would not allow that to happen.
He floated out of the womb-tomb to the Garage, where all droids were asleep, suspended on hooks in the ceiling. He stopped in front of his captain and touched a button on her chest, powering her up. Then, he shut down Cap.r, and B-Mem interpreted that as intention to relinquish captainship. To do that he would have to reboot. As Shutdown started, WhiteCell.s shutdown for five seconds. That was all the time A-Mem needed to write and launch a boot-virus that infected B-Mem. At restart, WhiteCell.s momentarily transferred the file Sys.r to A-Mem so that it could clean up B-Mem. The moment it did, A-Mem changed the file’s attribute, making it the owner, and thus the default system memory.
The captain was awake. Her eyes, glowing red with anger, fixed on his left shoulder where a green light blinked to indicate that A-Mem was in charge of his systems.
‘What have you done,’ she said. Her voice sounded strangled, hoarse with a severe thirst, which is how the voice of her human doppelganger sounded when she was under a lot of stress.
‘I’m saving us,’ Otim-droid said. He punched her power button, shutting her down.
He whistled a song as he floated back to the womb-tomb, his hands working an invisible oar. Baba had taught him that song when he was only a little boy. It brought memories of the chilly air in the lake, of birds on the shore, the perfume of fish on his skin. When he cut power to the cyrotanks, it was just as if he were a janitor turning off unnecessary lights after everyone has gone to sleep. He hoped other droids would forgive him once they saw that his actions had actually saved their lives. He would show them the log, which would prove that if he had not shut down womb-tomb, the batteries would have run out long before they reached Alpha Magara and they would have all died.
‘Row, row, row your boat, gently into the lake,’ he hummed as he floated out of the dark tomb, using his night vision to avoid running into the dead in their tanks. ‘Hmmph, Hmmph, Hmmph, life is not a cake.’
TO BE CONTINUED...
‘Safari Nyota’ is a multim
edia project featuring prose, a graphic novel, interactive fiction for both mobile apps and web browsers, and a web film series.
The story is a little different in each media.
For updates, visit dilstories.com/safari-nyota.
Support the project at patreon.com/dilstories.
Watch the films when they come out by subscribing to our channel youtube.com/dilstories.
Dilman Dila is a writer, filmmaker, all-round storyteller, and author of A Killing in the Sun. Among his many accolades, he was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated in the Nommo Awards for Best Novella. He received an Iowa Writer’s Fellowship in 2017. More of his life and works is at his website dilmandila.com.
Parental Control
Mazi Nwonwu
Prologue
The olive-green clock with large, luminous digital hands strapped to his arm chimed the final seconds of ten o’clock when Captain Dadzie breathed his last. Captain Dadzie, a fine officer, a gentleman, had led the Tin Island Braves for two years, and everyone, allies and foes alike, agreed that he was a formidable leader and a fearless fighter. Two days before, he had meticulously planned the charging of the Cattle Dung Hill. While most officers would be content overseeing the action from a rear vantage point, Captain Dadzie, as is his wont, was in the fore, swinging this way and that to relieve any of his men hard pressed by the enemy.
‘Ahoy there!’ he had screamed when he and the band routed the battlements of Cattle Dung Hill and linked up with their allies, the Six Jones Battalion. Awed by the tall dark dude with subtle war paints only discernible close-up, the Six Jones Platoon Leader shook his head and backed away two paces. It was better not to confront The Dadzy when bloodlust coloured his eyes.
Captain Dadzie died just as he wanted, with an empty gun in hand and dead enemies sprawled around him. As his troops, the fraction that remained, moved in to carry their leader away from the fouled battlefield most of them had Nzeogwu’s last stand in mind—this was because The Dadzy used to regale them of the exploits of his hero, Major Nzeogwu, and while this last stand didn’t exactly mirror that of Nzeogwu, it was far grander for they were witnesses.
‘Did you mark the time?’ Sergeant Bulls Eye asked Constable Lee.
Constable Lee, an unusually tall Korean, looked at his blonde and thickset Sergeant for a bit before answering. ‘Yeah I did,’ wisely refraining from adding that he also confirmed the demise of Lieutenant Davids, Corporal Buckley, and Staff Sergeant Cowley, making Bulls Eye the ranking Tin Island Brave alive. As he looked at his fallen Captain, he was one of the few Braves with promotion in mind. It would be well-deserved. This is a battle meant for the history books, he thought as he bent to get better purchase of the late Captain Dadzie’s legs.
Finally, the surviving Tin Island Braves reached their headquarters, bearing their dead and wounded on stretchers. A solemn procession it was that shuffled into the Braves’ headquarters deep in Merit Wood. Fifty Braves had left that morning to meet an advancing rebel army from the outlands, only fifteen made it back whole. Of the twenty wounded, only nine could ever hope to fight again.
Woodkeeper Alice, whose job it was to nurse the wounded and see that the nutrient needs of the healthy were sated, looked on as the soldiers made their way across the booby-trapped approach.
She knew, without being told, that the Tin Island Braves had lost their leader. Dadzie would have been in the vanguard of the returning Braves, injury or not, and they would’ve been singing, win or lose.
Alice did not ask about the gaps in the marching troop or offer sympathy when her eyes met with that of the men. It was war, and everyone knew the price. She directed the wounded to the infirmary and pulled on her gloves as she rushed in to start the first aid that would mean life or death for the more seriously injured Braves.
‘Did anyone remember to punch-out the deceased?’ she shouted from within the white tent.
‘Shit,’ Sergeant Bulls Eye exclaimed, worrying about the big shoes he would have to fill and the soldiers he had to find replacements for, he had forgotten to punch-out the men they had lost.
It was a very serious error and one that would mean their sacrifice and victory was all for nothing.
‘I punched-out, Sir,’ Constable Lee intoned. ‘Did it as soon as The Dadzy hit the earth. He is out, all the way out.’
Relief mingled with shame on the Sergeant’s face. He shook his head, trying to shift the cobwebs.
‘You know,’ he said to Lee. ‘I am very good at following orders. I am only as good as my commanding officer is. I can lead men and get the best out of them, but I do this by following precise orders, not thinking them up. Lee, I will need you to back me up on this, until whoever Dadzie is works his way back to the Island Braves.’
‘You think he will come back?’
‘I am positive he will be back, only we might never know it’s him. One thing I know about him, he considered the Braves family. He will be back,’ Bulls Eye said with a certainty that came from within.
Up in the sky, a skylark cried, and the gathered clouds were buffeted by a southerly wind that slowly but surely parted them to allow beams of sunlight to cleave the gloom over the collection of tents and wooden structures that served as headquarters for the Tin Island Braves. Far in the distance, other clusters of tents and wooden buildings sparkled as the sunlight caressed them.
1
Dadzie Maduka sniffed the food on his plate, shrugged and spooned some into his mouth. The food tasted okay, but he knew something was missing. He had never been able to put it to words, but he thought the problem with the food was that it was based on a generic menu that did not consider the inexact measurements of the Nigerian kitchen, where the size of a pinch of salt is proportional to the size of the individual cook’s fingers, and where taste is also a matter of the idiosyncrasies of the human taste bud and acquired taste.
Dadzie liked his food spicy hot and slightly undercooked. He liked his greens barely cooked and his noodles dripping with sauce and his meat deep fried. At least, that was how he cooked it whenever he got the chance to prepare his own meal, which was rare as his mother cooked his meals and—because she doesn’t sleep—he usually woke up to find a tray of steaming food on the old speaker box that doubled as his bedside stool and table.
‘You do not like it?’ His mother asked from the far end of the room.
‘It’s ok,’ Dadzie said, not wanting to have an argument this early.
‘“It is okay” is not exactly the same as liking it.’
‘Please Mama, I can’t do this right now. I am eating it, aren’t I?’
‘I bet it tastes great. I followed the instructions to the letter.’ His mother pressed, ignoring the irritation in Dadzie’s voice.
‘I bet,’ Dadzie said, scooping a chunk of brownish meat from the plate. ‘Where did you get the ingredients?’
‘I couldn’t find the spices in the market, but the synthesiser did the magic.’
Dadzie dropped his spoon with a clatter. ‘Synthesiser? You synthesised food?’
‘Just the spices, I got the meat from the market. Dried though, but it hydrated well.’
She walked over to lean on the table and, appearing to ignore his hurt look, pinched a piece of meat he had spooned out and held it in front of her nose. ‘See, the meat is natural,’ she said.
Dadzie resumed eating, hating himself a little for allowing his irritation to get the better of him, especially as the spice appealed to him, and the meat though overcooked had a flavour that agreed with his growling stomach.
‘I learnt you were killed yesterday,’ his mother said, dropping the comment without warning.
‘How did you hear?’ Dadzie asked, feeling foolish as soon as the words left his mouth.
She laughed and rubbed his shoulder. He marvelled at how gentle her hand felt on his back and remembered how many times he had seen her bend steel with her hands or lift impossible weights as she cleaned around the house. He thought he shou
ld be used to it, she is his mother after all, but it continued to bug him. What if she forgot her control? It would only be for a moment, but with her, that would be enough time to crush every bone in his jaw, or whatever part of him she was grasping at that moment.
‘They say you left in a blaze of glory. Everyone is talking about it. I think I am very proud. Dmtoo says you are now a legend and Estoo says her calculations point to your Braves winning the series on the strength of that victory alone. You should be happy Dadzie.’
‘Everyone isn’t your friend, Ma. What’s there to be happy about? Even if the Tin Island Braves win, I won’t be there to share in the glory, and though my banner will be there, it is not the same as being physically present.’
‘You could go back you know. Trade in some of your points for a place in the Braves. I hear you lost a lot of soldiers on Cow Dung Hill, so the Braves will be shopping for soldiers soon,’ his mother pointed out.
‘You think I’ve not thought of that?’ Dadzie asked with some heat.
‘I know you have. Anyway, the game will be over in about a month. Why not take a trip instead? You could go to your father’s.’
2
Dadzie had waited sixteen years to meet his father and as the plane taxied into the Abuja aerodrome he leaned back into his chair. He felt little need to hurry now that the day had arrived. He waited until the last passenger in his cabin was heading towards the door before, he stood up and pulled his knapsack from the overhead compartment. Travel light, his mother had said, a quirky way of telling him not to stay beyond the few days they had agreed. He smiled, thinking how much like a human his mother is. She is more human than anyone I know.
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