Noor(17)

“They didn’t mind, though,” Gold said. “Pepper knows how to tread lightly. Anyway, come, let’s break bread. I have fresh roasted goat meat and fried plantain and I’m happy to share.” He also had a giant red tent he could pitch in seconds that provided us with solid shade and a solar fan. The whole set-up was comfortable and the food he shared was delicious. I hadn’t eaten since the peanuts I’d had yesterday, and with each bite, I felt more like myself. I was about to take a third helping of the goat meat. Instead, I hesitated.

“Eat, eat,” he said. “I’m coming from my sister’s wedding two nights ago. They packed my planter’s cabinet with too much food. Even with the cold of the capture station, it’s so much food that it’ll spoil before I can finish it all.”

I took another piece of goat meat. “Have you always traveled alone?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “My best friend, she used to travel with me. Then she decided she wanted to settle down and start a farm.” He paused and looked at the content cat sleeping in his lap. “That was when I decided to stop planting for Ultimate Corp.”

DNA laughed and nodded.

“What? I don’t get it,” I said.

“This your friend is not from around here,” Gold said to DNA.

“No,” DNA said. “And she hasn’t been here for more than twenty four hours.”

“Miss AO, you will think I’m touched and that is okay. I still explain am to you. You go listen?”

I rolled my eyes at his dramatics. “I go listen,” I said.

“Okay. Miss AO, I’m out here because I have to bear witness to what used to be here. My lady didn’t want to, but that’s above me now. I know I must. I was out here before Ultimate Corp ran everything and everyone out into the desert and into the Red Eye. Then they hired many of us nomads to leave our way of life to earn a salary by planting. We were fools.

“We let them convince us that we had nothing and our lands were useless. If it cannot make money, then it is worthless. That is not our culture, that is capitalism. Yet we still listened. We saw their big cities, we wanted all their nonsense things, we respected their big talk. We learned to prize money over things far more valuable.

“This led to farmers’ letting Ultimate Corp buy their land. They were convinced they were getting something for nothing, the nothing being the land they’d been told was worthless. There was an element of fear, too. Fear of the big people from big faraway places. Goddamn, it was like rolling over and dying. The farmers sold their land, but they stayed to farm it. Where else were they going to go? They were given high tech equipment for farming which made them abandon their old ways. How can you go back to the labor of working the land when now you simply had to press buttons to make the machines do it? Now Ultimate Corp really has them. It’s a mess. My friend, she married one of those farmers. At least with me, she was free.”

He threw his piece of goat meat to his dog who sniffed at it and then slowly began to eat it. Pepper was a well fed dog.

“Everyone who works for it, hates it,” DNA said.

Gold nodded. “But they collect a salary from it. They shop from it. They hate what it does, yet Ultimate Corp continues doing it. It’s something more than human, by Allah. It’s the beast, a djinn. Fire and air, insubstantial, but very real. Human beings created it, but they will never control it.”

We were all quiet after that, except for the sound of Pepper politely gnawing on his piece of goat meat, the cat curled nearby in a most peaceful nap.



* * *



—

Hours after Gold had moved on and we’d walked goodness knew how many more miles, I was still thinking about all he’d said. He took one look at me and thought I was an actual product of Ultimate Corp. I mean, maybe my parts came through them, I thought. But everything came through them. I stopped walking. Did everything come through Ultimate Corp? “Maybe,” I muttered, pinching my chin. I’d never really thought much of it.

“What?” DNA asked.

“Nothing,” I said, starting to walk again.

I was sweating and looking at my feet. The networks of fine metal filaments woven around the heavier central structure gave my joints a flexibility that even made walking in sand easy. And the sand would sift right through. When I walked in mud, because of a special polymer sealant, the mud would slide right off. My feet couldn’t slip on ice, get stuck in muck, stay wet, and I could walk over hot lava and the metal wouldn’t melt. The joints were silent as the wings of an owl. I could jump fifteen feet in the air and land like a ballet dancer. My feet could grip even the tiniest crevice, so I could climb as well as a mountain goat.

So though my legs looked like the skeleton of a half made robot, I was marvelous. Doesn’t matter if my parts came from Ultimate Corp, I thought. I kicked a small mound of sand. When I first got my legs and was recovered enough to actually try them out, I’d crumbled to the ground, and it took three nurses to get me back into the hospital bed. I was closely monitored for weeks because my legs could have set me on fire during the nerve regeneration and fuse phase. All it would have taken was one misfire. It was one of the reasons so few of the disabled opted for even one cybernetic leg transplant, let alone two.

There was a reason I was such an angry child at fifteen. Not only was I full of hormones, ambition, curiosity and zeal, but for most of my fourteenth year of life, my nerves were also almost constantly on fire, and it was because of some freak car accident. That year was like a rebirth. The old me died when my legs were crushed and a new me was slowly reborn.