Noor(41)

“Hell no,” he said, laughing hard. “That was built by Maiduguri, the low level AI who still runs this place. Maiduguri was created by one of the first groups to come here.” He sat on the well-worn couch in the center of the room. “Sit, AO.”

I walked around the room first. Touching the screen, marveling at its realism up close, thinking and ignoring the pounding in my ears and neck. In the back of my mind, I could see the pomegranate of eyes. This room was live with wifi. I sat beside him, staring at the pigeon sitting on the edge of the hut. So wildlife, at least the kind often referred to as “rats with wings,” lived in the Hour Glass, too. Had they been introduced here, or were they, too, refugees?

“What?”

He looked at me, and I looked at his face up close. I’d analyzed every detail of this face years ago when I couldn’t move, when I was in so much pain, when I didn’t know what I was or could be. His full lips with the delicate crease in the middle, his high cheekbones that showed off the power of his bloodline, and the brown spot in the white of his left eye, all had given me comfort. He looked the same, just older and more him.

“What did they do to you?” he asked.

I smiled and shook my head. “I did this to me,” I said. “It was all my choice.”

“Being born crippled and then being mangled by a damn car?”

“The part after all that,” I snapped.

“You have a twisted idea of what choice is,” he said. “My choice was dropping my whole life to be king of some small kingdom or being disowned.”

I wiped my face with my hands and groaned. I knew what he was asking. “I don’t know, Force.”

“Well, tell me about it, then.”

“I just said I don’t know.”

“You know. I know you.”

“You don’t know me anymore,” I said.

“Men attacked you in your local market while you were shopping and you killed them all with your bare hands in front of thirty-one people. Oh I definitely still know you.”

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” I said. “I’m not a murderer. Those men would have killed me.”

“I know.” He paused. “I watched it several times, closely. But what happened to you?”

DNA and the steer were back at Force’s outdoor home. For the moment, we were all safe. It was time to face what I didn’t want to face. I groaned again, and even then I knew that they heard. “They always hear now,” I said, curling over myself. I pressed my face to my hard knees. I curled my arms around myself. And I wailed. For the first time, I accepted it, opened myself to it. I wailed into my knees until my lungs burned, my organic intestines turned, my human heart beat so hard that I felt dizzy. When I opened my eyes, everything was blurred.

Force’s hands were on my shoulders, gently pressing me down. “Shhhh, AO, shhhh, calm down.” He sat back and reached for something on the floor. Then I felt him reach into my shirt. “Don’t move,” he said. I trusted him enough to not tear his head off. “Sit back. Breathe. If I think what’s happening is happening, your life depends on it. Breathe. Deep breaths.”

I could feel my heart slamming in my chest, everything was crowding me, I opened my mouth wide. “Inhale,” I heard him say. “Like you are the Red Eye itself!” I inhaled. “Your blood pressure is class three,” he muttered. “Calm yourself.”

I breathed. My mouth wide. I imagined the chaos of the Red Eye. Wind moving in every direction. Suctioning my thoughts like one of its many whirlwinds. Whoooooooooooooooo. Then I exhaled a storm. Haaaaaaaaaaaaa.

“That’s it, my love, that’s it,” I heard him say. I could hear his fingers tapping. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was typing on a large tablet. The beat of my heart simulated on its screen, along with my blood pressure and other diagnostics. At least ten minutes had passed because he said, “ I analyzed that footage of what happened in that Abuja market. You coughed, like in that moment, you had a hard time breathing.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

“I just put a diagnostic tab on your chest,” he said. “And now I see that what I suspected was correct.” He put up a hand. “Relax, you’re better now. Don’t let this, uh, surprise you too much but your blood pressure is just shy of a full on heart attack. But you’re better now, you’re better now.”

Heart attack, I thought. “Is that why I feel my pulse so strongly in my ears?” He nodded. “And the headaches,” I said. “Like a drum beat.” When was the last time I had my blood pressure checked? Or maybe it got bad when I killed those men. I kissed my teeth. What did it matter? “I think . . . I can talk to them.”

“Talk to who?”

“The AI. All of them. Around the world, in space, all the programs, software. Even the Hour Glass’s AI Maiduguri.” I paused. “And I think I can make them do what I want.”

He didn’t believe me. Even after I told him how DNA and I escaped the warehouse, Force chose to believe his theories and logical scientific explanations, instead. He said it was all just my high blood pressure and coincidence. The high blood pressure and stress interfered with my perception of what was happening around me. In the meantime, the corporation decided that a public execution of someone as damaged as me was bad press. He was sure that the Nigerian government may have done something to me, and they’d ordered the corporation to back off so they could retrieve their specimen.