Noor(43)

“I know what you mean,” I whispered. They’d most likely been euthanized. Probably with their parents’ consent. The only alternative was having a “demon” child.

“Aside from you, two had parents who agreed to a few cybernetic organs. But those parents were Christian Pentecostals, so their religious and cultural beliefs made them reject the most important ones. So one of them died around the age of two and the one who survived, aside from you, remains the . . .” he took a deep breath.

“Say it,” I said.

“Shameful family secret,” he said after a moment.

“Still alive?”

“If you want to call that life,” he said. “So you were the only one who chose to walk into the fire. They could never get anyone to volunteer for what you’ve been through—”

“I’m an experiment,” I blurted.

He looked sad as he said it. “Yes. And they can say you volunteered for it.”

“Fuck!” I screamed. I frowned, calming myself. “So . . . so, they knew pregnant women would eat those fucking olives? They wanted them to?! To cause mutations in their unborn children? So . . . so. . . . they made me need all my augmentations?! Then they gave me access to it, and then they monitored me?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay,” I said. Full capacity. A shiver flew from my feet to the top of my head. I opened my mouth to catch my breath. “Stop!” I screamed. Thump, thump, thump, in my ears.

“I researched it all,” he whispered. “Found solid answers.”

I inhaled deeply, concentrating on my heartbeat, trying to dodge the realization that was slipping into my consciousness no matter how I tried to keep it out. I managed to slow my heart’s rhythm, but I couldn’t keep out the information Force had just dumped on me. “Because of olives,” I said, my eyes closed, my fingertips pressed to my temples.

“She still had one of the jars.”

“She kept it? All these years?” I asked.

He nodded.

“So she knew,” I said. “She must have researched, too.”

“Or they’d visited your home when you were born, and your parents never told you.”

So Ultimate Corp was responsible for me being born as I was. Then the government was responsible for enthusiastically giving me whatever augmentation I requested. I thought about the car accident years later. An autonomous vehicle. An accident that the news feeds and engineers said had never happened before. That was so rare it was anomalous. An accident that shouldn’t have happened. Maybe that was them pushing me further, to see what more they could do. They must have been delighted every time I petitioned for something. I’d made their job easy. No wonder my petitions were always accepted. I’d thought I was just lucky, applying at the right time, stating my need in the right way. “Shit,” I said.

“Yeah. Shit.”

I couldn’t keep the tears from dribbling from my eyes. I wiped them away with the back of my flesh hand. Thump thump thump, the beat of my brother’s drums in my ears. I saw flashes of what I did to those men. And then my vision blurred as, for the first time, I remembered in full. I’d crushed the beautiful man’s throat with my cybernetic hand as I looked him in the face. The sound and feeling of it echoed in my mind. And once the memory was there, it didn’t leave this time. It stayed. It stayed. Oh it stayed. “God,” I muttered, barring my teeth, clenching my fist. Thump, thump, thump. I welcomed it.

I got up and walked to the screen. I was now taking us through a dense jungle. I stopped and stared at it. I liked this place. It was like being able to see what was on my mind as it was on my mind. “They’ll kill us both, eventually.”

“Not if you kill them first.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious, Anwuli. Maybe it’s time you stopped running. Turn and face your pursuers. Just think about it.” He got up. “They won’t find you any time soon. The Hour Glass is still the Hour Glass. You’re definitely the most valuable person to come through here, but you aren’t the most dangerous.”

“I find that oddly comforting.”

“Heh, that’s why few people who come to live in the Hour Glass ever leave.”

A black box opened in the center of the screen. Inside it, in bright red, was 1:10. Then it began counting upwards. Less than a minute until it was 1:11, the Reset, the time when all data in all clouds and networks going out and coming into the Hour Glass was wiped and everything restarted. Sand began to blow across all the screens and it was so realistic looking and sounding, that I actually started feeling wind! I looked at the floor to make sure there was nothing hitting my feet. It increased and soon the image of outside was awash in sand. Everything but the counting clock.

When it reached 1:11, it all went black. Force sat back down on the couch. “Have a seat for a second.” As I sat beside him, windows began to open up all over the screens. Three-hundred-sixty degrees of current news. It was so overwhelming that I laughed out loud. All the people speaking, all the images, all the motion, all the urgency, all the emotion, from all over Africa. Now now now. It was so similar to what it was like to close my eyes and reach out, except for one thing; I was looking, seeing, hearing, but no one was looking back at me as I did so. And I couldn’t interact.

I was in the middle of one of Africa’s worst disasters worrying about being hunted down by one of the world’s biggest corporations and my own government. Yet, the rest of Africa was going about its business as usual. Elections were being held in Ghana. There were protests for gay rights in Kenya again. The latest Oracle Solar farm, this one in Chad, was now online. There was a new rap group in Algeria taking the world by storm. Drone deliveries in Mali were going so well that this was the fifth month without a single mishap.