“Slowly.” The priest brought the cup to Bob’s lips again.
Taking a deep breath, Bob blinked and leaned his head forward, taking a sip. He was leaning against a wall of rough concrete blocks, in merciful shade. In front of him, a pig was rooting through a mound of plastic bags in a pool of water, and further, several young boys were stooped over, stepping through the muck, searching. One of them kicked aside a robot scavenger, pulling away a tin can for which the bot was going. The boy made a face at the bot and it scurried away. He deposited the tin can into a sack slung over his shoulder.
“Can you stand?” the priest asked.
Bob wasn’t sure. How did I get here? Closing his eyes he tried pushing himself up, and, trembling, his body responded, but only just. “Give me a minute.”
The priest nodded and offered more water. It spilled around Bob’s beard. Beard. Bob reached up to feel his face. It was covered in shaggy hair. It was the first time he had ever grown facial hair. It itched.
“We need to keep moving,” whispered the priest, looking toward the knot of children hunting through the islands of garbage in the stream. “You still want to get into the African Union, yes?”
Bob nodded. Across the filthy river, standing above the corrugated tin roofs, stood the local microwave array that received and transmitted to the space power grid. Africa was leapfrogging ahead, replacing old-style infrastructure with more efficient ideas like the matter-net.
“Then I have someone for you to meet.”
Clenching his teeth, Bob groaned and tried his body again. Pushing against the concrete wall, he inched his way to his feet. “Let’s get going.”
Holding Bob’s hand to steady him, the priest led him along a path at the side of the stream, past stinking piles of plastic bags and eel bones and shredded packaging. They walked through an opening under tarps, held aloft by haphazard wooden poles, onto a dusty street between mud brick houses that leaned unsteadily into each other. A scooter buzzed by, honking at Bob as he nearly fell into it. The boy riding double on the back turned and gave Bob the finger.
Bob stared at the trail of blue exhaust following the receding scooter. “Where are we?”
“Goudjoul, on the side of Lake Chad.” The priest adjusted his grip on Bob, then looked up into the sky. “Or at least, what used to be Lake Chad. We have crossed the great divide.”
Images flowed into Bob’s mind, information pulsing through the connection with the priest. Goudjoul was a small frontier town between the Allied and African Union territories, on an island in a sea of algae on the border of Chad. Lake Chad used to be a vast inland sea, but all that remained was a puddle of green—it was the only place on Earth where the species of algae outnumbered the species of animals. Bob followed the priest’s eyes up and saw the comet hanging in the sky, ever larger, its tails spreading ever wider. The critical thing was that they were on the other side of the Sahara desert, on the fringe of sub-Saharan Africa.
“Come,” urged the priest, motioning toward a crowd gathering in an open square ahead.
Bob felt something sticking to his leg and looked down. A leech had attached itself. He reached down and yanked it off, leaving an oozing wound.
The priest saw his look of revulsion. “Parasites make up the majority of life on Earth.” Grabbing the leech, he held it in front of Bob’s eyes. “Do you hate them? Do you see yourself? Humans are the greatest parasites of all.”
He threw the leech into an alleyway and kept walking. The lesson was over.
In this place a ragged, half-naked man aroused little curiosity, and Bob stumbled behind the priest. Am I hungry? He wasn’t sure. Everything felt like a dream, the images before his eyes flat and two-dimensional. He eased through the crowd like a ghost, sensing the people around him. People walked by him, the men in cloaks, the women in burkas, hidden from view, but not hidden from Bob.
On Atopia he took for granted, like breathing, the speeding up of consciousness, the ever-expanding meta-cognition systems fueled by the machines, but here, the humans were so slow. He could sense the neural potentials flowing through their bodies, anticipate their movements, know their intentions before they became consciously aware themselves—he could almost hear their thoughts flowing through them.
In the few people who were connected to the pssi multiverse, Bob was intercepting the thoughts and images flowing through their external cognition networks. The memplex here was shallow and homogenous, the allowed external-thought patterns restricted. They were free to think what they wanted in their meat-minds, but the digital minds here were forced open to the local council. They were regularly cleansed of unclean ideas.
The Atopian network was present here, nudging itself into this crack in the side of the African Union. There were a few people using pssi, but there were more that were renting it. Spinning into a viewpoint that hovered above the bazaar, he picked out the psombies, the minds of their owners given free access to the multiverse play worlds in exchange for lending their physical bodies to Cognix Corporation.
Bob and the priest stayed well clear of them.
Something else he stayed out of was communication networks. He could have reached out into them, but he was in unfamiliar territory that was crawling with Atopian access points. He had to remain invisible.
Up ahead was a laamb wrestling match. This Senegalese sport was the biggest in Africa, almost the biggest in the world, and every town had its local contests on weekends. A thickly-muscled man sat scratching in the dirt, his eyes wide, and his neck muscles taut. He was speaking to the spirits, the loa. This area was under heavy influence of voudon, the ancient religion that spread from here into the Americas hundreds of years before.
The crowd grew denser. Bob began noticing the deformed and injured scattered throughout. The Wars were fueling massive death tolls in central Africa, and starvation and plagues were driving people into the cities, at least those who could afford it. Despite the amputations and injuries, there were no mandroids here. The area was too poor to support the robotic ecosystem that outnumbered humans elsewhere. If the African Union was a rising superpower, here in the fringes it was still grindingly deprived.
A young boy caught Bob’s eye. He was sitting on a tree stump, his withered arms and legs curled up into his body at awkward angles.
“Hi,” said Bob in Chadian Arabic, the words flowing from his mouth.
The boy looked up and managed a pained smile, flies buzzing away as Bob reached out to touch him. Flitting into the boy’s nervous system, Bob discovered the source of the deformation—a demyelinating nerve disorder brought on by malnutrition. Simple enough to fix, at least in the short term. Bob concentrated, letting his mind flood into the boy’s neural system. He began restructuring the grey matter. He wasn’t used to the technology the priest infused into him, but it was superior to Atopian pssi in many ways, even as a novice.
Bob smiled, releasing the boy, and continued walking into the crowd.
The strange man’s touch felt like cool water running into the boy’s veins. The pain disappeared, and the boy’s arms and legs unfolded. He smiled, leaning over to put his feet on the ground. Reaching up he pulled on his father’s hand, who turned to look down in amazement at his son, standing on his own feet for the first time in years.
The man cried in disbelief and began calling to his wife and friends. The boy stared silently at the disappearing silhouette of Bob. The crowd at the edge of the laamb wrestling circle was frenetic, screaming and thundering with the ongoing fight. Bob had to force his way in, past the men preparing themselves, their eyes, not seeing. He found the priest talking to two scruffy military men.