“Transportation into the African Union, no questions?” said a gaunt man dressed in threadbare khaki fatigues, an aging AK-47 slung over one arm. He was talking to the priest.
The priest nodded and pointed at Bob.
The man’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, yes.” He turned to speak to another man in fatigues beside him. They both nodded. He turned back to Bob. “This is danger. Will be expensive. Much risk.”
“You will be rewarded,” the priest said. “I will make arrangements.”
Staring into Bob’s eyes, the man smiled with a mouthful of broken teeth. “At the main dock, tonight, just before the sun goes down.”
“Sure,” Bob replied, trusting the priest knew these men.
The gaunt man continued to stare at Bob.
“Do I know you?” Bob asked.
The gaunt man laughed. “We are all friends here. Good, we will see when the sun goes down, down by the docks.”
With a roar from the crowd, one of the wrestlers pinned the other to the ground. Bob heard the crack of breaking bones, earning another roar. The laamb wrestling match was over, and the crowd began dispersing.
Bob stood in place, in a daze. The men in fatigues were gone, the priest was gone. Something nibbled one of his fingers. He looked down. A goat had wandered up to him. It bleated and nudged him again, looking up at Bob with its slatted-pupil eyes. Bob sensed its fear. It was lost and hungry.
He was lost too.
Bob reached down and petted it. He decided to care for it, find it some food, some shelter. He’d always had a soft spot for animals. They were simply non-human people, with the same abilities to make conscious decisions, grieve and worry and love. And this went both ways; in humans, there was also the beast.
Then again, looking down into the animal’s eyes, even if he fed it and found it shelter today, what would happen to it tomorrow? The animal was a bag of bones, its fur mangy. Perhaps a quick end, to stop its suffering, was better.
An undulating carpet of green stretched to the horizon. It glistened under the setting sun. The African Union began somewhere over that horizon, and Bob was close, finally on his way.
The AU was the second axis of world power behind the Alliance of China and America. A deep distrust of the old world and colonial powers ran deep, a distrust that ran into the bloodstream of anything African. The AU was commissioning its own aircraft carriers, at-sea platforms, and south-south trade outstripped north-north for the first time in history: the distance of Lagos–Rio was half that of New York–Frankfurt. It was also the first jurisdiction to grant full human rights to certain uplifted animals, the Grillas.
Bob settled into his seat of the wooden longboat, its gunnels worn with time and sweat. An ancient internal combustion engine, probably from an even more ancient car, was fixed to the back of the boat, its drive shaft extended and attached to a propeller. The engine roared, the driver standing high in the back like a gondolier, cutting a path forward with the boat through the algae.
“I can come as far as the border,” said the priest, sitting just ahead of him. “There is a transport waiting. Beyond that, I cannot. Just as you have enemies outside, there are those in Lagos who hunt me.”
Bob nodded. He couldn’t ask for more than that, knowing how much he missed—feared for—his own loved ones. He hoped it wasn’t too late.
Once they cleared the ragtag collection of boats in the harbor, the driver gunned the engine. Bob had never seen a gas-powered one before, and he watched the fumes pouring out of it and into the naked atmosphere with a morbid fascination.
They were smuggling him past the legal check points up the Yoba River and into Nigeria. The paramilitaries arranged a drone transport from there through the exclusion zone. An outbreak of nano-goo a decade ago had forced evacuations and a tactical nuclear strike by China on its own failed site in the Gobi desert, so replicator factories now had to be physically firewalled off from the rest of the world. The exclusion zone around Assembler City outside of Lagos was the best way to get in without anyone noticing.
Turning, Bob squinted ahead, westward, into the setting sun. Something was dead ahead of them. What is that? A forest? Something was casting long shadows across the pond-scum surface, but whatever it was, as the boat approached, it parted, moving aside to create a path.
The driver throttled back the engine.
It was people, hundreds of them, standing naked, knee-deep in the shallow water with their arms outstretched. The webbing between their fingers glowed green in the light, and folds of skin stretched from their arms to their bodies—a Greenie colony, people bioengineered with photosynthetic engines in their epithelial mitochondria.
They fed off sunlight.
The boat glided through them. Bob turned to watch their faces, their eyes closed, impassive. He saw the lignin-thermoplastic shell of their habitat burrowed into the side of the dune island behind them. There had to be a deep-core thermal generator in there. It was expensive to maintain a colony like this—nothing about it was natural—and just around the corner there was grinding poverty and suffering.
Bob shook his head, looked away to stare back into the setting sun.
24
“Robert Baxter and Sidney Horowitz,” said the newsworld announcer, an elfin girl with a deadly serious face, “friends or accomplices?” She paused for dramatic effect. “Or BOTH?”
An image of Atopia floated into the display space of the splinter Sid had following this thread. “And how are they related to the disgraced Vincent Indigo? The greatest personal financial loss of all time, over a trillion dollars gone with the collapse of his empire…” The social clouds tethered to the story erupted at mention of a trillion dollars: “Can you imagine?,” “What was he thinking?,” “Serves him right,” “Did they find him yet?,” followed by a chorus of, “Who cares…”
Most of it was just noise, but one thread led into an interesting aside: a ride through the pneumatic tube system under New York with the reconstructed mind of one of the party-goers injured in the attack on Hell. It was new information, and the splinter encoded this into a memetic ping to catch Sid’s primary attention. Sid added this to other data being collected. It seemed that Bob had been heading for the passenger cannon on the day of the attack. He sent agents to conduct a deeper forensic sweep.
In another newsworld, an image of the glowing skyline of Manhattan’s financial district floated into view, followed by a view of three-dimensional tunnels underneath it, layer upon layer, millions of conduits. A panel of media pundits, in severe black suits, weighed in: “Sidney Horowitz is still definitely in Manhattan, and the NYPD is asking anyone with any information…”
Sid had heard it all before, a million times in a million mediaworlds, but listening to it still sent dread tingling into his fingertips. Worse, he could only imagine what his mom was going through. But this is what I always wanted, right? A rebel, fighting for a cause, fighting for his friends. Sid nervously tapped his phantoms and dove into restructuring the airflow mechanics of the tunnel systems.
His bravado was wearing thin.
Pressure was coming down on the Midtown den. The underground was a collection of misfits, and to their credit—with the authorities bearing down—they were coming together. But not all the parts fit, and not everyone was happy. It wouldn’t be long until someone gave Sid up.