Page 83 of Waves of Fury

Then she’d go home, wash the lead from her hands, and sit down at her computer. Mind fresh, body cleaned, the scent of gunpowder still in her memory. She wasn’t writing book two, but she’d begun messing around on there. Writing pieces that only she’d read. Little vignettes about anything. The ant she saw in her kitchen. A conversation she had with her mother about the crumbling family house in Nigeria. Her brother’s cat Man Man’s obsession with corn bread. The tangible noise of the gun range. Talking to Marcy about her new girlfriend. The prick of regret she felt when she saw the civilian space mission she’d turned down launch successfully. The runaround the builders renovating her parents’ home in Nigeria were giving her. It felt good to write again with no expectations, no goals. Shooting guns got her to this point of clarity. Who’d have thought?

She never told Msizi, though. He detested guns; he believed they were literally evil objects. This was something she would keep to herself. He didn’t need to know a thing about Nicole Simmons.

44

Preparation

Oga Chukwu wasted no time in making it official. We were going to war with the Ghosts of Lagos. Yes, instead of focusing our time and energy on stopping the Trippers from destroying the Earth, automation was fighting itself. For a while, I felt great frustration about this; no one would listen to my concerns. Then I decided to shift gears and focus on the problem right in front of me. It was all I could do.

Similar conflicts were already breaking out between Ghosts and what was left of the Humes all over Earth, but the Lagos Ghosts and Cross River City Humes were at the focal point of it all. Lagos was global Ghost headquarters, where CB was powered. Cross River City was the biggest Hume city in the world and growing because it was the most organized, advanced, and armed place of refuge after the protocol. What happened here would decide everything before the Trippers even arrived.

Ijele and I were the worst kind of threat, to ourselves and to both sides of the automation war. But neither of our leaders would listen to reason, so there was little worth in discussing the conflict with eachother. When she came, I didn’t ask what the NoBodies were doing to prepare for war, because I didn’t want Ijele to look too deeply into my own inner storage, as I knew she could. I was a general, and there were things I needed to keep to myself.

So we made it a point not to talk about the war. Our times together were moments of peace... a reprieve from the constant, looming doom.

Many times, I would go out into the forest and climb to one of the tree platforms, and there we would gaze at and contemplate the stars. We’d talk about mundane things like the DNA of periwinkle grass or the geometry of diatom algae. Sometimes I’d read one of the many stories I’d stored in my travels; Ijele liked the way they sounded through my speakers.

But even in these moments, we couldn’t escape the truth. War had come, and only one side would win.

I was assigned a unit of two hundred soldiers, “soldier” being a very loose term. Everyone in Cross River City was deemed a soldier, and everyone had to fight in some way. Our first task was to build EMP disks. An electromagnetic pulse was the only way to stop or even wipe out a Ghost. If the AI was inside a physical body, an EMP would wipe it quicker than it could backdoor out onto the network. We needed to sneak the disk onto a Ghost body and set it off before they could identify it and abandon their physical form.

The disks we were making were invented by a robot named Koro Koro. Koro Koro had begun as an AI developed to create ways to defend Nigeria against a deliberate detonation of a nuclear device in the atmosphere above Earth. After humanity’s extinction, it had taken a humanoid body and pledged its services to Cross River City.

“The only way to defend against Ghosts is with EMPs,” it said. It spoke with a Nigerian accent it had picked up from its human colleagues. This was its way of remembering humans. “Give me a few months,” it had said when it met with Oga Chukwu.

And now, months later, just when needed, Koro Koro had completed,tested, and perfected its killer device. Each disk created a tiny nuclear explosion in a small space at its center. Though the impact was limited in scope, it produced an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to wipe anything digital within a radius of fifty feet. I never asked it what it had taken to perfect the device, how many Humes had been deleted in the process. Koro Koro was a benevolent Hume, but it probably hadn’t always been that way.

Nevertheless, all the sacrifice had been worth it. We had an effective weapon. Building the disks was oddly simple once Koro Koro made an excursion to Niger to mine uranium. We would plant the EMPs in the jungles around Cross River City, and Shay and three other generals were training specialized Humes in the art of the silent attack. Even the Creesh were learning how to carry and attach the disks.

I had a covert plan as well. It was unlikely to work, but I trained my soldiers for it, in case the time ever came.

In the meantime, others, like the RoBoats, got word of our preparations. RoBoats are not a secretive tribe. They always broadcast their actions to anyone who will listen. Most chose to remain neutral in this conflict, and many of them were traveling to underwater cities where they’d wait things out. But there was one faction who’d been anti-Ghost from the start. Their leader’s name was Ahab, and they remained not far from Lagos on standby.

I did my part. However, through it all, through the irrational optimism that had been programmed into me by my creators, I still couldn’t feel any real confidence in our efforts. What did all this work and planning and inventing matter? Why win a war when something was on its way to destroy the world anyway?

But every time I approached Oga Chukwu about Udide’s terrible information, he would say, “Not yet, Ankara, not yet! Stop thrusting that countdown at me! What is forty days from now to tomorrow? We focus on what is in front of us first. What is right here on this planet, on thisland!”

During one such meeting, as I begged for Oga Chukwu to listen tomy pleas, Koro Koro suddenly claimed that it saw a flash in my eye as I spoke. Ijele wasn’t with me, but Koro Koro said it sensed another infecting me!

I was taken into one of the prayer shacks. These are aluminum boxes that blocked all electromatic waves so that human beings could pray without distraction. We now use them as isolation tanks for situations like mine. In the prayer shack, Koro Koro and three others scanned my system and then asked me question after question.

“If there is no infection,” Koro Koro said, “then you won’t object to me adding an application to your system that will detect if a Ghost tries to flee your programming.”

What could I have said? For an uninfected Hume, such a program would be harmless. To reject this would be highly suspicious. So I agreed to these terms.

When it was all over, they apologized and let me go. Oga Chukwu himself even made a public apology. Koro Koro didn’t, and I noted this. It didn’t believe me. As I left, I made a big show about disrespect and lack of trust. Inside, I was panicking. This was very bad.

When Ijele came to me again, there was no way to warn her. She popped into my programming and that was that. The application Koro Koro had added to my system didn’t prevent Ghosts from getting in or raise any alarm, but if Ijele left me now, she’d trigger an alert.

“Ijele! You cannot leave. Donotleave!” I begged.

“I just arrived,” she said, confused.

I explained what had happened, and Ijele quietly took this information in.

After some moments, she asked, “If... I leave, what will they do to you?”

I didn’t need to answer that. We both knew.