Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

“It seems the events of yesterday morning may have instigated something of a kerfuffle. I’ve received an advisory that more armed insurgents have been spotted in the area where we were planning to work today. The risk of violence is higher than I’m comfortable taking you into,” Father says as we finish breakfast and begin loading the trucks. “So we’re going to skip the last of our planned desalination plants for Somalia and begin our work in Ethiopia early.”

Me and the rest of the small circle of siblings gathered around him take the news without complaint and get back to work breaking camp. I stow my pack and sleeping bag in the pickup bed and do a quick double-check of the shelter to make sure we didn’t leave anything. I give the floor a quick sweep with my bots, leaving it clean for whoever comes along next. I feel good today. Lighter. The tumultuous swirl of hate and love for Father is quiet for the first time since I found out he killed Mom. I’m not over it, but maybe I could get used to this. No more need to plot and scheme and look for openings and figure out how not to get caught.

We pile into the van. Bashir is driving today. He backtracks to Berbera then heads south. A faded sign says “Road Number 1” in English and some other script I can’t read. I wonder if it’s the first modern road they ever built here. It isn’t anything fancy—the aging asphalt has plenty of bumps—but it’s smoother than the dirt roads and cross country runs I’ve been dealing with all week. Even with the potholes, the hum of the tires on the road is soothing. I lean my head against the window and let it lull me.

I feel sleep coming. I don’t fight it.

My clock skips forward and I taste the subtle change in the flavor of my own mouth that tells me that I napped. Awake again, I notice the van is moving at a crawl. I lift up my head and look out the front windshield to see what’s going on. The road ahead is blocked by camels, a good sized herd. Or is it a caravan of camels? I should know the name for a group of them, but I can’t remember it. Chad, up in the front seat on sentry duty, is looking at them with his usual suspicious glare. There’s nothing to worry about. He would have woken us all up a while ago if the camels had been packing any weapons. We get past them and the road hums again, lulling me into a place halfway between here and sleep.

My mind clock jumps another hour. We slow down again to pass a donkey cart. I glance back past through the dusty rear windshield. Father is still behind us in one of the pickups, riding with Ahmed. I look ahead and can’t see Kofi and Ibrahim’s trucks anymore. I think someone said they were going ahead of us to the border station. When we finally catch up to them, we get the VIP treatment. Big smiles and a wave right through into Ethiopia. They must have greased a few palms.

I rest my head against the window again. Not quite sleeping, just mellow. This drive day has been a nice break. It feels like we’ve been going non-stop for so long, even though it’s barely been more than a week. Everyone in the van is quiet, without even the standard jabber from Marc’s motormouth. I glance at him with one of my eyes. He’s out cold. If he were awake, I’d be tempted to ask for another story.

We stop in a town called Jijiga for a late lunch. It’s a more modern place than anything we’ve seen since Djibouti City. And green. Surprisingly green. It has a squared-off grid of streets like Denver does. I feel a twinge of homesickness. Not for the campus, but for my old home. For Mom.

We eat at a restaurant inside a hotel. They do meats and sauces on top of spongy flatbread like we’ve gotten used to, but the Ethiopian variation of the bread is bigger than the Somali version, like the size of a big pizza for just one piece of it. The seasonings they use are different too, but just as good. The roasted goat is delicious.

Back on the road, belly full, the clock skips ahead again. The bumps of a dirt road beneath us rouses me. It’s just after sundown when we stop for the night. There are some lights off in the distance, the kerosene lanterns they use in the villages around here.

“I’ll see to the shelter tonight. You children go ahead and stretch your legs,” Father calls out as we pile out of the van’s side door. “And you’re finally free from the terrible voice of Father in your ears all day. This region is fairly safe, so you don’t need to keep your earpieces on all the time.”

A patch of ground illuminated by the truck’s lights churns and flattens. Walls climb from the ground, and the roof grows up out from them. My legs are feeling normal again by the time the new shelter is done. Father glances over to the side of the building, and a battery module grows from the wall at ground level. He must have charged it from his bots’ batteries, because the lights pop on inside, cool and bright. A moment later, the exterior lights come on.

This part is automatic by now. We unload our gear from the trucks and lay it out in the shelter. In a few minutes, the camp is all set up. Ibrahim pulls up in the last truck and brings out our dinner. He must have found a place not too far from here because the food is still piping hot. We sit on tailgates or on the front step of the shelter and dig in. Kofi passes around some bug repellant as we finish up, which is good because the bugs here get scary big.

Both of my sisters look over at me.

“Hey Noah, want to take a little walk?” Louise asks.

“Can we, Father?” I ask. I feel like when I was a kid and had to ask Mom for permission to play outside.

“You may,” he replies, smiling at us paternally. “Just don’t go too far, and stay together. Keep where you can see the shelter lights. Oh, and stay away from the village at least for the next hour until our guides have had a chance to talk to them.”

Andrea, Louise, and I stroll away from the group. Once we’re out of earshot, Louise pulls out her earpiece and makes a clear point of turning it off. I do the same, and Andrea follows suit. Louise does something with her bots that I can’t quite catch. It’s some program that’s not in her files back at school, but it pulls her cloud in a couple of meters away from us and gives the air a buzzy feel. Did she figure out how to make force fields or something? Before I can ask, Louise turns to Andrea with a serious look.

“What’s going on, Andrea? What’s been eating you?”

OK, good. It wasn’t just me who noticed it.

“Yeah,” I add, “you’ve been acting weird for a couple of days now. What’s up?”

Andrea turns away from us and shakes her head.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

She turns back slowly, tears streaming down her face.

“What happened?” I ask more gently. I’ve never seen her like this. “Did someone hurt you?”

She shakes her head and puts up a finger, telling us to wait as she gets a distant look in her eyes. She turns to me and gestures to point at me first, then Louise. Her other hand waves and a cartoonish lock appears in the air.

“The secret keeper thing?” Louise asks.

“Hey, that was private!” I say, trying with limited success to keep my voice down.

“I had to tell Andrea I had a secret keeper. I tell Andrea everything. Well, almost everything. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her any of your secrets.”

“Fine. I guess you’re not the worst secret keeper ever then. So Andrea knows we share secrets.” I probe Louise’s force field with my bots. I think it’s some kind of eavesdropping protection. She must have known this conversation was going to get into sensitive territory.

Andrea nods. Then she points at herself, then Louise, and then me, and the lock reappears. Her eyes pose the question.

“You want us all to be secret keepers?”

She nods.

“I won’t tell anyone anything you tell us,” I promise.

“Same for me. Now, what’s going on?” Louise asks gently.

Andrea holds up a finger again, waits a moment, then her fingers start dancing. A sketch of a road appears floating in the air. A pair of boxes with wheels materialize beside it. Stick figures get out of the wheel boxes. One is taller than the rest. All but two of them have plain round heads. The two have stylized swooshes of hair, one black, one yellow.

“That’s us getting out of the cars,” Louise says.

The stick figures duck down, and all but the tall one get swallowed up in cartoonish eggs.

“The morning of the attack,” I say quietly. Andrea nods to confirm.

One of the eggs expands, then opens back up to reveal the girl stick figure with the yellow hair. The egg closes back up, but a small hole opens up in it, and a cartoonish eye peeks out.

“You put an eyehole in your shield? You could have been killed!” I try to stay quiet, but how could she do something so reckless? “How did you even do that? We can’t access that code.”

“That was probably my fault,” Louise answers for her. “My hack that gets me into trouble also lets me override a lot of other things. I have admin access to the implant, and I showed Andrea how to do it too.”

“You still need to teach me that trick,” I remind her, “and now I really want it.”

“I will,” she promises, “but later. Go on Andrea.”

Another pair of wheeled boxes appear in the image, these ones bigger and green. Jumping from the back of one of them are surprisingly detailed little army men. They look just like the plastic toys I had when I was a kid, contrasting sharply with the crude outlines of everything else. The eye in Andrea’s egg turns and points at them. The army men wave at the tall stick figure. Then they start melting. But instead of solid green insides like my old toys, these turn red and juicy as their surfaces peel away. Their guns go off in wild directions until each one forms a red puddle on the floating road. A moment later, the guns melt away too, then the trucks. The red puddles slide off of the road to the side away from the eggs, then slowly disappear.

The eggs all shake and then hatch, and all the stick figures that emerge have big smiles, except for the little Andrea from the egg with the eye. She’s got a big sad frown. The image fades.

“Oh, shit,” Louise whispers. “He killed them all,”

Well, that changes things.

Why would he slaughter them like that? He could have just done what he said he did, slag their weapons and let them go. It’s not like they were a threat to him. He really is the monster that I thought he was.

“I was going to let it go,” I mutter. “I was going to let it all go.”

“What?” asks Louise, turning toward me.

“There’s something I need to tell you both,” I begin.

We talk for a long time in Louise’s sphere of silence. Hushed words and tiny images. Eventually, Chad comes to find us and tells us to go to bed. We walk back slowly, minds full and hearts heavy. Father is already asleep when we get back to the shelter. Good. I don’t want to see him right now.