Yongeza
Although it was covered in dust, Okello knew the boxer motorcycle inside and out. It growled contentedly under him, kicking up bursts of red sand as he wove over rocks. The cargo carried was ostensibly vegetables, an impossibly large stack of corn, with sacks of potatoes, tomatoes.
WOOSH - The talons of enormous birds clawing at him.
Okello shook his head, pushing the vision away.
These waking dreams, often nightmares, came at times of stress. He’d had the shadowdoctor back at the mine remove the SvenCore brainstem implant. Ever since he’d gotten these random flashes, sometimes specific sensory experiences, sometimes no.
After hours of red sand beneath him and an engine’s pistons punching him forward, the past and future blurred together into an surreal commercial breaks in his mind. They were the only thing punctuating the tedium, but if he was going to make it another 200 miles north by tonight, he was going to need to pull it together.
Anyone who knew a boxer 100cc motorcycle from eight decades earlier when they were originally manufactured would know that this vehicle was simply not capable of carrying this load. But if that same person were to take it apart, they would find four ultra-high density graphene batteries.
WOOSH - A four foot quarry filling with an ocean of water, children screaming to escape.
The horizon stretched out far in front of Okello, and behind his visor, he permitted himself a small smile. His hometown of Lira City was just a six hundred miles out there somewhere, beyond mountains, rivers, and Lake Victoria. And the capital of Uganda, Kampala, was closer, about five hundred miles. As that crow flies, that is.
SNAP.
the line rose out of the sand in front of Okello before he could react, an involuntary grimace forming on his face. His bike was launched sideways in the air, engulfing the rider in weightlessness. The tomatoes rose, the ears of corns, the potatoes, all floating through space.
In the air, his body spinning to face the clouds, Okello closed his eyes, thinking of his three children survived by his wife. He had been going one hundred and twenty - a few more eternities to enjoy with their presence before he hit the ground.
BOOM.
THUD.
CHSSHH.
Okello bounced on the pads of fiberglass he had under his jacket twice, then slid in the soft sand. Sand in his mouth, his eyes.
A few more short eternities before it’s all over, Okello thought.
“Get up,” said the voice in French, the butt of a modified AK-48 prodding his shoulder. When Okello didn’t move, it repeated the words in Swahili, Kinyarwanda, then Kigongo. Okello knew all four, but only turned his head.
Gingerly, hoping his limbs all worked, Okello shook a bit of the sand off. Surreptitiously, he glanced around at men surrounding him. No, possibly not all men.
They were l’Aube, les enfants du soleil. Solar shields strapped to their backs, a variety of rifles and small automatics, most not drawn. About eight of them. No vehicles in sight. Maybe more out of sight. Stupid. He should have watched for the subtle glare of subtle sales.
He’s seen images of them on his retinals before they were seized by the overseer XVII of the Mutanda Mine. Mostly on the news on the dinky projects the guards would watch at the checkpoints. There wasn’t much sun in the Mutanda Mine, that’s for sure. But he hadn’t been sure if they were the real deal, the way they were fearmongered on the Republic-owned media programs.
WOOSH - Muscles rippling under a woman’s back. She was young, and she turned back to look at him with an axe in hand. Her eyes were set in a steely determination.
His left audio implant hadn’t quite ceased yet, still playing some bouncy dance track in his left ear. He gathered himself enough to switch it off, then slowly, gracefully rose to his full height. He almost remained in a slouch as he often did to make a show of diminutiveness in most hierarchical company, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to do so in front of rebels who understood the candid facts of power, concealed or not.
“How can I help you,” Okello asked politely.
“Where are you coming from,” the figure asked. It was a woman’s voice, with a hard edge, rich unlike the sanitized international school flavor he’d have expected from a rebel. He chuckled to himself and got a blow to the head from the butt of the rifle.
“I don’t like hurting you,” the woman said, though she clearly did. She lifted her sand-visor to reveal steadfast amber eyes. “But watch yourself or you might not get up a second time.”
Okello’s vision swam for a moment, and he coughed up a bit of blood as he watched them look through the trail of flotsam that led to his bike.
Okello prayed for a moment, not sure to who exactly. And that’s when he saw it - that glint he’d looked for - the amber glint of a solar sale bundled up, covered impartially with a tan tarp, two dunes away. But were there more rebels protecting it?
Don’t like hurting you…ehh, iworoko - let’s go already Okello though, I’m going to not like hurting you too when the time comes.
And that. Is when the Gallyraptors came.
BAK.
Their talons made dull thuds on the ground.
“GALLIES,” several voices in the party screamed.
Okello took off, running, against every instinct in his body, right into the herd of oncoming, enormous bipedial birds.
Gallies are chickens, more or less. Gweno in Leb Lango, Okello’s mother tongue. Or they were chickens a few generations back, before big poultry got a bit to trigger hungry on the genetic modifications. Bigger chickens does equate to more meat production at chicken farms, but it also resulted in much stronger chickens, to put it lightly.
If I may editorialize, it is nice to think of the board members who were looking for those capital gains and ended up facing the supreme court in inethical and reckless genetic modification of livestock, a burgeoning field of politics. Illegal and mostly eradicated in the US, they’d sold in a firesale to Saudis and the Chinese, where the poultry companies, hubris all-powerful, had fallen victim to similar challenges. Northern Africa and the Mongolian highlands ended up, who knew, to be the best home for this increasingly ambitious new species. Their latin name was, unlike the Gallus Domesticus of the conventional livestock chicken, was introduced as a new species to be Gallus Rex, though they mostly were simply called gallies, or supercocks after truncated headlines of viral news on the subject.
The gallies focused on the upright members, dashing over Okello and pulling his oppressors off the ground with their talons and, for lack of a more vicious word, pecking. Pecking them rather seriously.
Dust flew up everywhere. The l’Aube were fast, and a few had jetpacks, twisting away from the herd of birds. Others were trumpled underneath the birds, who tore at their backpacks, for food, or for human meat.
Just a little…farther
Okello’s lungs screamed, and he covered the final few feet, dodging and weaving narrowly between gally claws.
WOOSH
He slid onto the deck of a solar cruiser. It was like a large paddle-board with a big sale on it, dusty and at least a decade old but looking to be in working condition.
He mentally activated an override command he had in a folder he had in his mental desktop, and voile! The retinal display popped up on the contact that hadn’t been ripped out of his eyes by the flurries of sand on the way there.
The haptic implants on the back of his right hand let him know he’d successfully started the engine, and a hearty snap alerted him to the sale flying open as the vehicle floated into the air on compact rotors, and twirled around to catch the wind.
“Ayah!, I wish Uncle Simon had actually taught me to fly one of these like he said he would!” Okello screamed into the wind. The ground was coming up way too fast, and the indicators on his retinal display were showing red, and symbols that didn’t look particularly welcoming. It was hard to tell through the tears welling up in his eyes from the roaring wind and stray grains of sand.
Okello held on for dear life as the solar-powered hovercraft jolted forward with the wind, soaring perpendicular to the Gallies, which defiantly slide under and around it. He hit at least one of them as he shot past his downed motorcyle.
BAM
A human figure collided with him. They careened down a hill and the solar flyer went sailing into over it and out of site but for explosions of sand it left behind as it bounced over the grassy dunes, pilotless. They came to a stop. It was the woman leading the squad from earlier, and she had him pinned.
“WHO,” she punched him heard, snapping his head sideways. “ARE,” she hit him again with her other hand. “YOU-”
The woman’s helmet had come off, probably hit off by a Gally. She through another punch and her dreads wipped over her face, and she shook her gloved hand, apparently a bit sore from the beating she just delivered.
Okello had caught her hand in mid-swing, and in the moment her eyes opened in momentary off-balance, Okello twisted out from under her with an athleticism he didn’t know he still had. Throwing her off of him, and broke immediately into a run, barely getting his feet out in front of him in time as he sprinted up the hill.
“WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR AND WHERE DID YOU GET THAT COBALT!” she screamed after him.
He slashed his cargo back onto his bike as quickly as he could and, in a flurry of sand, whipped it around to head north again. Miraculously, the thing still drove.
A hundred feet away, he stole a glance over his shoulder to see three surfers rising into the air behind him. No way he could outrun them in the open.
He banked hard left and grimaced. Right back into the pack of Gallies. He got there just in time, weaving and dodging in between them to keep out of sight.
One of the enormous chickens shrieked and went down beside him and he realized they had rifles!
But the herd of gallies bank hard left, and Okello with them, and suddenly they were racing down hill. With gravity and engines on his side, he broke away. The ground fell away from him and soon he was doing all he could not to lose control as he raced down the steep, rocky side of a hill.
Not again.
He lost the last of his traction and was propelled off. He slid and bounced, landing on ribs, sheltering his head, and barely missing sharp rocks.
Eventually, with the grace of some extraordinarily proactive guardian angel with very little pay, he was deposited on flat ground, emitting an off that represented all of the air leaving his lungs.
Lungs empty, he gasped, eventually forcing air back into his body.
WOOSH - The woman with the steely eyes, no longer strong. Emaciated, coughing up blood. She looked up at him, eyes different now —
Okello lay there for a while.
Small fire. Not to draw attention to himself. The bike was busted. Night was falling, and neither the birds nor the rebels were anywhere in sight. There was a cluster of lights in the distance though. He’d need to stash his things and make for those lights tomorrow. He was low on water and without a vehicle. No other choice, really.
“bak”.
“Ouch!” Okello woke to someone poking his new, and sat up as quickly as he could, scooting backwards. In front of him was maybe the ugliest baby bird he’d ever seen. Or, as a baby supergweno, it wasn’t exactly baby sized, standing about 3 and a half feet tall.
“bak,” it said, skipping sideways, not nearly scared enough of him for his liking.
“Get out of here!” Okello yelled.
The bird blinked. It had huge eyes, and turned its head sideways to look at him. It was missing a lot of feathers on its head, and of the ones it did have, they were wispy and downy, as if they were still coming in. It took a couple steps forward and then packed at his boot, successfully dislodging a couple of sizeable bits of rubber from the toe.
Okello waved his foot. “Out!”
He grabbed some pebbles but mostly sand and through them at the bird.
“Bak!” it turned tail and ran, taking cover behind a small boulder, of which there were many at the foot of this mountain.
Okello sighed, and got up. He looked at the long descent of a rocky hill he’d come down. At least he’d made it to the mountains. That was a good sign that he’d at least made some progress in his journey yesterday, even if he’d been interrupted by desert rebels and a freak chicken herd attack.
He spent the day gathering a few herbs for tea, and catching a couple of lizards to roast into Jerkey. He found a puddle of a spring, but his therafilter indicated it had high amounts of heavy metal. As parched as he was, he drank it anyways, but didn’t exactly gulp it down.
He stashed his vehicle underneath a rocky overhang, and concealed it with bricks. He stayed out of the hot sun as much as possible until it began to go down, and then he headed for the town.
He arrived at a road at just as golden hour began to break. Children greeted him from small earthwork houses off the dirt road. They did not approach, but they looked healthy, and many smiled and waved.
“Sebo,” a boy asked, standing next to his younger sister. “Are you coming to the festival?”
Okello grunted. So there was a festival.
He made it to the center of town. Concrete dwellings, only a couple more than a story tall. It reminded him of how his own town had looked in pictures his mother had taken as a girl. She had grown up in his hometown of Lira; had never left.
Okello scanned the street. Agricultural supplies. Glassworks. Electrical repair. Women on the street hawking vegetables. Dust in the air from carts passing to and fro, men with (normal sized) chickens hanging from sticks.
“Anaña!” one yelled the loudest, holding a large pineapple and looking right at him. She might have been older than him, wearing a white blouse that had been washed many times, and flashing a grin that revealed two missing teeth. Though she advertised her wares in Swahili, she took a look at him approaching and broke right in Congo-flavored French.
“And where, weary traveller, have you departed from this morning?” she asked, the grace of her french words taking him off guard.
“I look that old, do?” Okello responded, straight-faced.
“As old as time itself my friend,” she replied, glancing at one of her friends beside her.
“Maybe older,” said the hawker to her left with a wink.
“Oh I am, or at least I feel it,” Okello said. “But you all couldn’t be a day past twenty, don’t you know better than to tease old men?”
The women all laughed together.
“Pineapple, it’s twenty for the big ones, fifteen for the smaller ones,” the woman said, gesturing on the imitation-reed mat in front of her.
“I can’t carry a whole pineapple, feeble as I am,” Okello joked,” But I would take a cavara of slices and a bottle of water.”
Nodding, the woman with the white blouse pulled out a tray covered with plastic and produced an ornate knife from her belt, slicing the pineapple with deft fingers.
“How many?” she asked, holding up a sample slice.
“Six,” Okello replied.
The woman nodded, then popped the sample into her mouth with pleasure.
“Ninga tye ngo?” She asked, switching into Okello’s mother tongue Leb Lango, as she worked. ""
Okello laughed in surprise. “Okello Patrick! Are you Lango?”
“My father was Acholi, just like god herself. Here you are Okello,” the woman said with a grin, handing over a bag with eight pieces of pineapple. “Yongeza,” she said, the Swahili word for ‘bonus’, or ‘extra’.
Okello was tempted to open his secret bag of American dollars for this kind hawker, but he kept it to Tanzanian Shillings. Right pocket, left pocket, secret pocket, belt. In east Africa you need multiple pockets for all the languages and currencies.
“Apwoyo tutwal imat - asante sana,” Okello replied, taking the water and the plastic cavera of pineapple slices.
“Ah you are so polite,” said the quiet woman who had not yet spoken. “Are you sure you are Okello, and not Patrice Lumumba? You are coming from the west, after all.”
Okello cleared his throat to prevent choking on his water.
“I wish. But I am a man, not a ghost. What is your name?” asked Okello, his voice low, glancing around the market square. It was still full of moving bodies, other voices buying and selling, which gave him comfort. No l’Aube, no Svencore affiliates, no Chinese or Indians, just Africans. He had to hope he looked the more or less the same as these Tanzanian villagers.
“Opiyo Rosie.”
“Do you know a good mechanic Opiyo?” asked Okello.
” Ah, but all mechanics are thieves,” the woman responded. “Except for my nephew. Let me take you to him.”
“No it’s okay,” Okello said. “I will come back tomorrow.”
“Let me at least point out where he works. See that two story building? He works just behind.”
Okello thanked Rosie again.
“And are you coming to the festival tonight? It will be time soon,” Rosie asked.
“No, no, I have to be on my way,” Okello said.
Rosie smiled, clearly doubting him.
Okello found a small restaurant where some locals at millet grain and chicken. He washed his hands and face at the washing station and ate a warm meal. The TV was playing the news.