After the Flare Read online

  Bracket ran after the workers chasing Abdul, who were already cutting off Abdul’s escape route, driving him toward a large array of white-painted radio antennae. This was good. There was nothing behind the antenna array but two electrified wire fences and stretches of scrubland. He’d have nowhere to go.

  Bracket was a tall, fit man who cycled the twenty kilometers around the spaceport every morning, sometimes before the sun went up, so he quickly outpaced the others and closed the distance. Abdul was tiring, his gait becoming disjointed and awkward as he was flanked by his pursuers. He tried to force open a door at the base of the biggest dish of the antenna array, but the door was double-locked and dead bolted.

  “Hold on, Abdul!” Bracket shouted. “Just stop and nothing happens. Nobody gets hurt. There’s no need to run.”

  Abdul paused, as if considering the offer. “I keep my job?”

  “Sure, we can talk about that.”

  Then they heard the screech of metal grinding against metal. Above them, the massive antennae were beginning to pivot on their axes.

  “Give that back to me, and calm down.”

  But Abdul was frightened off by the other workers encircling him. He leapt on to one of the access ladders to the antennae, pulling himself swiftly up.

  “No, stop!”

  Bracket had no desire to jump onto the twisting tons of metal, but he couldn’t risk the alternative, that this man would somehow halt his project in its tracks with a suicidal leap. He climbed up rung after rung until he could set his feet on the mesh of the parabola. He steadied himself as the dish continued to pivot. Abdul was running along the face of an antenna as the dish began to dip. Before Bracket could reach him, Abdul swung his body over the lip of the antenna like a gymnast and dropped himself to the ground. The dish was at a steep angle now, and Bracket started sliding down its face. He desperately grabbed on to the feedhorn in the middle of the dish to stop himself from dropping. It was a good five-meter fall to the ground, enough to snap a leg or bust a tendon in his knee. He clutched the feedhorn, his legs dangling beneath him, until, thankfully—miraculously—the antenna flattened out again, and he ran back along the dish to the ladder.

  He dropped to the ground, breathing hard. Shouts emerged in the distance. He started running again and scrambled over a waist-high berm of soil. On the other side, he saw a low, flat structure about ten meters long that was scarred with broken windows—an old building that was no longer in use, possibly a barracks. He followed the shouts around the corner of the building and nearly collided with several members of his crew, who had stopped and were staring at the ground.

  “Where’d he go?” Bracket said.

  A worker pointed at a patch of scratchy grass. On it was a spreading pool of dark liquid.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Blood.”

  “What do you mean? Where did he go?” Bracket approached the puddle and stuck his finger into the liquid, disbelieving. It felt warm and viscous, and it stained red against his palm. Blood, to be sure. Human or animal, it was hard to say, but blood it was. The workers looked at him in fear.

  “What happened to Abdul?”

  “Taken inside.”

  “Inside the building? Then what are you waiting for? Get in there.”

  Still gasping for air, Bracket motioned for them to open one of the doors. One of them peeled off and could be heard kicking it open.

  “No, oyibo, he’s not in the building.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Inside the ground.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do to him?” He’d heard of mobs killing thieves in the local markets in Kano, but whatever Abdul may have done, he didn’t deserve that.

  “We chased him here.”

  They pointed again at the spot and watched as the blood spread out in the leached earth, bubbling like an oil seepage. There was a lot of it, a liter or two maybe. Bracket felt nauseated. “Will someone please tell me what happened?”

  The laborers’ Pidgin swarmed around him. “He vanished,” they concluded. “Like smoke.”

  “Vanished? What do you mean, vanished?”

  “He went away. He was here before, and then he disappeared.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No, no, he went away. We didn’t touch him.”

  “You’re telling me that man up and vanished?”

  “Yes, oyibo, that’s what we said.”

  “A man doesn’t just disappear. What about that thing he had with him? The pot?”

  “It vanished too.”

  “Magic,” someone whispered.

  Bracket contemplated this. He hadn’t seen Abdul carrying anything other than the artifact. Had he been carrying blood with him for some reason? Had one of the others?

  Someone could have helped him escape. He looked closely at his crew, who were all sweating now in the sun. But he knew they were mostly good men who would do nothing to jeopardize a paycheck. Bracket had seen some strange things since arriving in northern Nigeria eight months ago—a thousand ornamented prancing horses during the Durbar festival, and, once, a woman whose limbs were stained deep blue from using indigo dye—but never earth that oozed blood like a fountain.

  Either way, his crew was sufficiently disturbed to have calmed down. He went into the nearby building and searched around despite their insistence that he was looking in the wrong place. Inside there were overturned chairs—the type you might find in an elementary school—some file cabinets, and a tall machine lined with what looked like switches for a circuit breaker. On the machine’s front panel he could make out the word BENDIX. The floor was coated with dust and he didn’t see any footprints, much less any blood.

  “Raise your hand,” he yelled in exasperation, “if you saw what happened to him.” Three men halfheartedly raised their hands, as if unsure what trouble the admission would cause them.

  “I want you all to know there’s a logical explanation for this. It’s not magic. Don’t be alarmed. We’ll start normal operations shortly.”

  “What are you going to do, oyibo?”

  Bracket had ripped his collared shirt when he was dangling from the feedhorn of the antenna. He tore off a sleeve and used it to tamp at the ground, searching for a sinkhole on the spot where they claimed Abdul had disappeared. But the ground was firm. And he realized he had soaked up some of the blood on the shirt. He snatched a plastic bag that was trapped on a shrub, and wrapped the grisly thing up.

  “We’ll keep this as evidence.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of whatever this is!”

  “You going to call the police, oyibo?”

  “No police. I’m going to talk to Op-Sec and we’ll let them take it from here. In the meantime, I want you three witnesses back at my office. Your jobs are safe. And everyone else—get back to your posts.”

  Bracket assigned a team of ten men to sweep the area one last time. Then, holding the bag in his hand, he walked around the old building. It wasn’t on any of the maps of the spaceport complex, as far as he could remember, and it had been abandoned for some time. The machine he’d seen inside had a military feel to it, for what purpose he couldn’t say.

  The antennae were still moving in unison, screeching on their axes. Watching them rotate, Bracket shook his head, angry with himself for not remembering that there had been a planned telemetry test today. He could have electrocuted himself up there, or been ground to a pulp by the metal gears. He would have died over a piece of old pottery.

  As the last of his men started moving out, he called after them: “And I want you all to quit calling me oyibo. I told you before, I’m not a white man.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Bracket,” one of them said over his shoulder, laughing. “Everyone from America is called oyibo. Black, white. Oyibo.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Kwesi Bracket had once believed that living in Africa would be like a homecoming, that the throngs would rise up in jubilation to celebrate his triumphant retur
n. He would impart the wisdom that his people had gained during their centuries of surviving in the modern wilderness of America, and his long-lost brothers and sisters would instill sacred knowledge in him. His journey into adulthood would be marked by clear rites of passage that were as bright as beacons lining an airstrip, launching him across space-time to another plane of meaningful existence. The homecoming would allow him to make sense of his marriage and of his flatlining career at NASA. Bracket was a practical man—trained as an industrial engineer—but after his mother had layered him with batik dashikis, like a cake, somewhere he’d hidden the belief that what was lost would be once again found.

  In Africa.

  Then the Flare came. Everything changed. Bracket was working at NASA in Houston, and he watched as the United States buckled under an infrastructure collapse of such magnitude that people’s lives were changed forever. Everyone thought the government would quickly restore electricity, but then someone—no one knew who—launched cyberattacks that crippled networks, disabling everything attached to them, from heart pumps to refrigerators and generators. At first people stayed put and hoped to ride out the aftermath, eking out simpler versions of their lives and helping their neighbors where they could. But when the White House didn’t offer a timeline for recovery, the country began to splinter along ideological lines. Progressives flocked to the Southwest to establish what they called the Pueblo Confederacy, as citizens from all over the country migrated there from colder states where services and supplies grew scarce in less than two months. The affluent locked themselves down on the coasts, hiring private security firms to protect company campuses, neighborhoods, even whole towns; and the San Francisco Bay Area became an entire city-state nicknamed the Silicon Territories, where the tech titans tried to immunize themselves against the chaos. None of this was official, nor was it always real; these were often imagined geographies that people invented in the hopes of regaining control over their lives, which had grown paranoid with mistrust. The Wallers, by contrast, were very real, and some Americans became Wallers overnight no matter where they lived or how they identified. Wallers armed themselves to the teeth, preparing for a battle for survival they feared would happen if the government didn’t repulse the cyberattacks and restore electricity. And yet Bracket knew that before the Flare most Wallers had hated the federal government for existing at all.

  In Houston, Bracket watched as Texans trampled the border fences with their SUVs on their way toward the Yucatán. Because the reality was that the whole world wasn’t offline. A narrow band along the equator—including West Africa and parts of South America—had been protected from the Flare by the magnetic fields of Earth, which had deflected the charged particles. These countries destroyed their international gateways to the Internet and sealed off their networks, with only limited, highly monitored exchange points that allowed information to move across borders. Mass migrations to Central America increased each week as families packed up their belongings in search of the modern way of life. They relied on battery-powered devices, until those ran out, and on modified ham radios that created localized mesh networks to painfully, slowly transmit data. But by then it seemed all everyone had was time.

  When the Flare hit, Bracket was working at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a 6.2-million-gallon water tank that allowed astronauts to run simulations of space walks underwater. First the utter silence awoke him in the night. Out his bedroom window, as if in a dream, the air was infused with rainbow sherbet. He saw swirls of magenta and vermillion, and bursts of green so bright that it was as if you could eat them with a spoon. And then the next day he realized how interconnected everything was. No electricity, no indoor plumbing. No air-conditioning.

  No heat.

  The Army Corps of Engineers requisitioned the NBL as an emergency reservoir and Bracket found himself unemployed like millions of other Americans, suddenly paralyzed by a lack of purpose. Einstein had failed to include employment in his theory of relativity, that time slows down when you’re out of work, the job being the universal constant from which all things flow.

  His daughter Sybil was safe at medical school, and he thought about heading north to join her, but she would need money from him, not the other way around. You needed a big bank account to enter the Silicon Territories, too, and their gated artificial intelligence enclaves with their raw computing power could not even begin to meet people’s basic needs. The “cloud” had come tumbling down to Earth, fogging the world in confusion.

  He was saved by an air-mail letter from Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency, inviting him to “design and operate a simulation tank.” At first Bracket brushed off the letter as a cruel hoax, but when an old colleague managed to run a search for him on the military net—a sacrifice, given that military staff were allocated limited bandwidth per week—he learned that Nigeria operated the only remaining space program because it had been untouched by the Flare. He immediately applied for the position, including with his application a state-of-the-art design of a water tank that he drafted himself.

  Nigeria! In Africa! It was the place his mother had told him so much about, the land from which many black traditions had been drawn. All he had to do was pass a DNA test to prove his African ancestry. One-eighth was the minimum required for a diasporic diplomatic visa to Nigeria. Bracket failed it. He scored one-sixteenth Igbo, which disappointed him after all the dashikis his mother had made him wear in his youth, but didn’t surprise him either. When he looked in a full-length mirror, the most African parts of him were his navel and his penis, the dark melanin enrobing the skin. No matter that Bracket could pass for white, which he had never consciously done; his mother believed that he would give rise to the kings and queens of a new Nubian dynasty. The DNA test showed Bracket was also one-sixteenth Seminole, his great-great-grandfather having married an Indian after emancipation in Florida. This pushed his application over the line.

  The next day—and not yet four months since the Flare had changed the world—Bracket boarded a C-5 military transport plane from Houston directly to Kano, along with a dozen other black engineers and scientists. It was his homecoming. Except when he arrived he realized that northern Nigeria had nothing to do with dashikis because people didn’t wear them.

  CHAPTER 3

  In formation, the astronauts trotted past Bracket like a platoon of colorfully painted soldiers as he hurried back to his office. The Naijanauts were outfitted in green-and-white tracksuits, the colors of the Nigerian flag, while the Vyomanauts—those were the Indian astronauts—were wearing green, white, and saffron. India had been knocked offline by the Flare too, but when the country learned that the International Space Station was expected to fall onto its largest city, the government sent over its scientists to Nigeria to help build the rockets in a show of mutual cooperation. So now the astronauts wore the colors of their respective nation, like home and away jerseys for a sports team. Bracket kept his head down because the astronauts were waiting for him to finish the simulation tank, and they tended to pester him about its progress as if he had somehow forgotten about it.

  Instead he pushed toward the Naijapool complex to debrief the three witnesses who had seen Abdul Haruna disappear. In the operations room, he oversaw every aspect of the project, literally, because the room was perched on the second floor, and it had a viewing window that looked down upon the enormous gulf of the concrete pool, which was as deep as a four-story building.

  The mock-up of the International Space Station was already installed at the bottom of the pool. The NBL in Houston could fit only small sections of the station, so Bracket had designed Naijapool to accommodate all the modules that would affect the rescue of Masha Kornokova. This included the European lab and the Kibo module, and they were all built full scale. For now the astronauts busied themselves with walking inside the mock-up, but it couldn’t compare with an actual underwater simulation in which their weighted suits behaved like they would in space.

  From t
he operations room, Bracket could also observe the other facilities already built out and occupied by staff: the test conductor rooms, the control room, the locker rooms for the astronauts and scuba divers, the suit-donning room, the assembly area, and the hyperbaric and hypobaric chambers. Flags of supporting space agencies were draped from the ceiling between the overhead cranes: the Indian Space Research Organisation, the European Space Agency, NASA, JAXA, KARI, and others. The operations room itself was filled with banks of computers, video monitors, and large drafting desks to review blueprints or examine equipment as the need arose. Bracket compulsively kept the room neat and organized.

  The workers were there when he arrived. One by one, he recorded their testimonies:

  Witness 1: Sandton Magu, Kaduna State:

  I was chasing the thief because he was a bad man. I did not know him. I came to the building and I was going to beat him with a stick. When I found him he was not there anymore. I didn’t see what happened to the thing he stole. I swear I did not attack him. Just because I’m a big man, people think I attack everyone. It’s not true. I’m a gentle man. I think he’s still out there somewhere, and we should catch him, inshallah.

  Witness 2: Billy Madueke, Bauchi State:

  His name was Abdul. I did not like him very much because he didn’t talk a lot. He was always watching, you know, like he might steal something. I am not surprised he was a thief. I like people who talk, not people who hold secrets. I’m a naturally outgoing person myself. I was close to him when he tried to run away. I thought I could catch him, but he fell down before he disappeared. He was low to the ground. His hand was pulled ahead of him, like a dog tugging on a leash. I didn’t see what happened to the thing he stole. And then the blood appeared, like he had melted, or a cow’s throat had been slit. Good riddance.