Last
night when I pasted my ear to the wind
And tasted the
spice of eternity on my lips
I had really
turned my mind away into fear.
Kalu
Uka,
Fear
“Room 33 became a terror zone; something
kicked in when you got close. Alien telepathy was one. You could hear a person’s thought process in
there. It clanged with an audible urgency like a machine that’d gone on for a
while without oil. Sometimes, the sensation lingered for seconds after you left
the Room. And once, it devolved into
a screaming Capgras Syndrome. You
know what that is, don’t you?” I stopped long enough to watch Hannah nod her reply
and then proceeded.
“What
happened was Dimi; the stud who diddles with gadgets was in Room 33. He and one of our programmers,
I can’t remember who . . . must have been Kustley . . . yeah, ‘twas him
alright, Kustley. Suddenly, they started on each other. When we watched the
recording from the surveillance cameras afterwards, it was like living in a
nightmare.
“Who
the hell are you, Dumbbell?” Dimi said, starting towards Kustley. He was an
average mammoth.
“Who
you call Dumbbell, Pinhead? And what you doing in here?”
“It
doesn’t matter,” Dimi said. “I asked first. Who are you?”
“Kustley
made to call security and Dimi came at him holding up his Phillips screwdriver
like a Zulu warrior running to battle. Kustley swerved just in time. Dimi
buried the tool in his shoulder blade driving it all the way to the handle.
Kustley yawped and stumbled forward, blood, deep-red and syrupy spouted from
the puncture in raging rivulets. Dimi pounced on him and worked at recovering
the screwdriver from its position. Kustley’s hands flailed over his head,
feeling for Dimi’s shirt, as he tried to get Dimi off his back. Dimi retrieved
the tool, evoking a deep-throated squeal from Kustley. He reached high over his
head with that thing and came down hard.”
“Ruth Benemesia Opiah!"[I]
Hannah yelled. She’d been doing a good job keeping it together. Now, she just
let it fly.
“The
top of Kustley’s skull splintered and spat up a spray of blood where metal met
flesh. His eyes bulged and rolled over to whites as his bladder let go. He
trundled like an old horse that stumbles and nods half asleep as it stalks
then, crumpled to the floor in a heap. He lay there with one hand shooting out,
clenched into a fist as if he had died trying to play superman. Dimi - you would think that by now sanity would have
reasserted itself - put both hands to his eyes like he was wiping tears off his
face. He began to claw at his face. He cried as he did it. Suddenly, he clawed
his own eyes out and popped ‘em in his mouth like peanuts and then, Dimi ate
his own eyeballs. We had to peel the fellow off the circuit breaker when we got
back in Room 33. He fried his hide.
“Tell
me what actually went down,” something flickered beneath Hannah’s calm as we accessed
her kitchen. “All of it. As much as you can recall.”
A
sense of homecoming rushed at me like a bullet train and pushed me into the hugs
of common lilac fragrance that marked
every room in Hannah’s apartment. “What
may I tell you? What reveal?,” I said quoting ‘Hanging Day[II]’.
“Picking
off from the last rung would be a start.”
I made for the sofa in the living room before Hannah
said, ‘Com’ on over to the kitchen and grab a cool cup of limeade, first.’ She
was already squeezing lime with the reamer when I came into the kitchen. I took
the seat by the head of the dining and immediately regretted my decision. Hannah
looked at me and a knowing passed between us and following on its heels, the pangs
of memory.
“Your
father would have been proud of the man you turned out to be,” she said. No more
or the tears would come. “Go on, grab a tumbler off the buffet and come taste
the sweetest homemade limeade.” She smiled but I could see a glint of sadness
in her eyes. I did as told. Her limeade was as good as ever.
“On
June 9, 2007, I rooted for Barcelona[III] FC at a Suya[IV]
spot just around my street corner – that’s Barça
for fans. I kinda love it where it’s crowded. On a different level, there’s
some dick to elbow if the God of soccer’s
taking a nap on your team’s Hail Marys,”
I said, easing into my story.
“Barça was thirty minutes into the game
and a goal down when a Zambrotta cross sent the ball into the opponent’s danger
zone. Messi[V],
well positioned for the rare advantage launched himself at the ball. He missed
but, connected with a fist instead, to steer the ball past the Chelsea [VI]goalie.
The God of soccer winked at the
referee and just like that Barça had
an equalizer. There was a lot of bickering from Chelsea fans. I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I?
“
‘It’s not cheating if you don’t get caught,’ someone said. ‘Besides, it’s Magical Messi. You can’t penalize the God
of Soccer’s son.’
“The
owner of the voice wore a black three piece suit and sat in a corner in Zibo’s Suya Spot. His eyes smiled when they
met mine and he said, ‘Hello, Kumar.’
Hearing my name from this stranger’s lips made me feel like an artist viewing a
portrait of himself as a toddler for the very first time.
“Nobody
called me Kumar besides my parents. And
they were dead. Besides, how could he have known any of my names when we never
met? Dr. Iback had his hand extended when I got to his table. I took it. His handshake
was firm and totally disarming.
‘That game proves God not only plays dice,
Mr. Kumar,’ Iback said. ‘He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be
seen. Sit with me, please?’ He got up and pulled out the seat opposite his.”
Hannah took off her chapeau and dropped it on
the large oak table in her kitchen. She grabbed a bowl filled with citrus fruit
and reached for a goblet on the buffet. “Iback gave you the bottom line of his
offer, I suppose?” She said, back towards me as she worked at ridding the
citrus of their juice.
“I
guess he hinted on it when he said, ‘I love Messi. He knows fair and he knows foul. I love a player who knows when
to sneak one in.’ ”
“I
want you on my team,” he said, stroking his hand-to-ball
spotted-tie. “A creative genius like you ought to be working for the Touchpad Corporation, the big wheel in
Touch Pad technology.”
“Any
fool can peel the apple,” I said. “It takes a real man to eat the core.”
And he cracked up and said, “It takes a genius
to make people laugh. Laughter brings many benefits, such as increased lung
capacity and the ability to tolerate idiots.[VII]
You’ll do just fine with ‘DATSET’.”
“DATSET,” said Hannah. “What’s that?”
“That’s
short for, ‘Dactylic Touch-Sensing
Technology[VIII]’.
TouchCorp’s fingerprint-sensing innovation for PCs; laptops, tablet PCs,
iPhones and the iPad. Our gig was to invent a fingerprint-sensing program.
“TouchCorp managed a labyrinth-like
building complex called ‘Data Base’, in
the Peninsula. ‘DATSET’ was confined entirely to the left wing of Data Base. Day and night we fed data
into XT3 - the Mainframe at Data Base,
a 65000-processor positronic supercomputer responsible
for The Project. Whoever designed
that babe gave her all the features of intelligent life form.”
“Any
sufficiently advanced technology,” Hannah said. “Is indistinguishable from
magic.”
I took a sip of my juice, I was tensed up ‘cause
I was reaching for the raw nerve.
“So,
tell me, what went wrong?” She asked.
“Most
of us had retired to our quarters for the evening when the entire structure lit
up with a horrendous scream, shuddering, growling and moaning, filling up the hush
of the night. It came from Room 33,
where XT3 was housed. B-Mack, security
working the nightshift got there ahead of us. He said, ‘I wasn’t quite ten
paces from Room 33 when a blast of infrared
spectrum blew out the screen door and almost immediately, some influence sucked
the explosion right back in there in one big whump.’ The door to Room 33 was blackened, as if a blast of
heat had charred it.”
“Anybody
turned up dead?” Hannah dumped the dehydrated limes in the basket, grabbed her
goblet and waltzed toward the table.
“I
once read about a man who was chewed up by his laundry machine. Nobody figured
out how he got his butt stuck in there or how the machine performed the stunt. Here’s
the real whopper, we searched for Niamey who’d been in for his shift in that room, there wasn’t much space to
drift, and came up with his overcoat and his ball point still in the pocket. Niamey,
however, was . . . gone. On one
level, that’s worse than turning up dead.
I never saw the body. I don’t know why but at that instant, the story about the
laundry room incident flushed my mind with desperate intensity.
There weren’t any gaping holes in XT3 to wolf
down a toddler.”
“A
few days after Niamey walked into thin
air, one of our guys found a spatter of blood mingled with lacerated flesh in
Room 33. If you can imagine a POW
behind enemy lines, and this group of really stoned soldiers pulls the pin off
a grenade, yank his mouth open and force him to swallow it, works for a succinct
comparison. We did a headcount and Reynard came up missing.
“Let
me tell you one thing, when I took Iback’s offer I didn’t know what I was stepping
into. I wish Stacey had passed this up. I would have felt as if she left me in
the lurch yes, but . . . When we act for the noblest reasons, the last link of
the chain all too often drips with someone’s blood.[IX]”
God, I wish she said no.
“Have
you found God, Jase. Finally?”
I got up and walked to the refrigerator. I poured
myself a glass of water and downed it. I refilled it then returned to the dining.
Hannah was circling the rim of her glass with her index finger. She looked up
when I sat down. I could feel the tension settling over me like a cloak.
“That
was a lovely exercise,” she said. “It begs the question, effectively.”
“Why
switch the subject, Hannah? Does it mean anything?” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe so, maybe no,” I said. My
Mom and Dad died in an auto crash. I was spared. End of story. Why blame it on God? I believe God takes
a hand in things from time to time. “God is much more intelligent than I,” I
said, drumming on the table. “Let Him try to find me.[X]”
Hannah reached across the table and squeezed my
right hand. “In a world where death is the hunter, my son, there is no time for
regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions[XI].”
I withdrew my hand, gently. “Fortune knows we scorn her most when most
she offers blows.”
Hannah sighed. “Fortune gave me, you, after your parents passed on. I do not
despise him for it. Not even after my
husband died leaving you and Stacey for me to raise. Rather, I cherished the
privilege.” She searched my eyes, her face inscrutable like the face of a god
in a shrine. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in
your philosophy.”
“Well,
that’s tough,” I said. “I know there are people who argue differently but,
that’s just the way it is. For better or worse”
She combed her Cornrow braids with her fingers
and sighed. “Some things that were science fiction a few years ago are reality
today. Iback and I were the first two of a team of astronauts commissioned by
the Nigerian Intergalactic Agency
(NIGA) to shoot the independently-boosted Nigerian interstellar ship into orbit.”
“I don’t recall discussing you or Stacey with him, though. I may have slipped
on one occasion, it’s not impossible. I really can’t help it talking about you,
guys.” She laughed softly. “We were boosted by The Kalabria, the positronic starship into deep-space to
probe Kepler[XII] – a habitable exoplanet about two times
the size of Earth.
“The
hyperdrive had
been invented using Nigerium, a
highly refined radioactive material discovered by Sam Dukey in the
Nok valley, to build its nuclear engines. When the hyperdrive field is
activated, The Kalabria enters the hyperspace moving
thirty times faster than light. It’s the only way we could even come close to
the Kepler about 560 light years
away. The field creates warp holes; a kind of hyperspatial shortcuts. We collected all the samples we could
carry on Kepler and returned home. On
re-entry from hyperspace, the Cherenkov radiation
reversed Iback’s genetics. Medical examination revealed he caught it on our way
out. Earth’s atmosphere had only amplified it. He was treated, certified cured and discharged.
“It
was in the course of those very years, following the discovery of Kepler, that rocket probes began to be
sent out to other planets initiating interstellar travel and faster
than light
transmission (FTLT).”
“There,
I told you how Iback may have come
about your name. I want to know how my daughter met death.”
I
adjusted my position. “Nobody moved a motion to abort The Project, despite the
tragic episodes. At the subconscious
level where shadows grow claws, we knew there was no going back. We’ve invented
the Theremon fluid before this time
and worked it into touch screens and touch pads. Well, we thought we invented
it but, the real deal is, it was alien fluid. It seeps through the fingertips and
next thing’s you’re possessed by a secondary personality. We didn’t ship any
though; we were performing tests before incidents in Room 33 reached inevitable outcomes.
“The
night Stacey died, I entered that room
and couldn’t shake the feeling that the air was smokin and tokin with a lethal
potential. When I stepped into Room 33,
strange shapes popped into my eyes and there was a feeling of coming into a
grotesque room, not a computer room. I had this feeling somebody was trying
real hard to lodge in my mind. XT3’s screen was horrid black. It was like
looking into the mind of the devil, himself.
“I
knew Stacey was in there. She’d informed me and I’d promised to catch up. I was
still watching that screen when this hazy stuff started, a moving silhouette on
the darker surface of the computer screen. And then, this weird inscription floated
out on the screen like through a glass darkly:
The installer will automatically continue
when these conflicting applications are closed
“And
following closely, you won’t believe this, an inventory;
|
1. Jase
2. Mekan
3. Nivel
4. Ito
5. Tinker
|
“I
stood as still as a paper boat upon a paper sea, waiting, my heart pounding
against my chest like the testicle of the great bell at the St. Thomas
Cathedral clanging against its walls at the wake of dawn. The names or the applications, stopped at 5. I sensed the wrongness before I
actually saw it. It buzzed in my
brain like a voice crying out from behind the walls of doubt; names of members
of my team who had an encounter with Room 33 were omitted. I reckoned it wasn’t
an error.
“Stacey, who I’d been with a few minutes earlier, heck, is the reason I was in that horrible
place after all, wasn’t on the list either. I felt my butt plop to the floor as
strength fizzled out of my muscles, and I landed on my balls. The pain shot
through me and my body shuddered. I reached for the aching spot and my fingers caught
something. I would have let it go
under the circumstance but intuition overrode reasoning. I picked it up,
instead. It was drenched in blood and body juice. I recognized Stacey’s
engagement ring. It rolled off her finger when something grabbed her, must
have.
“When
I saw the body, Stacey wasn’t dead yet. Not by a long chalk but, what I saw . .
.” I swallowed hard and almost choked on my spittle. A coughing fit shook me. I
got it under control and went on “I wished she was long gone . . . I don’t need
to draw you a picture, do I?
“Go
ahead, Jase, I fixed my storm doors.”
“A
huge tube-shaped structure, somewhat like a misplaced oviduct attached itself
to Stacey’s eyes and sucked away ‘floop,
floop, floop’ producing a noise like of a hidden brook. I don’t know
exactly what I felt like, because a man can’t easily hold on to those things
that are typically macho you know,
like trying to fight back the tears and all that, when it’s all so damn
personal. Wasn’t much of her left but a bag of bones when I found her. She
retched like a rooster putting up with a bad case of thirst. They came then. A
deluge blurred my vision I had to wrestle it or forgo what I had to do. In a
sudden desperate invention, I grabbed the tube and made to rip it off her. A torrent
of electricity pitched me against a processor. I was beginning to get a hold of
myself when Iback’s face popped into view. Giving me the once over he said, ‘In
space, it’s always one minute after midnight.’ He had a smirk but I could read
nothing on the fox’s face.”
“He
always said that at NIGA,” Hannah said. “Usually, when things went awry.
Dreadfully awry.” This was followed by a spate of sobbing. I’d known details of
Stacey’s death would unplug a river. But, some tears have to be cried or they
eat away at the soul like cancer. I got her some Kleenex and as I passed by the
window saw darkness creep up on the skies as the horizon gulped down the sun in
degrees. “Iback was so dysfunctional after the Cherenkov experience Humpty Dumpty wouldn’t have envied him.” I’ve
never seen so many wrinkles in Hannah’s face before as I did then. “I never
observed a man’s nature totally translated in a short breath.” After a bout of
heaves and sighs and a sip of her limeade she said, “Continue.”
I resumed my story thinking about how often we were
fed with information we would have done without. “ ‘What’s done’s done,’ Iback
said. ‘You can’t help her now, anymore than you can save the human race. It’s
best to leave well enough alone. You can’t fight them, son. Yield. They’ll go easy on you. Call it Fate.’ ”
“‘Them’, what did he mean by that?”
“He didn’t say. But I’ll bet my
shirt, he was talking about aliens. He
stepped over my sprawled body and booked for the door like he was on to
something. Just before he slipped through it he glanced back over his shoulder
at me and said, ‘You give my regards to the devil or whoever has his job in
hell.’ And then he was gone. Stacey was no longer here with us, she’d become one
heap of bones covered with a very thin slice of skin. Seeing her drained me of
the will to live. I felt the floor vibrate as if some monstrosity was busting
through. I would have waited for it to come and get me. But I had a vision of
the world under the control of some alien race and something deep in my character allowed me to take the hits and still
get on with trying to win”[XIII].
Hannah broke down completely and I had to hold
her in my arms for a while. It was okay, I knew it was going to be a long
night. I came prepared.
But for your sake, Dear Reader. I know you’re itching
to know how the story ends. The details of our, mine and the few hands left on Data Base, little adventure’s what you
see on the news every other day. We threw a special cocktail party. The type
where you served up exclusively, Molotov cocktails. I don’t need to draw you a
picture too, do I?
☤ ☤ ☤
There’s been a lot of bickering making the
rounds since the birth of deep-space exploration. Questions like, if there are aliens in deep space where
does that leave God and the Angels and perhaps, even the Devil? My story’s not an attempt to answer that
question. It’s one author’s shot at making the two subjects serve one story
plot. I’m one of those writers who believe, a writer doesn’t write because
he has an answer but rather, he writes because he has a story. Let the reader beat themselves up trying to
solve the puzzle.
If
you think any of the characters in this story looks like you or anybody you
know, your mind’s probably playing tricks on you. All the guys and gals in this
piece are fictional. But the story on the other hand, that’s real, baby. As someone
once said, ‘You can’t make up
anything anymore. The world is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it. Go, figure.
ENEH
AKPAN
Ikeja, Lagos
Footnotes
[I] A veteran Newscaster on the Nigerian Television
Authority (NTA) News Network used here chiefly as a rhetorical device
[II] A Poem by Wole Soyinka
[III] Barcelona FC or Barça is the defending
soccer champion of European football.
[IV]A variety of Nigerian Barbecue
[V] There is a real Lionel Messi who plays for
both Barça FC and the Argentine national team. He’s a current recipient of the FIFA
Ballon d’Or (formerly World Player of the Year). Messi has scored three goals
similar to the one described in this story. Only one of those handballs was
actually penalized. He is mentioned here in a fictitious sense.
[VI] Said match was actually against Espanyol
FC. I think it ended in a 1-1 Draw. I only mentioned Chelsea to inspire well, a
little bit of controversy
[VIII] A phrase I got online and twisted around a
little bit
[IX] Stephen King, Lunch at The Gotham Café
[X] Isaac Asimov supposedly said this concerning his religious belief
during an interview
[XII] There’s actually an exoplanet called
Kepler-10b. It was discovered by NASA Ames’ spacecraft and speeds around a star
in the constellation Cygnus. Much of the details presented in the story are factual
except where I’ve stated that it is HABITABLE. It’s not. Kepler 22b’s a closer
bet.
[XIII] Lionel Messi quote
(paraphrased).
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