“Who? The government? I’m not . . .”
“No, Ultimate Corp. And you should fear them more than the government.”
“I’ll know when they all are coming.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Even if you can control all AI, all software, you’re still human. You can’t be everywhere at once, talking to everyone at once, preparing for everything at once. When you look one way, they’ll come at you another.”
I frowned. “Maybe.”
“There’s something else,” he said. He sighed. “How’s your mother?”
I chuckled. “Fine. My mom and my dad, well, as fine as they could be knowing all that’s going on.”
“Your mother loved olives,” he said. “I remember that.”
I laughed. “Of course you’d know that. What about it?”
Force and my mother had always had an interesting rapport, which made his leaving all the more profound. They simply enjoyed sitting and talking. Some days, when I was in my worst pain, unable to talk, Force would come over, and he and my mother would sit and just talk. Listening to them made me feel better, though it also made me feel left out.
“I know too much,” he said, looking away. He got up and walked to the edge of the room. When he turned back to me, I felt ill.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
I frowned more deeply. “Know what?”
“Olives.”
“What about olives?” I snapped.
“Ultimate Corp sold almost all the olives in Nigeria, they still do. Some two decades ago, there was a small batch of Beldi olives that they grew in Morocco. I never told you, but I researched this when we were sixteen. Those trees were genetically modified to grow in higher density and with a spicy black-peppery taste. They were wildly popular here, you put them in jollof rice, Indomie, ate them as a snack. Unfortunately, these olives were later proven to cause birth defects if one ate too many of them. They recalled all those Beldi olives, it was big news. For about a day. Then it wasn’t. What never made the news was that five pregnant women in Nigeria ate too many.” He paused, and when I just stared at him, he continued. “There were five born like you. Two died days later, though I’m not really sure if their deaths were natural, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” I whispered. They’d most likely been euthanized. Probably with their parents’ consent. The only alternative was having a “demon” child.
“Aside from you, two had parents who agreed to a few cybernetic organs. But those parents were Christian Pentecostals, so their religious and cultural beliefs made them reject the most important ones. So one of them died around the age of two and the one who survived, aside from you, remains the . . .” he took a deep breath.
“Say it,” I said.
“Shameful family secret,” he said after a moment.
“Still alive?”
“If you want to call that life,” he said. “So you were the only one who chose to walk into the fire. They could never get anyone to volunteer for what you’ve been through—”
“I’m an experiment,” I blurted.
He looked sad as he said it. “Yes. And they can say you volunteered for it.”
“Fuck!” I screamed. I frowned, calming myself. “So . . . so, they knew pregnant women would eat those fucking olives? They wanted them to?! To cause mutations in their unborn children? So . . . so. . . . they made me need all my augmentations?! Then they gave me access to it, and then they monitored me?”
“Definitely.”
“Okay,” I said. Full capacity. A shiver flew from my feet to the top of my head. I opened my mouth to catch my breath. “Stop!” I screamed. Thump, thump, thump, in my ears.
“I researched it all,” he whispered. “Found solid answers.”
I inhaled deeply, concentrating on my heartbeat, trying to dodge the realization that was slipping into my consciousness no matter how I tried to keep it out. I managed to slow my heart’s rhythm, but I couldn’t keep out the information Force had just dumped on me. “Because of olives,” I said, my eyes closed, my fingertips pressed to my temples.
“She still had one of the jars.”
“She kept it? All these years?” I asked.
He nodded.
“So she knew,” I said. “She must have researched, too.”
“Or they’d visited your home when you were born, and your parents never told you.”
So Ultimate Corp was responsible for me being born as I was. Then the government was responsible for enthusiastically giving me whatever augmentation I requested. I thought about the car accident years later. An autonomous vehicle. An accident that the news feeds and engineers said had never happened before. That was so rare it was anomalous. An accident that shouldn’t have happened. Maybe that was them pushing me further, to see what more they could do. They must have been delighted every time I petitioned for something. I’d made their job easy. No wonder my petitions were always accepted. I’d thought I was just lucky, applying at the right time, stating my need in the right way. “Shit,” I said.
“Yeah. Shit.”
I couldn’t keep the tears from dribbling from my eyes. I wiped them away with the back of my flesh hand. Thump thump thump, the beat of my brother’s drums in my ears. I saw flashes of what I did to those men. And then my vision blurred as, for the first time, I remembered in full. I’d crushed the beautiful man’s throat with my cybernetic hand as I looked him in the face. The sound and feeling of it echoed in my mind. And once the memory was there, it didn’t leave this time. It stayed. It stayed. Oh it stayed. “God,” I muttered, barring my teeth, clenching my fist. Thump, thump, thump. I welcomed it.
I got up and walked to the screen. I was now taking us through a dense jungle. I stopped and stared at it. I liked this place. It was like being able to see what was on my mind as it was on my mind. “They’ll kill us both, eventually.”
“Not if you kill them first.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious, Anwuli. Maybe it’s time you stopped running. Turn and face your pursuers. Just think about it.” He got up. “They won’t find you any time soon. The Hour Glass is still the Hour Glass. You’re definitely the most valuable person to come through here, but you aren’t the most dangerous.”
“I find that oddly comforting.”
“Heh, that’s why few people who come to live in the Hour Glass ever leave.”