Akaela (3 page)

Chapter Three

Athel

Day Number: 1,529

Event: Skip died, shot by droids while
checking the fishing nets. Number of Mayakes left: 432.

Goal for today: Survive.

I look at the numbers streaming on
my retina. My friend Lukas and I have been keeping a daily memo since we were
twelve.
Back then
,
there were 463
Mayakes
. In four years, we had 84 births and 115 deaths, all dutifully
recorded in Lukas’s data feeder.

I save the
record, send it wirelessly to Lukas’s stream, then close the connection. Mom
and Akaela are still arguing. I can hear their voices through the closed door.
Dottie yells that she’s perfectly capable of gliding at night and she’s tired
of being told off.

“Quit
worrying, Mom!” she says.

But Mom
won’t quit worrying. Not until Dad is back, not until the droids stop murdering
our people.

We’ve lost
aunts, uncles, friends,
cousins
. I’ve become numb to
the pain, my emotions hardened by too many losses. That’s what we all do: we
bow our heads and wait for our turn. We’re all going to die, sooner or later.

Maybe
that’s why Mom and Akaela still find the energy to fight after what happened.
Whatever the reason, I’m tired of hearing them argue. I sneak out of our family
quarters on the fortieth floor and push through the heavy fire doors into the
stairwell. Chilled air funnels up the winding staircase and howls. Disturbed by
the clatter of my steps, the pigeons stir in their nests. Pigeons are like
rats—they’ll never go extinct. They keep mutating resistant forms, no
matter how hostile the environment becomes.

It’s 5:30
a.m. and it’s still dark outside, the Tower only partially illuminated by the
little electricity we harvest through the solar panels scattered across our
fields. I wait for my retina sensors to switch to high ISOs then tromp down the
thirty-eight flights of stairs. Even in pitch dark, my eyes can see perfectly.
Our people stole the technology from the Gaijins, a new camera prototype they’d
built for their droids a few decades ago. The camera sensors provided eyesight
to many babies that would’ve been blind otherwise, born, like me, with a
defective LCA2 gene. But they also caused one of the worst bloodsheds in our history.
Tired of our looting, the Gaijins attacked us in 2189 and bombarded the Tower, killing
hundreds of our men. Both our parents were gravely injured during the attack,
and both lost their parents. The Gaijins raised the firewalls at the other end
of the mesa and deployed sniper droids to guard it. The smoke and ashes the
wind blows over the Yatelan plane
are
a subtle reminder
of their domination.

Defeated,
the Mayakes had no choice but let the Gaijins’ scavenger droids onto our land
in exchange for scraps of technology that barely help us survive. Our people
swore off war and stealing and vowed to be dependent on their own robotics
only. Yet twenty years have passed and we still don’t have the resources to
create new implants and prostheses.
Our batteries are aging
,
our technology is outdated
.

People
want an end to this but they’re too scared to start another war against the
Gaijins. We’ve surrendered to our enemies, given them our land, and got only
more deaths in return.

Last
month, after a very heated Kiva, a vote was cast and three men were chosen to
pave the way for a new collaboration with the Gaijins. Three ordinary men: not
soldiers, not a threat, but ambassadors of peace to request for help.

One of the
three men is
Dad,
the other two are my friends Lukas’s
and Wes’s fathers.

The
mission was supposed to last one week. Two weeks have gone by and panic is beginning
to spread. Skip’s death is just adding fuel to the fire.

I stop on
the twentieth floor and knock on my friend Lukas’s door. His mom died three
years ago of battery failure and he’s been living with his uncle Akari until
his dad comes back. I knock a second time, but nobody answers. Akari is one of
our surgeons, so chances are he’s with Uli and the other surgeons right now,
all working on Skip’s body. Skip had a mechanical heart, one of the most
advanced models we had left. As sad as it sounds, no Mayake body goes cold
before every
chip,
every scrap of metal, every bolt is
harvested, sterilized, and prepped for a new recipient.

It’s a routine
we’ve grown accustomed to for the past years.

I try to
message Lukas through our built-in network, but the wireless network is
annoyingly slow, probably clogged by the latest news of Skip’s death. I decide
I’ll catch up with Lukas later and trot back to the stairs. Thirty-something
floors down I hear the muffled voices coming from the auditorium on the second
floor, the place all Mayakes know as the Kiva Hall. One low drone—one of
the elderly Kiva Members—followed by an uproar of boos, clapping, and shouting.
Our elders have called a special Kiva assembly. People are scared and outraged.
Something needs to be done—we can’t just accept our fate and wait until
the last Mayake dies.

I shoulder
through the fire door and
jog down
the empty corridors
of the third floor. The Tower was once a hospital. When our people first moved
in, they found a wealth of abandoned electronics they could restore and use to
make our implants. Decay eventually took over. Some floors have no doors and no
windows.
Birds
nest in the stairwells, and weeds grow
through the cracks in the walls and between the floor tiles.

I used to
love living in a place like this. Our favorite quarters were the MRI labs and
the old surgery rooms. Even voided of all the equipment, there were still many
treasures to hunt: old medication bottles, X-rays of crippled bones, boxes of
screws and drills.
So many places to explore, so many spots
to hide.

Now I’ve
grown tired of it.

I’ve seen
all sixty floors of the Tower.

The
peeling walls, marred by tears of rust and mold, disgust me. I want to leave. There’s
no hope for those who stay.

I open the
door to a closet right above the north end of the Kiva Hall, where the stage
is. I remove a pile of buckets and old mops and slowly pull a cabinet away from
the wall, careful not to make too much noise. Not that anybody would notice.
They’re talking all at once now, outraged by the latest events. I’m mad, too. I
don’t understand why nobody’s doing anything about the deaths. But I’m only
sixteen and they won’t let me participate in the Kiva assemblies until I turn
eighteen. Screw
them,
I’ve got my own ways.

There’s an
air vent on the closet floor, hidden under the metal cabinet. I uncover it,
then
remove the grid. I pop my right eye out and pull the
wire that connects it to my brain. I unwind about ten feet of wire out of my
skull, then stick my arm inside the vent and toss my eye as far as I can. It
bounces against the narrow passageway lined with cobwebs, jumps through the
opening at the end, and dangles from the ceiling of the auditorium. I peer down
through the eye, hoping nobody will look up. They don’t. All men and women have
their gazes glued on the Kiva Members seated on the stage. I lie on the floor
with my legs scrunched against the wall and my ear pressed against the vent.

A woman
says, “It’s the fourth death in one year! This has to stop!”

A male
voice replies, “Droids don’t ever cross the river. What was Skip doing out by
the river in the middle of the night? He should’ve known better.”

The harsh
words are welcomed with boos and outcries of protest.

“We can’t
go on like this!” a man shouts at the Kiva Members seated on stage. “Our
batteries are getting old and we don’t have the technology to replace them. We
surrendered our land to the Gaijins and their droids hoping they’d share their
technology with us. Instead, they’re killing us one man at the time. That’s not
solving the problem, it’s procrastinating.”

“Our
children will die too if we don’t act now!” another woman chimes in.

Tahari,
the head of the Kiva, stands up and speaks. “We sent three of our best men to
find a diplomatic solution with the Gaijins.”

“Three men
are hardly enough!”

“They
haven’t come back yet, have they? What if the Gaijins’ droids killed them too?”

The last comment
sends a loud wave of murmurs across the auditorium. Somebody wails. I see
people hugging one another.

Tahari
raises his hand, hoping to calm the people down, but his gesture makes them
even more furious. At last, they quiet down. Tahari clears his throat. “Our
Ambassadors have been messaging us regularly,” he says. “They’ve been busy
negotiating since they arrived on the other side of the mesa. Unfortunately,
the Gaijins are ahead of us not just in technology, but also in weapons. They
have enough artillery and droids to tear down the entire Tower if they choose
to. We can’t risk it. All we can do is send a small group of men at a time and
hope for the best.”

A voice
rises from the audience—Tylo, one of the fishers I’ve often seen out in
the river with my cousin Skip. “What if the best doesn’t happen? We simply
accept the fact that we’re all going to die?”

Tahari
reiterates how the three men were not sent as enemies but as messengers to the
Gaijins. The statement makes me seethe with anger. Nothing’s going to happen
until we overturn the Gaijins’ supremacy. We used to have brave leaders. That’s
what Dad says, too, when he tells Akaela and me of all the expeditions they’d
done in the past to acquire circuits and chips and piezoelectric actuators to
fix hundreds of people. But now we have cowards running the place.

“Maybe
that’s why the Ambassadors haven’t come back yet. What are they supposed to do,
beg?” Tylo says. “That’s ridiculous. The Gaijins hate us. They won’t listen to
us. They’ll take our people and kill them, just like the droids did with Skip.”

A shiver
sweeps down my spine.
Our men are smarter
than that
, I think.
They won’t fall
prey to the Gaijins
. But the truth is, I don’t really know. And I do fear
for the worse.

“Not if we
make them a deal they can’t refuse,” Tahari replies. “They want to conquer the
Yatelan plane, which belongs to our father, the Kawa River. We can negotiate
with them, promise them more land if we can all learn to coexist peacefully.”

“They’ve
already taken our land on the other side of the river. They’ll
keep wanting
more without ever giving anything back. The
Gaijins want to take the last of our resources and then kill us all.”

Older
people raise their voices in favor of Tahari, the carnage of 2189 still fresh
in their memory. They’re convinced that approaching the Gaijins in peace is the
best option we have.

“Let’s
just wait until our men come back,” Tahari says.

I think of
Dad out there, in the enemy’s land, and clench my teeth. I wish Uli and Mom
were in the auditorium with all the other adults so they could tell Tahari how
hard life has been for us since Dad left with the other two ambassadors. But
Mom’s busy disciplining Akaela and Uli’s with the other bioengineers, working
on Skip’s body.

I sigh, my
legs stiff from the uncomfortable position. I’ve listened enough. Carefully, I
pull back my eye, dust it off, and pop it back in its socket.
The good thing about being half metal?
You never have to
worry about infecting your prostheses. Not when you have nanobots patrolling
your entire body for germs.

The door
to the closet opens abruptly and Lukas barges in, his gaunt face paler than
ever. He leans against the doorjamb and wheezes. “Found you at last. Been
looking for you all over the place.”

I don’t
like the panicked look in his eyes. If there’s one Mayake who never panics, no
matter the circumstances, it’s Lukas.

“What’s
going on?” I ask.

“My uncle
just got back from the autopsy suite. Don’t tell anyone, Athel, but—the
droids didn’t kill Skip. There wasn’t a single bullet in his body.”

My jaw hangs
in disbelief. “But then who
… ?
”

Lukas
swallows, a tear of sweat lining his temple. “Battery failure. He was drained,
Athel. Drained.”
 

And now I
know why he looks so scared.
Battery failure—same thing
that took his mom’s life.
Same thing that, eventually,
will take each one of our lives.

Chapter Four

Athel

Day Number: 1,530

Event: Went to the landfill to find stuff.

Number of Mayakes left: 432.

Goal for today: Make new batteries.

I’ll admit—Lukas is a bit of
an awkward kid. No, he’s not a freak like the other kids call him, but he’s
definitely unique. Which is why I hang out with him and not the other kids.

He doesn’t
have a retractable gliding sail like Akaela, he doesn’t have super-fast
titanium legs like our friend Wes, he doesn’t see in the dark like me. In fact,
he’s pretty skinny and fragile looking—makes you wonder why his parents
didn’t lobby for more implants.

All Lukas
does is think. And, man, he’s good at that. The amount of information he can
retain in that little head of his is beyond comparison. When he’s bored, he challenges
himself to do mental math faster than his data feeder. Nine times out of ten he
wins.

We’ve been
walking through the forest for about an hour. I thought of riding out here, but
if I did, Akaela would’ve noticed Maha’s empty pen and would’ve come looking
for us. I brought Kael, instead, even though the old falcon doesn’t like to fly
in the forest. So I carry him on my arm, with his hood on.

The landfill
is a pretty creepy place. From a distance, it looks like the earth has grown a
tumor. The forest dies around it, the trees suddenly bare of leaves, the weeds
all dry and yellow. The only things that grow out here are thorn bushes and rats,
which
makes
it a pretty awesome place to roam around
when you don’t want to be seen or followed.

As soon as
the trees thin out, I lift the hood from Kael’s head and let him stretch his
wings. He takes off and starts circling above us, scaring away the crows scavenging
for food. Lukas and I come out here every so often to look for old stuff we can
turn into priceless treasures. The landfill must be pre-Plague, because we’ve
found all sorts of pieces of electronics dating back to the beginning of the
century. The rusted body of an old minivan lies half buried on one side of the
mound. I still remember the day we dug it out. Lukas was so excited.

“The stuff
you can get out of old cars,” he kept saying. He ended up retrieving an
alternator, a compressor, and the AC motor run capacitor. The lead battery was
still there but so corroded it was no longer usable.

Smartphones,
when you can find them, are a gold mine, too: we can use the lithium from the
battery cells and recycle the transistors from the processors. The built-in
cameras are primitive compared to my eyes, but they often come with thermal
actuators that can be used for our own implants. Unfortunately, of all the
times we’ve been out here, we’ve only found two smartphones we could actually
use. The rest were plastic cases, or a broken screen, or other insignificant
pieces.

Today, I’m
determined to find something important.

I’m still
digesting the news about Skip. The fact that he died of battery failure changes
everything. I used to think the Gaijins were going to kill us all. It turns out,
if we don’t do anything about our aging technology,
we
are going to kill ourselves.

I refuse
to sit and wait for the end to come. Lukas has brains. The two of us together
can make new
batteries,
it’s just a matter of finding
the right stuff. And whatever we can’t find here at the landfill, we’ll harvest
from the droids. I’ve already got some ideas on how to build a trap for the
dumb M3s.

I brought along
a small machete to trim the thorns and carve a path to the top of the hill. The
landfill looms past a ring of thick vegetation, pieces of glass and plastic
shimmering in the harsh sun. Kael swoops down and perches at the top of the
junk pile, bobbing his head as if wondering why we took him out here. Unscathed
by our presence, the crows come back and resume their search for scraps of junk.
I don’t know how, but those animals have adapted to feed on old wires,
chipboards, and even old pieces of electronics. I wave the machete to shoo them
away. They shift a few feet but don’t give up their space, watching us through
their one-eyed glare.

“Li-air
batteries are the best technology the Gaijins have right now,” Lukas says. “They
can achieve up to one thousand Watt-hours per kilogram. It amounts to
recharging every six months to two years, depending on the implant and how you
use it.”

I slide
the machete back in its sheath and hang it from my belt. Lukas and I take a
stick each and prod the uneven mound, careful not to trip or get cut by cracked
pieces of plastic. Lukas can get so focused in his own thoughts that he
completely forgets to watch his steps.

“Is Li-air
what we have?” I ask him, my eyes scanning the ground for precious finds.

“Most of
us have Li-S, five hundred Watt-hours per kilogram. Not bad, but could be
better. Then
there’s Li-ion cells
, made of
electrochemically stable polymer electrolytes.”

The last
sentence sounds like a tongue twister. I wish I could understand stuff the way
he does, but I don’t, and I know there’s no point in asking him, so I nod and
pretend I get it. “Which ones are easier to make?”

Lukas
looks down at his feet, his angular forehead scrunched in a frown. “Li-air is
really hard to make. You need to dissolve lithium salts in water, but if you’re
not careful, the whole thing could violently explode.”

I snicker.
“That could be fun.”

“Only if
you live to tell.”

“Ok.
What’s the next option?” Something shiny catches my eye from underneath a slab
of concrete. I push my stick under the slab and leverage it up. A rat comes
scuttling out of the hole. As soon they spot the movement, the crows give
chase. Kael’s faster, though. He opens his wings, swoops down, and whisks the
rat away.
 

“That was
fast,” Lukas mumbles.

“Kael on
an empty stomach is a killing machine.”

“How often
do you guys recharge his batteries?”

I tilt my
head, thinking. “Every three months, more or less. Hates it. We have to put him
out.”

Lukas
watches Kael vanish above the treetops. “He probably has a Li-ion, then.
Makes sense.
Pets get the older technology.”

I sigh.
“Until we have no more and then we no longer get to choose.” I tap the stick on
the ground. “Ok, what are we looking for? Can we make our own Li-S batteries?”

“I have a
bunch of PCM at home—protection circuit modules. We need more, though.
Once we make enough batteries, we can replace the old ones and recycle the PCM.
Then we need to make cells. We need pure lithium and sulfur to make Li-S
batteries.”

The more Lukas
goes down the shopping list, the more disheartened I get. I can find cable
wires and old CPUs out here. Once I even found the high-tension transformer of
an old microwave oven.
But lithium and sulfur?
How the
heck does one find those? And where? I hope Dad will indeed succeed in getting
some stuff out of the selfish Gaijins, but I know that’s unlikely.

After a
couple of hours of useless digging and prodding, I throw away the stick and sit
on the filthy mound. “I wish I had a brain like yours, Lukas.”

Lukas is
quiet for a little bit, scuffing the uneven ground with the tip of his shoes.

“It’s not
cool,” he says at last.

“Why not?”

He shrugs
and doodles on the ground with his stick. “If something happened to your eyes, Uli
or my uncle Akari could make new ones and fix you. If Wes’s legs broke, or
Akaela’s sail—those can always be replaced. But me, if my brain failed,
they’d have to make me a new one. I’d lose everything.
My
memories, my feelings, my likes and dislikes.
I’d lose everything.
I—I wouldn’t be the same person anymore.”

I think
about that. “I’m sure there’s a way to back-up your memories somewhere.”

“Not if the
state drive breaks.”

“You do back
it up, right?”

He nods,
absentmindedly.

“So what’s
the problem?”

“I’m not
sure they could ever make another brain exactly like mine.”

I sigh,
not sure I get his point. Lukas can be so weird sometimes. We are what we are,
and the truth is, we’re lucky to be alive and able to do all the stuff we do.
The real problem, the way I see it at least, is: how long will we be able to go
on like this? We depend on technology we cannot make. We need to either learn
how to make the stuff or face our ruthless enemies: the Gaijins.

I take
Kael’s hood out of my pocket and whistle his call. The falcon appears in the
sky a few seconds later. “Let’s go back home,” I say. “We’re just wasting our
time out here. We’ll never find all the stuff we need to make more batteries.
And if our dads don’t come back…” I swallow and refuse to finish the sentence,
refuse to even consider the possibility.

“Then we
need to go look for them,” Lukas matter-of-factly ends the sentence for me.

“Yeah, but
how? We don’t even know which way they went.”

Kael lands
on my gloved arm and Lukas gapes at him, as though suddenly struck by
lightning. I can almost hear the clicking of his neurons. “I think there’s a
way to find out. It’s risky, but…”

My lips
stretch out into a hopeful grin. “I don’t care if it’s risky. I wanna hear all
about it.”