The Prophet's Ladder (6 page)

“Ali,” his father called to him, summoning him to the table’s edge. “What’s this your brother Abdel tells me about your writings being on the news today?”

So we get right to it,
Ali thought. “Father, it is nothing. I merely maintain a...website…. about various cultural issues and...and one of the posts was mentioned on
Tunisia Today
, that’s all.”

His father still appeared amiable. “Well Abdel is upset, but that sounds great! This means you will have more
dinars
coming in, yes?” Abdel gave Ali a death stare from his seat, silently urging Ali to be honest with their parents, each brother knowing that their father and mother had no practical understanding of how the internet or the media functioned, especially when it came to money.

“Well no…. they can talk about whatever they want on
Tunisia Today
without paying anybody, and also I wrote the blog anonymously.”

“Why would you write anonymously, my son?” replied Hassan, perplexed. “Aren’t you proud of your work? Your articles in the paper have your name above them.”

“Of course I am proud of my work father, but it is very typical to post anonymously on these types of websites, or blogs, under a pseudonym. This way I can write what I want without worrying about every post being perfect.”

“Nothing man creates is perfect my son, only Allah is perfect.”

“Thanks be to God father, you are right, of course,” replied Ali, chastised.

“Father, you don’t understand,” Ali’s other brother Youssef protested. “The Imam on TV was saying Ali’s writings were heretical!”

“Are they, Ali?” Ali’s mother inquired, quietly. The party turned to review her sallow, sunken features. “They aren’t, are they?”

“No, of course not, mother!” Ali grew testy. “What I wrote is merely an extension of what we all fought for during the Arab Spring. We protested and overthrew a corrupt government, and we’re supposed to rest on our laurels? No! Now is the time for the real change, the lasting change, to be implemented. Our society, our culture, must grow and adapt to the needs of the 21st century; my blog criticizes old assumptions, about what is sacred, what is not: Conservative Imams in the community, religious institutions abusing their positions, that sort of thing. But I write from a deep reverence for the Quran, a love for Allah and the prophet. You know this mother, you know me.”

Ali’s father looked at him and nodded. “I know you are a good son, Ali. Just be careful. You say this website is anonymous, that’s fine. I didn’t see what they said on
Tunisia Today
. They’re usually a bunch of idiots anyways on the TV. But don’t get this family into trouble, you understand me? Don’t bring shame on your mother.”

“Yes, father. Of course.” Ali’s parents looked mollified. The matter seemed settled given Hassan’s proclamation.  Though the urge to jump online and check his subscriber numbers was almost overwhelming, Ali resisted the impulse.  Instead, he stayed in the living room and chatted with his entire family, a rare occurrence these days. Ali knew why Abdel and Youssef resented him; he’d been the only one in the family to win a scholarship and attend university, the only sibling to get a chance at starting a better life outside the medina, a modicum of social mobility that was denied to his older brothers. That was why they had so quickly brought this scandal to his father’s attention. He didn’t blame them, not really. It was the way of things just as it’d always been.

Youssef talked about his wife’s pregnancy and Abdel complained about the hanut not getting as much foot traffic as it had in past years.  Ali’s father made a show of being overly concerned about his wife’s health, fretting over not eating, offering to fetch her more pillows; all an attempt to placate his son’s concerns, or so Ali thought.

Eventually the siblings departed, heading back to their wives and families in nearby apartments several blocks distant. Ali stayed and cleaned up while his father departed for the
jamea
.

After his mother had again drifted off to sleep, exhausted from the company, Ali opened his laptop and reviewed his website. It was as he had expected: a massive upsurge in traffic. Hundreds upon hundreds of vitriolic comments lay beneath his most recent posts. There was, however, an equally impressive amount of new subscribers, almost quadruple what he’d had yesterday evening. There were even some subscribers from other countries: Morocco, Algeria, France, even the UK and Germany!
I guess that show has a wider audience than I’d thought.

There were too many comments to read, too much emotion to sift through. He wondered not for the first time how the television station had found his blog.
Could they find out who I am? Would they do a followup story?
He assumed it had just been a station intern trawling through every Arab language blog he could get his hands on, looking for some original content on a slow news day.
Perhaps one of the station’s journalists is a subscriber….

Ali leaned back from his laptop screen; he had been hunched over it like a vulture on a carcass, feasting on the digital prose.
Not good for a young man’s back.
After some consideration, he opened up his word processor and began to write another blog post, a reactionary piece to the
Tunisia Today
coverage.
No time like the present…

Amina received the text from Ali’s phone that evening. He’d asked her to watch the episode online and to call him back after she’d seen it. She’d reviewed the segment and had experienced all the same emotions that Ali had: fear, betrayal, anger, but also excitement. At 11 that evening, after supper, she dialed Ali’s cellphone from her bedroom at her parent’s house.

“Well, it could’ve been worse,” she whispered in consoling tones; Ali, like many of the writers and journalists she’d known at university could overthink things and suffer from the resulting anxiety. “They could’ve found out your real identity, or the names of your family, or even me and mine.”

“Thanks be to God
Habiba
, that hasn’t happened yet. But it doesn’t mean they won’t try to find out for a followup story, or perhaps a devoted viewer with an axe to grind…”

“Relax. Isn’t this great news? Your readership numbers, the visitors to your website must be way up, no? You
do
want people to read your work, right?”

“Well of course...but…”

“Ali, my beloved, you are overanalyzing everything to the tenth degree, like always. Take a breath: remember the breathing exercises we learned together? Then read a good book, and I’ll see you tomorrow, ok? I’ll stop by the library during my lunch break.”

“Ok. Bless you; you’re so good to me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sleep well.”

Amina ended the call and put her phone on the dresser next to her bed. Looking around her room, she reviewed her lifetime’s work in the artwork that decorated every meter of the walls and ceiling. Some of the paintings were done in acrylic, others in oils or even stencil. Nowadays her medium was her desktop PC, working for her father’s bank designing the pamphlets and billboards that advertised her family name as trustworthy: Tunisia’s standard for financial security. Reflecting as she prepared for bed, Amina mulled over her current circumstances, her train of thought prompted by the change in Ali’s fortunes.
Have I earned it all myself? No. I took no risks; my father got me the job. Could I have struck out on my own? An educated woman in Tunis, even in this day and age?
It was hard to say, honestly. Maybe she could start her own graphic design firm, hire other women (and men!) with talent, use her contacts from university, get some good clients lined up… who knew. What she did know was that her fiancé was sticking his neck out for what he believed in, taking some risks with his career, and she admired him for it.

Father wouldn’t approve if he knew what Ali was writing - had written - on his blog.
It was true. Her father, though likeable enough, could be extremely critical of new ideas, of real change.
The Arab Spring was bad enough in his mind
.

She’d go visit Ali tomorrow and they would talk about their next move, together.  She still wanted to marry in the summer, and they’d need to plan it all out: finances, everything. Amina had come to the conclusion that she would continue to work after marriage; she hadn’t yet mentioned the notion to her parents, but she suspected they’d go along with it if she stood her ground. It’d save the family bank money and the hassle of a new hire in the long term anyways. 
Father and my betrothed, both so predictable…. am I the same?

****

Todd and his new engineering project team sat around a sleek, modern-looking conference table in the largest of Al-Hatem Aerospace’s administrative offices. It was burnished aluminum, with outlets and ports at each seat for every conceivable electronic device or gadget.  Floating in the center of the table via an astounding holographic display that utilized water vapor was a schematic for a strange-looking robotic spider. The colorful image rotated slowly so that everyone seated around the table could get a good view of the conceptual automaton.

Four meters in length, the creature was a fascinating blend of organic form and synthetic parts. Its multiple eyes were high definition digital cameras with powerful macroscopic lenses, each able to see in near total darkness. Every one of the machine’s eight legs contained fine pairs of heat resistant grasping arms, fractalized artificial fingers splaying into multiple points of articulation.

The artificial spider’s exoskeleton was made of a heat resistant ceramic, tawny brown, almost red in color. Visualized in the hologram in semi-translucent layers, the outer shell of the machine’s belly peeled away to reveal massive, complex 3D printers capable of weaving sheets and strands of carbon nanotube fibers made from the graphene carried in its bulky abdomen.  Much like a true spider, the creature emitted the completed strands from a spinneret at its rear.

Implanted in its stomach, the robotic spider housed a series of rollers and wheels coated in an absurdly powerful dry-adhesive gripping material Todd had understood to be only hypothetical up until recently. The skin of the rollers imitated the footpads of a gecko, its synthetic ‘setae’ or elastic hairs capable of adhering to any known surface. Were Todd to don gloves and boots made of the material, each square centimeter costing thousands of dollars, he could climb up onto the sheer walls and ceiling of this very conference room with no perch necessary, like a fictional comic book superhero.
I’d need to work on my upper body strength though,
Todd thought.

The robotic spider would not be a solitary predator like its biological counterpart, however. It was designed to operate in teams of two to three other similarly designed and equipped machines, performing routine maintenance and repairs on a piece of technology that was as yet untested and untried: the space elevator.

Todd’s colleagues at NASA had for years speculated on the feasibility of such a thing, but many of them had dismissed it out of hand. A space elevator, were it to actually to be built and function as specified, would drastically decrease the cost of transporting cargo and materials into space. A cable would be attached to a counterweight orbiting the planet in a geostationary position above the earth’s surface; possibly an asteroid towed into orbit or a massive artificial space station.  The cable would stretch thousands of kilometers from orbit down through the atmosphere to an earth based anchor point, where vehicles or ‘elevators’ could be launched up and down the length of the cable.

Until very recently, Todd had understood the materials necessary to construct a space elevator’s cable to be too cost prohibitive, belonging solely to the realm of theory and not reality. The qualities inherently necessary for such a span of cable were mind-boggling. The tether would need to be astoundingly lightweight, as well as immensely, almost impossibly strong, able to withstand the stress of a cargo vehicle or vehicles repeatedly traveling up and down its length, as well as the shearing forces of the earth’s atmosphere, along with a heady host of other stressors. Luckily, Todd’s team was not responsible for the engineering of said cable; that was another department entirely. No, Todd and the group of people assembled in this room were responsible for overseeing the final design, construction, and management of the aforementioned robotic spiders, named
Solifuges
after their resemblance to a certain class of arachnid.

Todd glanced around the conference room. The project team itself was a marvelous invention of the 21st century. Talent from every corner of the earth sat along each table edge. A communications specialist from Japan, Saudi hydraulics engineers, a Scandinavian software programmer, a Canadian imaging expert…the list ran on and on: 27 persons in total from 14 different countries, including the UAE and his own United States.

All official work would be conducted in English as, for better or for worse, it was the
lingua franca
of the age, especially in engineering and academic circles, for which Todd was eminently grateful. His hour-long Arabic lessons, twice a week now, were coming along slowly. It would be some time before he could converse about anything more complicated than the weather or a grocer’s bill, let alone robots and spaceships.

“Thank you all for your input today. Tomorrow we will begin touring the assembly floor clean room at the tertiary compound at zero-nine hundred hours. Let me know if you need directions to the facility.” Todd tapped an icon on his tablet computer and the hovering image of the spider vanished in a flash of mist-laden light.
That never ceases to wow me
.
Feels like I’m in a movie.
Supposedly a Korean tech conglomerate had invented the vapor-hologram technology, and these desk models were not yet for sale to the general public.