Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  He tried to imagine their final moments in his mind. A group of warriors, like himself, who had completed their mission and were preparing to leave. They would have had a problem: how to torch the trucks without blowing themselves up. How had they done it? He searched and found something interesting: a small piece of hardened string. He guessed immediately what it was. He put it to his lips and tasted a mixture of sweetness and harsh chemicals. He spat and nodded to himself. He’d guessed right: a sugar fuse. A simple timing device that could be cooked up in about ten minutes with string, water, sugar, and a dozen match tips. He figured these Bushmen were probably very clever, like the Lakota, Apache, and Koyukon he’d hunted with as a kid, but this seemed like a different kind of clever. This was an I-went-to-college-and-studied-chemistry kind of clever.

  He began to walk around the camp in ever widening circles; determined to find out more about who had done this. Around and around the camp he walked. He was in the middle of his seventh circuit when he finally found something. The tracks were so faint he almost missed them. He got down on one knee to examine them. The people who had passed here were barefoot and very light. None of them could have weighed more than 110 pounds. He counted three sets, and one was even smaller than the others, likely a woman or a teenage boy.

  Looking at the tracks, Sawyer felt a sudden sense of wonder.

  As a teenager he had sometimes had similar moments. Once he had found a single leather moccasin near Koyukuk River in Alaska. It was a time capsule held frozen in the permafrost for no one knew how long, but perhaps as long as thirteen thousand years. Yet looking at the tracks at his feet gave him an even more intense sense of history. These tracks were only a day old, but in a way, they were timeless. Because he was looking at the tracks of the first human beings, the tracks of a people who had lived and hunted and made cave paintings on this land for two hundred thousand years. A staggering length of time, especially when one considered that “civilization” was only six thousand years old.

  He followed the trajectory of the prints another forty yards until he found them again.

  He knelt down, placing his hand on the thing he’d been looking for. Here, at last, was something he could use. Intermingled with the dainty footprints of the tribesmen, was a print of someone much larger. A man who weighed at least 170 pounds.

  Back on the Gerald Ford, Sawyer finished his documentation of the day’s mission. He had only found a footprint, yet he felt better than he had in weeks. If Eric had been rescued by a Sān tribe, it would explain a great deal. The Sān were renowned for blending into the land and staying hidden. For much of the twentieth century, many Sān tribes were thought to have died out, yet most had been discovered living quite happily in some of the harshest parts of the Kalahari. If Eric were with them, it would explain why Sawyer and the Chinese hadn’t been able to find him.

  He picked up his iSheet to call Jane. She would be excited to hear the news. He found her contact and the iSheet brought up her smiling face. He was just about to hit Call when he stopped himself. Was he being irresponsible? All he had was a footprint. Shouldn’t he wait until he had more evidence? The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded. And that wasn’t all: He realized he wanted to believe the story because it was the only one with a happy ending. In every other scenario he could think of, Eric was dead. He had to be. No one could survive that long in such a harsh environment without help.

  He looked down at Jane’s face once more, then shut down the iSheet and went to bed.

  He came awake some time after 0100, panting and afraid that he had cried out, but the other men were sleeping quietly in their bunks. He lay back and looked at the ceiling, only inches from his rack.

  Sawyer was a man who had grown accustomed to nightmares. Twenty-five years in the teams—during a time when the US was perpetually at war—meant that his eyes had seen shit that his brain was never going to sort out. That’s the way he thought of dreams—his brain’s effort to understand and make sense of the things he had experienced. But in his line of work, that was never going to happen. There was no logic or reason to be found.

  So Sawyer’s best solution was to ignore them.

  Yet he couldn’t help but notice certain patterns. It was the senseless stuff that seemed to haunt him the most. Like Neil Baldwin. He dreamed of him often. Baldwin was a twenty-one-year-old SEAL that Sawyer had trained and befriended. One night near Fallujah, Baldwin went to take a piss and was shot by one of his buddies on his way back. Sawyer had held his hand as he bled out. Senseless. Or Amy Kaufmann, a New York Times reporter who was beheaded when Sawyer’s team tried to rescue her, but accidentally raided the house next door. Her blood was still flowing out when they reached her. Two minutes too late.

  Often the dreams were compilations of violence and sorrow, pieces of Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq poorly stitched together, with fact changing to fiction and back again. The dead from one country returning to life in another, only to be killed again.

  This dream had been in Syria.

  In a prison, deep underground.

  Heavy metal doors. Rust everywhere. It was unbearably hot, and water dripped from the ceiling and made green and copper streaks along the ancient brick walls. The Americans were the prison’s latest stewards, but it had been a prison for centuries, trading hands as different empires struggled for control of the Holy Land.

  The room was impossibly large. Stretching out for hundreds of feet. Sawyer sat at a table. Behind him were hundreds of American soldiers, mostly SEALS, men he had known and served with for years. Everyone was counting on him.

  In front of him were hundreds of Syrians: soldiers, old men, women, and children.

  We can end the war, Sawyer, all you have to do is kill one of them. Just one and we can all go home.

  That’s what Curtiss had said, but the admiral had changed the Rules of Engagement. Sawyer couldn’t kill them unless they agreed to be killed.

  One by one they materialized in the chair in front of him. One by one he tried to convince them. “With one life we can end the war. All the death and destruction will end. Your family will be safe again.”

  But they all refused. The young soldier, the mother, the businessman, the old woman. And each time one refused, one of the men behind him disappeared.

  Five. Ten. Fifteen refusals. Fifteen friends gone.

  Sawyer felt the tickle of a bead of sweat as it rolled from his hairline across his temple. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and there was Curtiss. “Get it done, Nathan,” he said. “Figure it out.”

  He turned back. A girl had materialized in the chair. She was eighteen or nineteen, with long black hair, olive skin, and forest-green eyes. She struck Sawyer as halfway between a beautiful child and a beautiful woman. She was dressed in expensive clothes, like the students who went to Damascus University.

  Sawyer began again. “Hi,” he forced a smile. “I really need your help. I need you to help me stop the war. Do you understand the war?”

  She nodded, a fierce look in her green eyes. “It is because of the war that my brother and uncle are dead. Can you really stop it?”

  “I can. I really can. I know I’m asking a terrible thing. I know it’s hard, but we can save so many.”

  “I want to save my sister, Rima,” she said. “She’s only six. If you can promise me that she’ll be safe, then you can . . .” She nodded, unable to say it.

  Sawyer nodded. “I promise . . . thank you.”

  “Will I go to heaven?” The question hit Sawyer like a fist. He closed his eyes for moment, wishing he could say yes.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  She nodded. “Do we have to do it right now?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I just need you to turn around.”

  Sawyer pulled his pistol from his holster, but kept it under the table so that she couldn’t see it.


  “Okay,” she said and before she turned around, she smiled at him and gave a little wave. She turned, and Sawyer swung the pistol up quickly and pointed it at her silky black hair.

  That’s when he had woken up. Just another nightmare, he thought. Just your mind trying to sort things out. Ignore it and go back to sleep.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  More

  December 11, 2026

  Washington, DC

  Emma Rosario sat slouched in her chair, her eyes vacant and unfocused.

  “Why isn’t she showing any improvement?” Olivia said. “I thought nanotech was fast.”

  “You have to be patient,” Ryan said. “It’s only been four days. The fact that she hasn’t had any more seizures is a good sign to me.”

  Olivia gripped her hair with both hands and sighed. “We missed something, some critical piece.”

  Ryan embraced her. “Try not to worry so much. Forced evolution is powerful, but its power comes from the fact that it can do things that we don’t understand. And each time it does something, it does it in a different way; each evolution is unique. Right now the program is trying to learn Emma, to understand her, so that it can treat her. The fascinating thing is that if it succeeds, we’ll still never know exactly how it did it. We’ll only know the outcome.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t help thinking something’s not right. That I made a mistake.”

  “It’s still too early to know,” Ryan said. “Remember what we are doing is very complicated. No one has ever tried gene therapy like this before. In fact, the FDA forbids it.”

  She buried her face in his chest. “When can we give her more?”

  He put his hand against her cheek. He spoke softly, but there was force in his words. “Not until we are a hundred percent sure it has failed.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Oracle

  December 8, 2026

  Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC

  Jane pushed out the double doors of Ingersoll Hall, ignoring the chill of the December air on her face and neck. She walked briskly toward the river. She just needed a place where she could think clearly.

  She felt like she was going crazy. All this waiting. Not knowing. It was finally taking its toll on her.

  She had thought if only she could reach the Inventor, she’d be able to find out the truth. But he clearly did not want to be found.

  She reached the river and looked across to the houses and trees of Alexandria, Virginia. The predominance of Georgian red brick seemed to meld with the reds and orange of the fall trees.

  She looked up at the blue sky and imagined being able to see through the atmosphere into the blackness of space. The Inventor’s nanosites probes were out there. Searching, working, discovering. They were spread across the earth, too. Invisible armies of microscopic slaves doing his bidding.

  His servants were all around, yet she still couldn’t reach him. She ran over what the Inventor had said to Eric. I see everywhere. I monitor all things. I explore. I discover.

  She thought of how quickly the Inventor had called back the nanosites on the bananas when he realized Bill was trying to track him.

  Area of perception—the ability to “sense” things on a global scale.

  He can see everywhere, but I can’t reach him.

  She stared at the swirling water of the river, then at the sky.

  Then it hit her. He can see everywhere.

  Of course! She turned on her heel and headed quickly back toward the lab.

  How could she have been so stupid? She didn’t need to find the Inventor because he was already watching them. The source of his evolution had come from this lab, so he would certainly be keeping tabs on everything they did. All she had to do was call out to him, and he would hear her.

  And maybe, if she asked nicely enough, he would answer.

  But that was easier said than done. She couldn’t just make a banner and put it on her roof. She had to broadcast a message that no one else could see or interpret.

  She headed for Wet Lab 4—a facility where swarm programs were tested, and where she hoped to get some privacy. Luckily she found the room dark and deserted. She opened the door and turned on the lights. The fluorescent bulbs flickered a moment, then surged on. She looked up at them a moment, thinking, her finger still on the switch. She turned the lights off, then back on again. Once more there was a series of pulses before the lights came on.

  Jane smiled. She had her answer.

  She stayed up all night working on it. Despite her fatigue, she was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t feel tired. Finally, she had a path to follow. Hour after hour she toiled. She was surprised to see the first light of dawn breaking through the windows. She paused for a moment, hypnotized by the particles of dust in the golden beams of light. She looked at her watch: 6:46 a.m.

  She reviewed her work. She knew it was good. In just a few minutes she would release her swarms, which would “infect” every LED light on the base.

  Light Fidelity technology (Li-Fi) transmits data using light instead of radio waves like Wi-Fi. Any LED light bulb could therefore be “hijacked” into sending information—and at speeds a hundred times faster than Wi-Fi. What’s more, Li-Fi transmissions were so fast and could be executed with such low levels of light that they were imperceptible to the human eye. Even a light bulb that appeared to be off could be transmitting data at 224 gigabytes per second. Jane was confident no human being would be able to read her message. But she still had one potential eavesdropper—computers, which could receive Li-Fi through a photoreceptor such as a solar panel.

  But she’d found a solution to that, too. Computers worked in binary—ones and zeros. So Jane just had to find a system that computers couldn’t read but that the Inventor could, such as a trinary system. Jane picked the first one she could think of: Morse code. At first glance, Morse code looked binary (dots and dashes), but the spaces between the units were also information (indicating when to switch from digits to letters, for example) and this third “number” would confuse a computer.

  She initiated the swarms. She couldn’t see them, of course, but she imagined them moving off through the air to do their work.

  With the first part of her plan done, she headed back to her apartment, where there was one final thing she had to do before she could rest.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Time to Go

  December 11, 2026

  Namibia

  Eric and the Sān had been walking for three days since their raid on the poachers’ camp, moving straight into the heart of the Kalahari, foraging and hunting as they went. They ate tubers, berries, baobab melons, but the only meat they found was on the second afternoon when a cobra had flared its hood at Naru. She had danced with it for a minute, then grabbed its tail, and with one deft smack, cracked its skull against the earth. A small fire was made and they each ate a little.

  It was on the third day of their trek that something strange happened, while they were making their way up a rocky cleft that jutted out of the flat savanna. At the top of the cleft, Eric looked back at the parched landscape behind them. It seemed to spread out forever in its breathtaking calico of greens and browns.

  That’s when he heard it. It seemed to be somewhere above the plain, floating in the sky. The mechanical sound of an engine.

  The whole time he had been with the Sān he had not heard a plane or even seen a contrail in the sky. Wherever he was, it had to be far from any well-used flight path. But now he heard something, and the rest of the party heard it, too. They scanned the sky but saw nothing. For a moment Eric thought he saw a familiar shimmer moving southeast across the open country.

  He had become so absorbed in his new world that the old one was beginning to feel like a dream. Yet he knew he needed to return to it, to continue the life he had once known. A part of him longe
d to return. To see Jane, just to hold her, to make her smile and be still beside her. But another part of him didn’t want to go. He felt he still had much more to learn. There was something enchanting about this life. It felt like he was—for the first time—living the way his body was designed to live.

  That night, in the glow of the fire, he squatted down beside Khamko. “Father, it is time for me to go.”

  Khamko gave a heavy sigh. “I understand.”

  “I don’t want to, believe me. But I’m needed by the people who love me and my country.”

  Khamko gave a reluctant nod. “I’m sure that is true, but we need you, too.”

  Eric shook his head. “You don’t need me. All you’ve done is take care of me.”

  He laughed. “Yes, that is true. But I won’t need to take care of you much longer. And we—my people—need help. You have seen for yourself how it is getting harder and harder for us. We will need someone like you when I am gone.”

  Eric turned away. He couldn’t look Khamko in the face when he said things like that. He loved this man and wanted him to live forever.

  “What about Naru?”

  Khamko shook his head. “Perhaps. But I worry about her. She enjoys the killing too much. She doesn’t realize it, but she is becoming like you: someone who has lost their connection to nature and the spirits that live here. I know necessity is pushing her that way . . . but if she keeps going down that road, I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring her back. You are the opposite. You are becoming more like us.” He paused a moment and looked into the fire. “But that is only part of the reason.”

  Eric waited for him to continue.

  “I need you because you are like me. You know both worlds and can move freely between each one. And you have power and influence that can help protect our way of life.”

  Eric shook his head. “I’m no wealthy philanthropist.”

  “No, but I suspect you have other gifts. Your knowledge could help us.”