From his vantage point, he could see for many miles along the coast road. This side of the island seemed sparsely visited, probably because the soil was so poor and rocky and there were no natural harbours. History and geography had settled everything 10 or 15 kilometres away on the other side, and it had not seen fit to spread very far. So far, he had only seen a handful of vehicles, apart from the shore patrol doing its hourly circuit.
There was a stand of stunted, weather-bent trees a little further up the slope. Da’uud moved among them, found a spot and began moving rocks and little stones aside until he had exposed the almost worthless soil underneath. Then he carefully scooped a hole several centimetres deep. When he was satisfied that it was deep enough, he sat back on his heels, reached into his backpack and took out a small transparent flask. Rattling in the bottom of the flask was a dull metallic object about the same size and shape as a sunflower seed.
He remembered his Uncle giving him the flask. His Uncle had been wearing insulated gloves. “Many Bothans,” his Uncle had told him gravely, “died to bring us this information.”
It was a family joke, but not one without a lesson: intelligence always has a cost. Da’uud and his siblings had been taught not to treat intelligence lightly, to remember that it was not simply words and numbers and photographs and video.
It was also true, in this case. People had died in order for his Uncle to offer the flask to him; it was well to remember that.
He had been warned not to touch the seed—the interior of the flask had some kind of protective coating—so he simply removed the cap and upended it over the hole. The seed dropped to the ground, missing the hole by a fraction, balanced on the edge. A faint wisp of smoke began to curl up from beneath it. Da’uud sighed, looked about him, found a twig and poked at the seed until it toppled into the hole. He scraped dirt over it and sat back on his heels. Holding the twig up in front of his face and squinting at it, he saw that the end seemed to have been eaten away. Was still being eaten away; as he watched, it appeared to be disappearing in a tiny vague cloud of mist. He stuck it in the soil over the hole and scrambled away a few metres and made himself comfortable against the wizened trunk of one of the trees. He looked at his watch. Twelve hours, his Uncle had said. That, at least, was the intelligence they had. They were dealing with a Mystery here, and there would be variables. Da’uud settled back against the tree, set the alarm of his watch, and closed his eyes.
“IT IS A weapon of great power,” his Uncle told him. “Our information is that it was developed by the North Koreans, who have become interested in technologies proscribed in the West.”
Da’uud, who was sitting on the couch in the living room of the main house with a tablet in his hands, reading the technical specs of the thing which had been delivered under cover of darkness last night, glanced up at his Uncle and Father. “North Korea,” he said.
“Yes, we know,” said his Father. “The last famine killed over a million people, and still they work on devices such as this.” He nodded at the tablet.
To Da’uud’s mind, as well as the minds of most people in the rest of the world, North Korea had become a pressure cooker, an out-of-control social experiment presided over by a line of increasingly dangerous Kims. No Westerner had been allowed into the country for almost 30 years, and what intelligence did emerge came in the form of wild rumours about genetic experimentation, augmented humans, apes which had learned to use power tools, dogs which could carry on a rudimentary conversation, and so on and so forth. You could boil off the most insane of those rumours and still be left with enough credible tales to make the fears of North Korea’s nuclear capability earlier in the century seem like an idle and passing worry. It was said that every nuclear power on Earth had at least one warhead targeted on Pyongyang.
“How did it come into our hands?” he asked.
His Father sighed and tipped his head to one side.
“If this is true…” Da’uud gestured with the tablet. “I think I have a right to ask, don’t you?”
“It was stolen,” his Uncle said.
“Well, patently.”
“Several times,” his Father added.
“Our information is that it was taken, originally, from a facility near Kanggye, up near the Chinese border,” his Uncle went on. “How it was taken, we do not know. There is anecdotal information that it was offered for sale to the Chinese intelligence services, but the sale never took place and the item dropped out of sight. Some months later, it reappeared in Japan, where it seems the North Korean intelligence services made an attempt to retrieve it.”
“There was a firefight,” his Father said. “Many casualties.” He shook his head. In their world, gunfire was the mark of a catastrophic failure of tradecraft. The whole point of espionage was that no one should know you had been there.
His Uncle shrugged. “The next thing we know, it’s in Damascus.” He let the name of the city hang in the air for a moment. “Several different groups of jihadists are bidding to buy it, then someone gets impatient and the representative of the vendors turns up in one part of the city and his head turns up elsewhere.”
“After that, we don’t know,” his Father went on. “We do know that it finally passed into the hands of a jihadi cell, and we suspect they stole it, because they certainly did not have the funds to buy it.”
“And we stole it from them,” Da’uud said.
“We did.”
“This thing is cursed,” his Uncle said. “Everyone who has ever touched it has died violently.”
“I’m more inclined to put that down to human greed and stupidity than supernatural agency,” his Father mused. “We are not greedy, and neither are we stupid. We will be more careful.”
DA’UUD OPENED HIS eyes. Without moving, he scanned the area. It was late afternoon, and the sun beat down on the hillside. Far below, one of the great white cruise ships was sailing away in the general direction of Turkey, inscribing a white crease on the surface of the sea. A little further down the slope, a solitary scrawny goat was standing looking at him. Da’uud’s watch buzzed; he turned off the alarm.
Turning his head, he saw a ragged hole in the ground where he had buried the seed. Looking carefully, he searched for signs of vapour rising from the hole, but he saw none.
He got up stiffly and walked over to the hole. It was easily large enough to put his head and shoulders into, the stones and rocks around it seemingly half-melted, almost vitrified. He dropped the rucksack down the hole, heard it fall a considerable distance before it hit bottom, then he sat down with his legs dangling over the edge and slipped inside.
The walls of the hole were smooth to the touch; by bracing and relaxing his knees and elbows he was able to let himself fall by degrees until, all of a sudden, his legs swung out into thin air and he lost his purchase and fell several metres. He landed on a level surface, absorbing the impact easily like a parachutist, and looked around him.
He was in a hemispherical chamber about ten metres across and five high at its highest point. The floor and walls were smooth and lustrous and gave off a low, pale blue luminescence. Above his head, the hole opened into the chamber’s ceiling. Looking up, he could see a tiny circle of sky. He judged that he was almost 20 metres underground.
In the very centre of the chamber, the seed had germinated into a fat teardrop about the height of a six-year-old child. It was the perfect blue of a cloudless Mediterranean summer sky, and leaning down close Da’uud could see that its surface was covered in a network of fine black lines, like the craquelure on a piece of ancient porcelain. The surface was, he realised, also moving, very slowly. Or perhaps it was just the black lines—it was hard to tell.
He sat down beside the teardrop and looked around the chamber. I am not afraid, he had said. But now he was. He thought his Uncle would approve.
“It is called,” his Uncle had said, “nanotechnology. I am too old to understand these things; I do not know how a machine can be too small to see and yet stil
l function.”
“Whoever developed it has, apparently, made unbelievable advances,” his Father added. “There is, in fact, a rumour that it comes from a crashed spacecraft belonging to an alien civilisation.” And they had all laughed at that, but now, sitting here beside the machine, Da’uud did not feel inclined to laugh. To their knowledge, this machine had never been tested; all they knew was what it had been designed to do. The Western intelligence agencies, if they knew of this thing—and he assumed they did—must be going out of their minds trying to find it. It was, in its way, the most dangerous thing on Earth.
Moving quickly, Da’uud removed his clothes and sat beside the machine again. He took a deep breath, put his hand on the smooth surface of the teardrop, and pushed gently. There was a momentary resistance, and then his hand sank into it up to the elbow. He stirred his hand in a warm substance that seemed at once wet and dry. The skin of his arm tingled briefly, then went numb. The numbness welled up his arm until it reached his shoulder, and then surged across his body. He fought panic, fought the atavistic urge to pull free of the machine, and then the numbness filled his head and he slumped backwards on the floor of the chamber.
THEY HAD TOLD him he would not dream, but somehow he did. He dreamed of his mother, who had died in a suicide bomb attack in Mogadishu when he was four. He dreamed of his brothers and sisters. He dreamed of his Father and Uncle, who had spent much of their lives theorising this operation, never realising that one day they would be in possession of something which would actually make it work.
In time, his breathing slowed, then stopped altogether. His heartbeat stilled. The machine built fine tendrils into his body, feeding oxygen to his brain. His skin hardened, became leathery, thickened and thickened again until his features disappeared. After two days, he lay in a featureless black cocoon. Within the cocoon, tiny machines worked busily to disassemble him, piece by microscopic piece. While he dreamed of his Uncle telling him about Europe and its decades-long war against people who were not of Europe, his brain floated in a thick soup of cells and furiously busy nanotechnology.
“The caterpillar does not dream of being a butterfly,” his Uncle had told him, “any more than the butterfly remembers being a caterpillar.”
Above him, the hole to the outside world gradually closed itself.
DA’UUD OPENED HIS eyes and took a deep breath. Without moving, he took stock. He felt warm and comfortable and well rested. No aches or pains. He flexed his fingers and toes and everything seemed to work. At some point, his arm had been ejected by the machine.
Very slowly, he sat up, and experienced a sudden wave of disorientation. The legs stretched out in front of him were white. He wiggled his toes, and, yes, they seemed to be controlled by him, but they were not his toes. He raised his arms and held his hands in front of his face. They were slender and white, their nails neat and pink. He turned them over and looked at his palms.
“They will not admit us,” his Uncle had old him, “because we are other. We are not them. We do not look like them. They will overlook our colour if we have enough money or we have something they want, but we will always be different; we will never walk down their streets without someone attacking us or suspecting us of wearing a suicide vest.”
“The device is an infiltration weapon,” his Father said. “It is the ultimate disguise for a deep-cover agent. We think the North Koreans may have intended to use it to flood the West with operatives—indeed, if there is more than one prototype they may already be doing so. For us, it is our doorway into Europe. For you, for your brothers and sisters. For our people.”
Da’uud stood unsteadily—his viewpoint seemed several centimetres too low—and walked carefully over to the rucksack on those alien white feet. He took from the pack a small mirror and held it up in front of his face, and a stranger’s face looked back. A blue-eyed face topped by a shock of blond hair. He blinked, and those blue eyes blinked back. This was going to take some getting used to.
The machine sat in the middle of the floor, quiescent now, its job done for the moment. He thought perhaps it was fractionally smaller, but he couldn’t be sure.
Da’uud dressed. For a moment, tying the laces of his training shoes, he became so hypnotised by the sight of his hands that he forgot what he was doing. I am the same person, he told himself. This is cosmetic. Like having a haircut.
But it was not like having a haircut. If the information he had been given was accurate, quite a substantial amount of his genetic code had been rewritten. He was no longer what he had been.
“If you were to approach the border looking as you do now,” his Uncle had said, “you would be turned away. All of us would. The Europeans talk about jobs and economic pressure and population growth, but the truth is that they don’t want us because we are different. They were content to rule us for a century, two centuries, but now we rule ourselves they do not want us among them.”
Though the hole in the ceiling had closed up, while he slept an opening had appeared in one side of the chamber. It was just high enough for him to step into it if he crouched. It led to a narrow, low tunnel which angled gently upward and opened on the hillside some distance away.
Da’uud stepped out and found that it was raining. Squalls, dancing in a strong wind, obscured the view. He checked his watch and discovered that four months had passed since he had put his arm into the machine. The season had changed. It was as if he had travelled in time.
“Go to the edge of Europe and establish an embassy for us,” his Father had told him. “We will send someone by a different route to prepare new identity documents for you when you have undergone the procedure. When you are ready, we will send others. One, two, three at a time. If we look like them, we can walk among them. And if we walk among them, we can find our way into positions of authority.”
“We will effect change,” his Uncle had said. “A great wrong has been done to the peoples of the South, and now the peoples of the North have walled themselves up against us. We will redress that wrong. It may take a generation, or two generations, or three. But we will open the borders again and our people will be free.”
Da’uud took a phone from his rucksack and sent a text message to tell his Uncle that the embassy was open and ready for business. Then he walked down the hillside, through the rain, to look for a job in this new world.
BRING YOUR OWN SPOON
Saad Z. Hossain
Saad Z. Hossain is a Bangladeshi author who writes in English. His war satire, Escape from Baghdad!, was published in 2015 in the US and India, and is currently being translated into French. His second novel, Djinn City, a picaresque fantasy blending fantasy, supernatural politics and genetic science, was published in late 2017. Hossain’s short fiction has been published in The Apex Book of World SF 4 and The Djinn Falls in Love. He lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
HANU SAT BEFORE his stove, warming himself. It was cold outside, and even worse, the wind scoured away the cloud of nanites, the air borne biotech that kept people safe. He had seen more than one friend catch death in the wind, caught in a pocket without protection, their lungs seared by some virus, or skin sloughed off by radiation. The thin mesh of pack-sheet formed a tent around him, herding together the invisible, vital cogs. Shelter was necessary on a windy night, even for those with meager resources.
He was cooking rice on the stove, in a battered pot with a mismatched lid, something made of ancient cast iron. Ironically, in certain retro fashion houses, this genuine pre-Dissolution Era relic would have fetched a fortune, but Hanu had no access to those places, and wouldn’t have cared, either way. A pot to cook your rice in was priceless, as valuable to a roamer as the tent or the solar stove.
He measured the quarter cup of fine grained rice into the boiling water, added a bit of salt, a half stick of cinnamon and some cardamom. The rice would cook half way before he added onions and chilies, perhaps a touch of saffron. In a way, Hanu ate like a king, although his portions were meager. He had access to an abandon
ed herb garden on the roof of a derelict tower, plants growing in some weird symbiotic truce with the nanites warring in the sky, nature defying popular scientific opinion. The rice he got from an abandoned government grain silo, sacks of the stuff just lying there, because people feared contamination. Almost everyone in the city ate from food synthesizers, which converted algae and other supplements into roast chicken at the drop of a hat.
He let the rice cook until there were burnt bits sticking to the bottom of the pot. The burnt bits were tasty. The smell filled the tent like a spice bazaar, and he ate from the bowl using his wooden spoon. No one disturbed him, for which he was thankful. It was difficult to find a square inch empty in Dhaka city, but it was a windy night, the Pollutant levels were on orange alert, and most people were indoors.
Moreover, he was in the fringes of the river side area of Narayanganj, where the alert level was perpetually screaming red due to unspeakable life forms breeding in the water, a sort of adjacent sub-city swallowed by Dhaka a hundred years ago, a pustule avoided by even the moderately desperate homeless, one step away from being cluster bombed into oblivion by the satellites above. Thus he was able to finish his meal in peace, and was just contemplating brewing some tea when a gust of wind knocked the tent askew, and a lumpy black dog nosed in.
Hanu sighed, and gave the dog a bit of rice. It ate directly from his hand, thumping his tail in appreciation. Hanu got out of the tent, to prevent the creature from breaking it. Where the dog roamed, his master would not be far behind.
“You’re corrupting my hound,” a voice said. In the shadows a slow form materialized, a man-like thing extruding a field of disturbance around him. It was the Djinn Imbidor, an ancient creature recently woken from centuries of sleep, diving again into the cut and thrust of mortal life, puzzled somewhat by the rapacious change in humanity.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 65
