CHAPTER 4
Nairobi, Kenya
Campaign Rally at Kibera Fields
June 5, 2110
1900 hours
For Evelyn Ndinka, the rally for candidate Julius Akamba was the biggest thing she had ever seen in Kibera. The Solnet reporter hoisted herself up on a pile of trash, balancing herself precariously, as she steered the fleet of dronecams about Kibera Fields, gathering footage for her report.
“Cam Three and Four, come left and drop down to fifty feet…get me some footage of the stage and the podium…it really stands out.” Several hundred feet above, the twin ornithopters wheeled about and took up their new headings. Ndinka watched the image on her wristpad. “That’s good…that’s good, right there. Edit can add sound and graphics later….Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a shot. The stage and lights, right in the middle of a sea of tin-roof shacks. There must be half a million people here.”
Indeed, the vast slum land of southwest Nairobi, hadn’t hosted a gathering this large in decades. Julius Akamba, the Assimilationist candidate, would be there, just days before the big election. But Ndinka knew it wasn’t Akamba that was the real draw. It was the candidate’s front man and staff aide…Symborg. People shrieked and fainted for Symborg. That’s why they had come.
The Solnet reporter steered dronecam four closer to the stage. “Hover and zoom in…I want to get those assimilator booths…there’s already a queue outside.” The ‘copter obeyed and took up a tight hovering orbit some thirty feet over a line of coffin-shaped booths along one side of the stage. The booths were already working, already taking in volunteers. People were pushing and shoving in a ragged line just beyond some barriers, barely contained by a platoon of khaki-clad Kenya Police. One man, Inspector Shadrick Nziri, barked out commands to his force on a megaphone.
The rally was set to begin at 7 pm, according to the flyers and brochures that had littered Nairobi for days. But already the assimilators were at work, manned by volunteers. Ndinka manipulated her wristpad controls and Cam Four zoomed in tight, picking up the sweaty, ecstatic faces in the queue. The first in line was a heavy set woman. Ndinka fiddled with the audio, caught snatches of words over the roar of the crowd.
“…name is, ma’am?” The assimilator tech wore a light blue uniform. His nameplate read Gavin.
Her name was Anna Ngombe. She was tall, maybe with a bit of Masai in her, proud, a bit fluttery and nervous. She grinned sheepishly as one of Gavin’s men helped her into the assimilator booth.
“A great day,” she muttered. “Great day...so proud.”
Gavin sat at a console just outside the booth, while another tech helped Anna inside and made her comfortable on the seat. The tech shut and latched the door, pressing a button to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.
“Let’s do it,” the tech told Gavin. Gavin pressed buttons.
Inside the booth, a fog had formed…that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Anna disappeared into the fog, only a leg and a shoulder could be seen.
The fog thickened. A faint buzz could be heard from inside the booth. Evelyn Ndinka steered the dronecam in closer, hovering only a few feet over the scene, like a giant gnat, watching as the cloud of bots inside the booth thickened. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth.
Anna didn’t move. Ndinka zoomed in through the front porthole on her right leg. At first, it was unchanged, a smooth black leg with a section of her print dress showing, hitched up just above her knee. But even as she watched, the black of her skin had begun to fade. In moments, it was almost gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. Her shoulder was the same.
Anna Ngombe was slowly but steadily being disassembled. She was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.
The end came softly, almost as if the woman were walking away in a light rain. Her body, the physical Anna Ngombe, began to fade inside the booth. At first, it had been barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of her skin, her extremities, a smearing of her legs and shoulder, as if a photo had lost contrast.
In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Anna Ngombe had devolved—that was the commonly accepted word now—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.
And then she was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was Config Zero.
Evelyn Ndinka swallowed hard… steering DroneCam Four away from the booth. She muttered into her lip mike: Rotate and hold…I want shots of the faces in the queue…” The cam obeyed and soon her wristpad screen was filled with joy, ecstasy, laughter, joking…whatever you wanted to call it.
The woman known as Anna Ngombe had just let herself be disassembled into atom fluff. And behind her, people were jostling in line to be next.
Involuntarily, Evelyn Ndinka shuddered. She would never understand Assimilationists.
Something was happening. The crowd was stirring. Ndinka craned her head, trying to see over the mass of humanity. It looked like a wave surging and sloshing back and forth between islands of tin-roof shacks and rubbish piles. Imagery flickered on her wristpad. Men were mounting the stage. Serious men in dark suits and white open-neck shirts.
That’s when she saw him.
Of course, Ndinka knew all the stories about Symborg: that he wasn’t human, just an angel, a para-human swarm of nanobots, a cloud of bugs. Still, she found herself shoved and jostled as the crowd surged forward. She steered the dronecams closer for a tight shot, muttering “In tight, on his face, hover at twenty--“ She checked the shot on her wristpad, found it good.
Julius Akamba was hard to miss. Wide as he was tall, blacker than coal, he strode up onto the stage and raised both hands in a victory salute, beaming at the crowd that now lapped against the stage and the police cordon like ocean waves in a storm. Beside him were more staff people. Symborg was to his right, there to lead the introductions to the candidate, to whip the crowd into furious adulation.
Ndinka found herself shoved forward like a raft adrift, until she was nearly impaled on the baton of a policeman at the stage. Quickly, she flashed her press pass and was shoveled off to the side. Her arms were pinned by the crush and she couldn’t reach her wristpad controls. The story would have to go with the shots the dronecams were getting now.
Symborg acknowledged the crowds with a wave and moved to the center microphone. The angel was good, Ndinka could see that. Very few edge effects…often, angels fuzzed out at their extremities, where the swarm didn’t have good config control. This one was tight and dense over its entire surface…only an occasional pop or flash in the torso area, one or two in the face, gave away the fact that the angel was a para-human, a swarm of nanobots configged to look human. In stature, he was a smallish man, dark of color but that could be easily enough changed. His height contrasted with Akamba’s beefy frame, and his face was dominated by a black moustache.
“PEOPLE OF KIBERA…THE TIME HAS COME FOR A CHANGE….” His voice boomed out across the rally ground and the crowd grew more and more frenzied, pressing ever tighter against the police cordon.
“AND THIS MAN…THIS JULIUS AKAMBA…WILL BRING THAT CHANGE…THIS MAN, PEOPLE OF KIBERA…THIS MAN IS YOUR MAN, THIS MAN IS YOUR CANDIDATE….”
Now, as if by unspoken agreement, Akamba and his staff receded into the background and Symborg dominated the stage. The angel worked the crowd like a practiced stage actor.
“PEOPLE OF KIBERA…WHAT IS IT THAT ASSIMILATION BRINGS?”
The res
ponse roared up out of the crowd like a thing alive.
“PEJERU…PEJERU…PEJERU!!”
A radiant smile came to Symborg’s face, beamed by cameras to screens throughout the rally ground.
“Peace. Ecstasy. Joy. Enlightenment. Rapture. Unity with the Mother Swarm. You are right!”
The crowd roiled and throbbed like a frenetic horde, as one, surging again and again against the stage and the police barricade. Beside the stage, Kenya Police Inspector Shadrick Nziri barked more commands into a wristphone, re-deploying his men to tighten the barrier.
Symborg went on. “This man--“ he swept his arm toward Julius Akamba, who stepped forward to the microphone, a well-scripted and rehearsed bit of choreography “--this man will bring all that Assimilation can offer to you.” He wrapped his arms around Akamba’s shoulders and drew him closer and it was only a few moments later that Evelyn Ndinka realized that subtle changes had come over Symborg’s face. The morphing was so well done that no one detected it, but by the time the angel had embraced the beaming candidate, the face of Symborg was gone and the man now hugging the candidate was Jomo Kenyatta himself, or least a passable config of the father of modern Kenya.
Stage cameras zoomed in to capture the moment. Ndinka wrestled an arm free to make sure her own dronecams did the same.
Symborg, now morphed and configged to resemble the great Kenyatta, beamed and vigorously hugged Akamba, the Founder himself endorsing this candidate as “the best man for the future of Kenya.”
Ndinka couldn’t help but be impressed. Akamba’s handlers had perfected the stage show to use Symborg’s talents, linking Kenya’s past, the beloved Kenyatta himself with the new candidate. It was a symbolic point lost on no one.
Symborg went on, now releasing Akamba, who retreated to a position on the side of the stage. The angel went to a bag held by one of Akamba’s aides and withdrew a handful of dirt, which he raised for all to see. By the time he had done this, the Kenyatta morph was gone, and his face subtly altered back to its original config. Or was it the original? Ndinka couldn’t be sure. She suspected the crowd didn’t care. They were mesmerized, enthralled. And they wanted more.
“The soil of Kenya!” Symborg announced. “This is what Assimilation brings…this is what Julius Akamba brings!” Even as he spoke and the cameras zoomed in, Symborg’s right hand morphed from a palm with five fingers into a fuzzy, swarming cloud of bots. The bots swelled and enveloped the dirt in his hand. Unseen by the crowd, the bots slammed atoms and formed a faint but rapidly filling apparition that grew like a plant in fast-motion out of Symborg’s hand.
In moments, the apparition had solidified enough to be visible…and recognizable. It was Kenyatta again, this time ‘in the flesh.’ The bots that Symborg spalled off from his hand grabbed atoms from nearby and assembled a reasonable facsimile of the ‘father of modern Kenya.’
The crowd roared its approval.
Symborg approached the mike again and told them how Julius Akamba loved Kenya, no less than Kenyatta. How he loved his family and tribe, how he lived and breathed Kenya and always would. From down in front of the stage, Evelyn Ndinka wriggled an arm free and pressed a few buttons on her wristpad, zooming in for an extreme close-up on the faux-Kenyatta, then on Symborg himself.
Is that sweat on his forehead? She wondered if angels could even do that, then decided it was like everything else at the rally…part of the show. What she didn’t see was the faint trail of bots that drifted off Symborg’s hand and down into the crowd itself.
Symborg continued his magic, his blurry hand by turns a cloud of bots, a magic wand, a djinn granting wishes, mesmerizing the crowd, plucking their emotions like a mandolin, first rising, then falling, cresting and receding. He was a master showman…Ndinka had to admit.
What Ndinka didn’t know was how well Symborg knew his crowd. The bots he had loosed into the crowd, unseen, were now embedded in the heads of scores of nearby faithful.
Even as he dazzled the crowd, Symborg was receiving feeds from the bots that many of them had already ingested. A faint pall of fog wafted off the stage, sending more and more bots into recon mode among the rally. Processor module ANALYZE GLUTAMATE PATTERN MATCHING received results from the nanobotic sleuths even now burrowing into their brains, sniffing along highways of equal glutamate concentration, rebuilding memories from their chemical residues.
Algorithms ran and massaged the data from the bots. The crowd was hooked, in synch with Symborg. Patterns matched with high confidence. Symborg saw snatches of memory, fragments of images…large crowds, banners and dancers, a train creeping into a station, belching smoke, brakes squealing. Some kind of rally, somewhere else.
All this the crowd gave up to the bots in their brains, and to Symborg, who smiled back and went on with the rally. Behind him, the candidate Julius Akamba beamed, and scanned the surging crowd uneasily.
Now Symborg made config changes and the Kenyatta ‘angel’ began morphing once again. The din began to subside. Heads craned forward. People jostled and shoved to see better. Inspector Shadrick Nziri spoke into a lapel mike, calling up reinforcements for the police cordon.
In moments, the Kenyatta angel had changed into something formless, a blazing, pulsating spherical ‘sun-like’ orb of nanobots. It shone with the brilliance of a miniature star, throbbing in time with music issuing from speakers nearby.
“This is what Julius Akamba means for Kenya…he is like Ngai, the Giver of All Things, an earthly reflection of the Mother Swarm.”
Then the orb evolved again, this time growing, swelling, taking on structure. It became a small shelter, a composite shanty like the thousands that dotted Kibera.
“This--” he roared to the crowd, “this is what Julius Akamba and the Assimilationists can bring…this is what the Central Entity brings…shelter for all, food and life for all, embedded in the Great Mother Swarm.”
And, as if to emphasize the point, the queues at the assimilator booths surrounding the stage grew and became gridlocked with even more people shoving and jostling to be next into the booths.
Evelyn Ndinka found herself shoved almost right onto the stage, pressed hard against the barriers, nearly face to face with a row of Kenya Police officers. The officers were shoving back just as hard at the crowd, batons and shockwands flailing. She wrestled her arm free and checked out the view from the dronecams on her wristpad.
The crowd was surging forward, frenetic, screaming and fainting, pressing against the stage like ocean waves battering a beach. She was startled to see some of them climbing on the shoulders of others, launching themselves through the air.
This is mad, this is insane, she told herself. Instinctively, she ducked down and started wriggling through tiny spaces and niches, close to the ground, worming her way away from the stage. Self-preservation took over. After a few moments, she found a void and surfaced, standing up between two obese women who were swaying and chanting as they gazed up at Symborg.
She steered Dronecam Four as close as she dared to the stage. Symborg was performing more tricks, conjuring fantastic things from his bot-cloud hands like a true djinn. In the background, the candidate himself had left his seat and squatted down at the edge of the stage to have words with Inspector Nziri. Evelyn maneuvered the dronecam to catch what she could of the conversation.
It was clear Akamba was spooked by the intensity of the crowd. Inspector Nziri had a warning for him. The dronecam picked up snatches.
“…can’t hold this….-rimeter long…your people…the barrier won’t…could be a stampede—
Akamba shook his head emphatically. “No…no…no…this is for me. These are my people--“
That’s when Shadrick Nziri shrugged, threw up his hands. He got on his lapel mike, screamed commands to his force. Evelyn could see what was happening around the stage. The men of the Kenya Police were being crushed, swallowed by the great beast. Nziri was pulling his men
out.
Bit by bit, the police cordon shrank and contracted. Now Symborg had finished and with a flourish, waved his arms toward Julius Akamba, who stood and beamed in the glow of the moment. Akamba came to the mike, where Symborg embraced him. The crowd roared. The stage began to shake and the men stumbled momentarily. Symborg retreated behind, toward a row of seats on the edge of the stage. Akamba seized the mike.
His amplified voice screeched with feedback and was drowned in the deafening roar of the crowd, which surged forward with renewed fury. It was like a rock concert mixed with religious revival, amplified a thousand-fold. The dronecams captured everything: people wailing, fainting, shrieking, even dying in the crush. The crowd became a crazed, mindless thing.
And no one was paying any attention to Akamba.
Finally, in order to save the situation for the candidate, Symborg was forced to leave the platform, under escort. As he did so, the crowd broke through the last barriers and pressed forward to try and touch the angel. Just when it appeared Symborg and his police protective detail, led by Inspector Nziri, were about to be crushed to death in the surging crowd, Symborg did what angels can do…he dematerialized into a loose, amorphous swarm and disappeared in a faint puff, dissipating into the air above the stage.
Evelyn Ndinka captured the whole thing on dronecam video.
And the rest of the police detail was left to fight their way out of the crowd, who become even more agitated at the disappearance of their hero Symborg. Soon, the stage collapsed completely and a full-scale riot had developed.
Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone Page 13
