Oware Mosaic Read online

  The Oware Mosaic

  By

  Nzondi

  Omnium Gatherum

  Los Angeles

  Oware Mosaic

  Copyright© 2019 Ace Antonio Hall

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and publisher omniumgatherumedia.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Library of Congress Control Number:2019943601

  First Electronic Edition

  To my real-life superheroes, my sons, Derrick and Bryce, fellow author, Ken Hughes, the ScHoFan critique group, Robert J. Sawyer, Tony N. Todaro, Charlie Franco, Kate Jonez, and librarians, Neil Citrin and Maggie Johnson. Good luck on your retirement, Maggie. We're going to miss you.

  Praise for Oware Mosaic

  “Once again, Nzondi creates a rich and vibrant world crackling with life. He is a brilliant writer, one readers and critics should be watching.” —Pete Nowalk, creator of How To Get Away With Murder

  “If you’re looking for a story that’s daringly imaginative, Oware Mosiac will scratch that itch.” —Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger

  “Nzondi’s Oware Mosaic is real Afrofuturism, speculative fiction actually set on the continent itself. This is the future of SF, and the future is looking good.” —Steven Barnes, author of Lion’s Blood

  “I loved, loved, loved this novel by Nzondi! Breath-taking SF adventure!!” —Linda Addison, author of How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend

  Listening to a New Song

  By Linda D. Addison

  I’ve said how deeply I love words, real and made-up. Every thing I write, especially poetry, is a way to discover new words, how to use known words in new ways, to give shape to the songs I hear in my head. One day, years ago, I meet this person Nzondi (Ace Antonio Hall) and his warm personality and sense of humor made me want to know more.

  He attended my poetry reading and I could see in his eyes that he hears the song, gets the words, the images. Afterwards, we talk and it’s clear: we acknowledge the magic of words.

  Curious about his writing, I bought his book, The Confessions of Sylva Slasher (about a teenage zombie slasher who also raises the dead for police investigations), and discovered he is a superb story teller. Over time I’ve found that he has a deep background with writing, as well as other talents (acting, fitness maven, and passionate motivator of life).

  Every time our paths cross: laughter and ah-ha moments transpire. It’s 2019 and I get a copy of his new science-fiction novel, Oware Mosaic. And there it is, words, real and made-up, the first line: “I was born in a dead man’s city.”

  Damn. That’s good. I could write poems to that one line.

  The story unfolds, like multi-dimensional origami, far in the future: family, friends, beings, technology, virtual and real worlds built from the intricately imaginative mind of Nzondi.

  While I look forward to Nzondi and I meeting again, laughing and more, you get to delve into this wonderful collection of words, the enticing tale waiting for you to turn the page.

  —Linda D. Addison, award-winning author of How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend and HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.

  1

  Ghana Africa

  2025

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  I was born in a dead man’s city. My first taste of how bitter life was, came when my parents died on my eighth birthday. I ended up springing from foster home to foster home but spent the majority of my useless childhood playing role-playing games online, to flee from the sting of the African streets. I never played with dolls, wore makeup nor had a boyfriend. Why? The world had fallen ill due to a virus called hate, and that was one disease that led to wars so brutal, it crippled the planet. So there wasn’t much to do in an insufferable wasteland but play virtual reality games, get wasted and berate myself for still wanting to make a difference on a planet where the word hope had become obsolete in all languages.

  On the last day of spring, at three o’clock in the morning, I sped down the road in one of the last working piece-of-crap vehicles in Ghana, except, of course, military vehicles. The party was on the outskirts of the village of Liati Wote, near Lake Volta, and I had just left. I’d been drinking and hadn’t slept in over twenty hours. Needless to say, the world was spinning on its axis just a wee bit, but I’d always managed before. At that time of night, no one was on the road, and it had started to rain a little. I put on the windshield wipers.

  They were also one hundred percent crapper material and screeched loudly with every wipe. I received an alert on the temporal transmitter of my neural implant, or in simple terms, a mind-phone, and recognized the identification number.

  “Why are you calling me at three something in the morning, big brother?” I asked.

  “You have my car, you know? You were supposed to be home, already!”

  “Sorry. I got held up.”

  “Is that your way of saying you met somebody and the two of you drank way too much blood vodka to notice the time?”

  “Meet someone? I wish. There were only humans, there. And no, I haven’t had one drink, tonight.”

  “Yeah, right, Feeni. Tell that to someone who doesn’t know you.”

  “I swear, I haven’t.”

  “Are you’re home? The twins are sleep, right?”

  “Um, yeah. I guess.”

  “Okay, that’s a bit ambiguous. Where are you?”

  “In Liati Wote, working on a case.”

  Liati Wote? I thought. I didn’t want to tell him I was there, too. He would have made me turn around and pick him up, and then he’d known for sure I was wasted, and driving his car. I didn’t believe for one minute he was working on a case, but decided to change the subject, altogether.

  “You need to get new wipers, though. I can’t see crap with these shitty dirt scrapers.”

  “I’ll remember how you trash-talk my ride, next time you ask to borrow it.”

  Laughing, I said, “Don’t get butt-hurt, big brother, I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Starting with ironing my clothes every day for a week.”

  “You’re pure evil.”

  He laughed. “Speaking of evil. I meant to ask you, can the body produce antibodies to fight any disease, if given antiviral drugs?”

  “Good question. It actually depends on—”

  The car hit something, and I swerved, trying to gain control of it. It did a full three-sixty before I managed to skid to a stop. Everything happened fast. It took me a few to get my bearings. My head hurt. Blood was on the steering wheel, and I touched my forehead and the crimson substance on my fingers told me it was my own.

  “Hey! Hey! Feeni!” Kofi said. “What the hell was that?”

  “Nothing—nothing. I think the tire blew.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just a little bump to the head.” The passenger side of the car seemed higher than the driver’s. “Great.”

  “What?”

  “I think I have a flat, now.”

  “You jacked up my tires?”

  “Relax, you should be more worried about me.”

  I got out of the car and groaned. My abs bruised, slamming into the bottom of the steering wheel, although I had no recollection if it had. The rain started pouring down harder, but it felt good in the sweltering summer morning.

  “You didn’t dent my car, did you?” Kofi asked.
<
br />   I didn’t answer him. There was a child-size sandal covered in blood, lodged under the front tire.

  “Hey, Feeni. I know you hear me. Just tell me. Did you wreck my car?”

  I took a slow few steps toward the back of the car and gasped.

  “What is it?” Kofi asked.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” I said, and fell to my knees.

  At first, I saw her mangled toes, and then her legs, before I got to the back of the vehicle and saw her small lifeless body on the pavement. Half of her face was gone, leaving flesh and blood on the pavement, a stream of it leaked from out of her ears.

  I screamed.

  Kofi had to call me back on the mind-celly three times before I collected myself enough to tell him what happened. By the time he got to me, the time had stretched itself into eternity, and the only living thing that passed me on the road that night was a lone pup mountain wolf, or what the locals called a dhole. Like the people of our country, many of them were affected over the years from nuclear radiation. Usually, they traveled in packs and scared the villagers because of the many-reported vicious attacks.

  The driver’s side door was still open, and I had one leg out. The pup came up to me and smelled my trembling hand and licked it before he went on his way up the street. He hadn’t any deformations or tumorous lumps like most of them did, so I didn’t kill it. To be honest, I don’t think I was in the right mind to harm it, had it been one of the radiation-mutated dholes.

  I didn’t even hear Kofi when he approached me.

  “Feeni?” he said, shaking me. “Feeni, do you know who that is?”

  I looked up at him through glassy eyes and shook my head.

  He smacked the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Oh, man. What did you do? What did you do?” He placed his hands behind his neck, pointing his elbows up and outward and walked away from me, mumbling.

  I glanced at him, dazed. Not knowing, at the time, if I was awake or sleeping.

  He let out a long breath and walked back toward the car, pounding a fist in his other hand.

  “Okay, okay, okay. Look, um. You can’t be here. You’d be in prison for life and Auntie Yajna would surely lose her job, not to mention, would die of a heart attack if she knew you were drinking and driving.”

  “What are you saying?”

  The rain poured down and dripped from his face, his chin. “Just sit tight. I’ll take care of this.”

  “She’s…dead?”

  “What do you think, Feeni?” Kofi asked, his clothes drenched. “She’s definitely not breathing after having a Volvo roll over her. What was she doing out here, this time of night?”

  “I didn’t see her. Believe me, Kofi. It was an accident.”

  “Right, right. Look, you’re a good person, and you’ve never been in trouble before. I’m going to call Grunt.”

  “Major Grunt? He—He’s with GAF.”

  The Inspector General of Police, Bete Sibaya, had merged the police force with the Ghana Armed Forces and created the Ghana Allied Forces. Major Grunt had trained with the army branch of the force.

  “You just said they’ll arrest me. You can’t call him!”

  “Yeah, I can. He owes me one. He’ll pick you up, no questions. I can trust him not to say anything with what I got on him.”

  I shook my head. “I—I don’t know. No. No, it’s not right.”

  “What’s not right is what you did to this young girl. She’s thirteen years old.

  “How do you know that?”

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is how everyone is going to judge you for this.”

  He placed his hand on my shoulder. “You have to do this.”

  “No,” I said, and tugged away.

  “Do you want to go to prison for the rest of your life? Bring shame on our entire family, and even our village when this gets out? That girl is dead, Feeni! She’s dead! And she’s not coming back. You screwed up, but believe me, if you turn yourself in, you’re never going to recover from this one. You hear me? Never!”

  Thunder boomed, and the rain came down even harder. Kofi called Major Grunt, and just like he said, Grunt didn’t ask any questions. When Kofi came back to the car, the rain had slowed up a bit, but he was dripping wet. He sat on the passenger’s side and flicked on the old radio. Some young boy or girl, it was hard to tell, was ranting about how people should stand up and not be weak. I was out of it. I didn’t listen to much. I just remember wondering who gave them access to speak so freely on the radio like that.

  In a tough rasped voice, this is what that person said:

  “I had ten brothers and sisters, and when I was nine years old my grandmother trafficked me to a stranger who came to my village looking for kids to enslave in the fishing communities along the Lake Volta. No one did anything to stop her. My parents died when I was an infant and we were impoverished. I promise that citizens of Ghana will have to pay for not standing up to the tyranny of the GFA while children are made labor and sex slaves.”

  It was sad what she went through, and I couldn’t believe such a thing was still allowed in our country. My brother turned off the radio in disgust and got out of the car.

  “He’s here,” Kofi said.

  I didn’t say anything, just stared forward at the raindrops on the windshield. Wearing gloves, Kofi and Grunt cleaned out the inside and outside of the car. They even put gloves on me and told me not to take them off until I got home.

  “Don’t worry, sister,” he said, cleaning the inside windshield. “We’re family. Nothing’s more important than that.”

  Turning to face him, I did my best to smile but didn’t believe him. Not after all I’d been through growing up in foster homes. Grunt got in the back and started wiping down the seats. Unlike many of the men of the Ghana Allied Forces, Major Grunt had become friendly with the civilians of our community, including me.

  Like the height of a professional basketball forward, he was two hundred and four cm, cut like a bodybuilder and had tattoos of Egyptian hieroglyphs covering his neck. There were tribal scarification marks on his cheekbones. Rain fell on his face, dripped off of his lips.

  “I messed up,” I said, and broke down again, crying.

  “No one needs to know,” Grunt said, “It would destroy your family. No, it’s better this way.”

  The two of them took care of the body while I waited in Grunt’s car. I was so out of it, I stayed in the car and shivered, either from being in shock or from the coolness of wearing cold wet clothes. Either way, I waited until they finished doing whatever it was they did. The next morning I woke up with one helluva hangover and wondered had the tragic experience happened at all or if it was just some wild dream.

  When I awakened, Auntie Yajna and the twins were home. That was a big relief, but that didn’t stop my stomach from being queasy after what I did. All I kept seeing in my mind was the girl’s mangled feet beneath the car.

  That morning, Auntie Yajna stuck her head in my room with a face full of anger.

  “I taught you better than that!” she said. “Coming home in the wee hours of the morning like you don't have any damn sense!”

  I didn't want to leave my room, ever. That afternoon, when I went to the bathroom, I overheard Kofi telling Auntie Yajna that he no longer had his car—that it died on him—I stopped listening when he said he had it towed to a junkyard in Accra. Now, he had no way to take her to work, and she’d have to leave extra early and take a tro-tro bus. She was not happy about that at all, and said this killed her chances of asking for a few days off to take the twins for vaccination shots.

  When she used the word killed, all I thought of was the teenage girl I ran over. I stayed in bed all day and cried. It was one of the many times that I wished my father was still alive. He’d known how to fix me, make me feel better. Mom always fussed at me, but Dad, he always spoiled me. I needed his love. Just to be held in his big arms would help me get through such an unspeakable incident.

  I acted recklessly.
Dad used to tell me that desperation brought out the worst in people. He said that when people were faced with the realization that someone or something they loved more than anything was in jeopardy, they’d do just about anything, even kill. He was right.

  There were many reports about missing persons on the corneal stream search engines, but I didn’t see anything about a body being found in Liati Wote within the last twenty-four hours and was a little relieved. Corneal streaming was a Japanese invention that had put libraries and newspapers out of business in one fell swoop like a hawk capturing its prey.

  Kofi knocked on my bedroom door three different times, and each time I screamed at him to go away. I just wanted to escape having to always cope with how hard things were. Life had never been fair, and after that tragic night, it just got worse. Locking my door, I did the only thing left for me to do. I played the House of Oware virtual reality RPG.

  2

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  I activated the VR mode in my neural implant. A flock of crows scattered into the air, leaving behind their road kill when I passed by them. I didn’t know how much longer I’d keep up the pace along the shore of Lake Volta. I ran hard, and breathed harder, as sweat slung from my face. The implant tapped into my nerves and heightened all my neural sensations. My clothes were drenched from exhaustion and my feet were aching for a rest, but I kept going…until…

  The stench of the dead rotting drifted my way. I stopped, and bent over, gasping for breath with my hands clasping my knees, perspiration dripping from my chin to my breasts. The odor was unmistakable; a fluid known as civet musk hung its pungency in the air. Her lifeless body was almost hidden in the brush. Black bands around her eyes reminded me of a raccoon. I glanced over my shoulder, took in my surroundings, and then looked back down at the poor creature. It was an African civet, black and white stripes covering her fur like a leopard. Her pupils were eaten out, and maggots were crawling throughout her insides. My guess was that a snake had gotten the best of her.