Oware Mosaic Read online

  “Dammit, Lamp,” I said. “I’m going to kick your ass when all this is over with!”

  I grabbed the corner of the windshield, lifted myself up, and straddled her neck with my legs.

  We fell to the ground. I stood up in a low crouch and jabbed her semi-hard in the throat with the heel of my hand, not enough to kill her. She gawked, and I leaned down close enough to whisper something in her ear, planting my teeth into her neck.

  She shrieked. “Eeeyah!” and fought with hopeless desperation to get me off, pushing and shoving her knees into my back.

  But there was no way. I was not feeding off of Lamp. Maybe had I eaten over the past twenty-four hours, I wouldn't have done it. I drank a few sips of her blood, and an overwhelming endorphin rush came over me. I almost blacked out. It was like I’d had a double dose of epinephrine injected right into my heart. Lamp almost threw me off of her, but I regained my composure, and slammed her wrists to the ground, staring into her eyes.

  Her body softened, and the fight in her died.

  While still mounted atop of her, I wiped the sweet remnants of her blood from my mouth with the back of my hand while shame moved me to spit the taste on the ground. Someone strong, stronger than me, grabbed my shoulders, and stabbed me in the neck with a needle.

  Grunt ran over to Lamp and injected a needle in her neck. Lamp looked up at me, and her eyes widened.

  “Old Man?” she said, smirking. “You’ve betrayed me?”

  I knew it was an anesthesia that we were injected with, and I had less than fifteen seconds before it took me down. I fought like hell to escape, but darkness took my fight away. Before I fell unconscious, the man who grabbed me said,

  “Otsoo, meet me in the House of Oware by the tombstones. I think Frankie has found us and has compromised the game.”

  In Ghana, if you were clumsy as a kid, Otsoo was a nickname your parents gave you. I was the epitome of clumsiness, growing up. My eyes became blurry with a film of tears, as I glanced into his tender gaze and said, “Dad?”

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  When the House of Oware game construct materialized a virtual world around me, I sniffed, catching a waft of familiarity. Formaldehyde stirred in the air like vultures. My neural implant tapped into my temporal lobes and added sensory texture. No matter how many times I dry-cleaned my favorite lab coat, that odor persisted. The game had decided to put me in that lab coat, along with a conservative pantsuit underneath.

  The cemetery was the starting point for the game. The night air was clouded with fog. Trees towered over many of the tombs and created elongated shadows that swayed in slow ominous movements at the insistence of the strong wind. For as far as the eyes could see in every direction were stone homages paid to the dead. Mom and Dad’s tombstones stood before me. A patch of South African sugarbushes grew along the side of each grave and illuminated the gravesite with hope.

  “They are quite lovely, aren’t they?” Dad asked.

  I turned around. He was standing behind me.

  Like the many times, as a toddler when Dad came home from the lab, I ran to hug him. A flood of emotions poured through me, dripping through my eyes like joyful morning dew. Not wanting to let go, just yet, I said nothing but squeezed him harder. I was too overwhelmed by the shock of seeing my father again after so many years of hopeless goodbyes. His body was rugged, strong, and his scent colored the room with a bright splash of manly cologne.

  “In real life, you’re alive,” I said. “I thought you died.”

  “For all intents and purposes,” Dad said. “I did die.”

  Pushing away from his tender grasp, I wiped my eye with the back of my hand and asked, “How is this possible?”

  “I’ll explain everything later,” he said, and walked over to his tombstone and sat on it. “As for now, we have a difficult situation at hand.”

  “Frankie,” I said, and walked up to him. Reaching for his hands, he took mine, and as we talked, he swung my arms like he used to do when I was a child.

  “Yes, this girl has found a way into the game.”

  “But how?”

  “That horrific act of genocide in Liati Wote was of her doing. I’m sure of it.”

  “But how? Those people died of some type of new pathogen. I’d never seen anything like it.”

  “Tell me something,” Dad said. “Were you affected?”

  “At first, I thought it was a panic attack coming on—”

  “By the way, I will show you how to overcome that.”

  “You will? How?”

  “Later, Otsoo. We have much to talk about but later. Tell me the symptoms you had during that attack.”

  “Well, it all seemed like a hallucination. The pain was real, of course. I’d gotten a migraine but one like I’d never experienced before.”

  “How so?”

  A random but necessary thought crossed my mind. “You met and befriended Lamp in real life?”

  “Yes, her part in my plans are monumental, but Otsoo please, tell me about your experience.”

  “Nothing to tell except it felt like my neural implant was going haywire, like someone had hacked my brain, and I had no control over it anymore.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said and stood. “Come, it’s time for you to meet the others.”

  “You have other children?”

  “No, no, Otsoo. These are ennies who have played the House of Oware game all of their lives, like you.”

  “But Dad, how? What is all of this about?

  “Be patient with me, Otsoo. When the time is right, I will explain everything, but I have to leave the game and transport the two of you to a safe house. Stay in the game, meet the others.”

  “Where?”

  “In a simulation of a bar called the Kings’ Shelter. I’ve finally found the real one, and will take you there to meet everyone face-to-face, in real life.”

  “How will I even know who they are or how they look?”

  “Samora will be there.”

  “She tried to kill me!”

  “It wasn’t her doing. You must forgive her. The same way she will have to forgive you when you tell her what you did.”

  “You—you know? Dad, how do you know all of this?” I turned around, and paced, trying to make sense of it all, and said, “It’s like you’ve been spying on me all of this time. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”

  I turned around, thinking my stubbornness was enough to make him come clean. But he was gone, and a door appeared in front of his tombstone. I scoffed and walked through the door.

  ~

  The Kings’ Shelter reeked of beer and roasted peanuts. Aside from the rock ’n roll, the bar was like every other dive in Ghana: plasma screens showing cricket games, buxom waitresses with short skirts, watered-down drinks, funky bathrooms, and sticky floors. Hovering high above the bartender’s head, a hologram of Little Ghana Boy screamed from an old jukebox projector singing Ready Teddy.

  When I went through the bar’s door, the game changed me into riding gear, leather jacket and pants, boots, and a helmet. I spotted Lamp, a female version, just beyond a tiny dance floor and gripped my motorcycle helmet while I maneuver past the bar tables seated by buzzed chatterboxes and shouldered through the dancing patrons.

  Lamp was sitting on a stool toward the back of the bar by the pool tables, holding a beer on her thigh and a lollipop in her cheek. There were a few more people back there watching one table in particular. The closer I got, the more I realized a white woman was putting on a master class in kicking someone’s ass in pool.

  She was tall, towering over the others. As if a character in a Bradbury novel, her ginger hair was a lamp burning, cascading down her back. The woman wore the kind of clothes that told everyone she had a lust for expensive things. She had thick, well-drawn reddish eyebrows that furrowed over drooped eyelids, and her mouth never seemed to stop jabbering.

  Ginger-head’s accent
told me she was from South Africa. “A decade ago, global warming has made it possible for scientists to find an ancient virus—one ball off of the six,” she said, and aimed for the corner pocket. “And now after finding a fourth giant virus…” She struck the ball with the force of a pro, and the one ball slammed into the pocket. “French scientists revealed recently that they plan to resurrect the harmless virus that had been locked in the Siberian permafrost for more than thirty-thousand years.”

  “Of course, you’re speaking of Mollivirus Sibericum,” a large man in a charcoal gray pinstripe suit said. He sat next to Lamp holding a pool stick. His black-framed glasses were thick, like his mustache. “But I’m not sure if disturbing a prehistoric virus is wise.”

  “What are some concerns that you think scientists are deliberating?” the ginger lady asked, standing and chalking her pool stick.

  “Where should I start?” he answered. “There are many.”

  “I agree with Lt. Tanaka,” a woman said, interrupting. She wore an earth tone scarf around her long neck. A black snood covered her hair and her face was Geisha-white. “Even though these scientists may have said the virus is harmless, they don’t truly know the potential dangers that it could pose.”

  Lamp stood when she saw me. Her face was all wide-eyed and loopy. She handed me a beer. It was cold and the label said flavored with fossa blood. The name of the beer was called Kings’ Shelter and had an image of a white moon shining over a gold pyramid. I took note of the pyramid on the label and popped that bitch open the second the cool jar hit my hand.

  Lamp interrupted the conversation. “Hey everyone, this here is my pathologist friend, Xo. Feeni Xo.” Lamp said. “That there is the one and only, Felicia Shaw,” he said, referring to the pool shark. “She heads the Africa CDC. And the Indian woman over here who wishes she was black—”

  “Watch it, Lampers,” Durga said.

  Lamp giggled and stumbled forward a step. “I mean the one with the pretty braids—”

  She nodded. “That’s more like it.”

  Lamp continued. “That’s Shaw’s assistant, Durga. Every Tuesday, Shaw comes here and robs us law folks out of our money.”

  “What’s up, Xo?” she said, nodding at me with a genuine smile.

  Tanaka said, “These phonies wouldn’t know if they were being robbed if a thief took the glasses off their very noses.”

  Tanaka held up a credit card and tube of lipstick.

  Shaw gasped, and said, “That’s mine!”

  Everyone in the small group laughed at that. Tanaka tossed the items to Shaw. She caught them and shook a fist at her. I took a sip of the beer and thought I’d gone to heaven.

  “Good beer, huh?” Lamp asked, grinning, and taking a sip of hers.

  I nodded. “Damn sure is,” I said, and looked at the label, again. “Kings’ Shelter. You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  I pulled Lamp over to the side. “You tried to kill me.”

  “But I didn’t pull the fatal trigger,” Lamp said, and took another swig of her beer.

  “No, but you tried.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I tried my damnedest not to, but someone was in my head.”

  “Here’s to making whomever hacked into our brains, pay with their life.”

  “My hunch is it’s Frankie.”

  I nodded, and clinked the bottom of my bottle against hers, before taking a refreshing swallow.

  “My Dad is the Old Man?” I asked.

  “I guess.”

  “At first, I thought he’d betray me, but he said he was only protecting you.”

  “You spoke to him at the cemetery?”

  “Yes, right before you did.”

  “You know what’s going on?”

  “No, like I said, he’s a man of mystery, but believe me, before all of this is over, we’ll know exactly what hand he plays in all of this.”

  “I second that. Does Dad think these guys can help us tie your sister’s message and Frankie’s part in all of this?”

  “Although I just met them, I’m convinced that they can.”

  “Why?”

  “These folks have also been playing the House of Oware game. They’re not just characters in the game, they’re real-life people, all our ages.”

  “And each one of them has been trained for all of their lives in a particular profession?”

  “Yep, just like us.”

  “How’d you find them?”

  “I didn’t. They found me. Durga is a whiz in computers. She found a back door into the program and found the info that revealed who was playing the game.”

  “So who did this to us?” I asked.

  “The real question,” Lamp said, taking a sip of beer and then continuing, “is why?”

  Shaw pointed her stick at the man with the thick-rimmed glasses. “Now back to the topic at hand. I agree, Tanaka, that we don’t truly know the dangers, but if every scientist was afraid to take risks we’d running around in our cars like the Flintstones. Look, Pithovirus Sibericum, one of the other viruses they found, has five hundred genes—”

  Durga asked, “Whereas the influenza virus has only eight!”

  Lamp jumped in, saying, “And now these arrogant French researchers want to awaken the Mollivirus Sibericum? Maybe Molly doesn’t want to be disturbed!”

  “Molly?” Shaw. said, one eyebrow raised.

  “Look guys,” I said. “I know science is beautiful to us, but some of the most beautiful things in the world are the most dangerous, space, the ocean, animals, hell even us women, but these viruses we’re playing with, they’re pathogens of Jurassic nature! Jurassic! So, I don’t care if the virus seems to only attack single-cell amoebas—”

  “I follow you, Xo,” Shaw said. “The binomial nomenclature known as the Homo Sapiens may not have the biological structure in their immune system to fight off a virus that carries sixty-two point five times the punch of influenza.”

  “Exactly,” Lamp said, pointing at Shaw.

  Tanaka shook her head. “Hey, you think the Spanish Flu kicked the world’s ass? Wait until Molly throws on her stilettos and prances across this globe. All humanity will be able to do is climb its way up the mountain and claim itself queen of the most endangered species.”

  “Not on my watch,” Shaw said. “That’s why my team and I work tirelessly at the CDC, to make sure we do all we can to thwart not just that virus, but all viruses.”

  I turned to her. “You work at the CDC?”

  She nodded.

  “So explain to me,” I said. “Why did an entire village come down with a virus like I’d never seen before and the government came in and killed everyone off, even the CDC health workers?”

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  “I had nothing to do with that,” Shaw said. “But based on what you just told me, silver fluid coming out of the ears, people holding their heads, and screaming, I have an idea of what’s happening.”

  Shaw, Durga, Tanaka, Lamp and I were standing outside of the bar passing around a lipstick-smudged cigarette like we were participating in some kind of female bonding ritual, and perhaps we were. The streets were empty, except for the wet residue that covered the dirt roads with rain puddles. Outside, the village was quiet, yielding to the yips of a pack of dholes high in the mountains, and a chirping cricket hiding in the crevices of darkness. Light flickered from a street lamp. Moths flew around the dampened bulb and wisps of cigarette smoke careened upward into the cool night air.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Durga said.

  “Someone please fill me in,” I said.

  “It was a computer virus,” Shaw said.

  “But it’s not possible to get past the security systems of neural implants. They’re impenetrable.”

  “Durga, humor me,” Shaw said. “Tell us exactly how a computer virus works.”

  “Malware, logic bombs, those sort of things are software that piggyback on computer programs,” sh
e said. “The malicious virus replicates itself to spreads to other machines, wreaking all kind of havoc for the host.”

  Shaw extended her hand to me for the cigarette. “This is what the retcon virus has done with clones, destroying the consciousness, and literally erasing it from existence.”

  “Since the very first neural implant was surgically inserted in man, the capability of a virus getting past security walls were a non-factor,” Durga said.

  Tanaka said, “But somehow in clones, scientists didn’t get something right in their biological gene coding, and that’s why the clones were susceptible to viruses.”

  Durga tapped her index finger to her chin, and she fixed a gaze on me. “But this mysterious malware acts like a double-edged sword, attacking the neural implant and attaching itself to a virus already present in the body.”

  “I’m not following you,” Lamp said, leaning against the side of the building, her heel on the brick wall.

  Tanaka went over to Shaw and extended her hand. “Pass and puff, sister. Pass and puff,” She inhaled deeply, blew out smoke circles and said. “Okay, so you know that the viruses that cause the common cold are always present in our bodies, yes?”

  Lamp nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

  With the jot dangling in her mouth, Tanaka clapped her hands and pointed at Lamp. “Good! Not to be stating the obvious but so many people think they get sick because they were out in the cold, yes?”

  Shaw nodded. “Unfortunately, that’s true. But we know it’s more about the behavior of the host that allows the virus to attack the immune system,” Shaw said.

  “Yeah, I follow,” I said, “if a person is extremely exhausted, it’s that behavior that weakened the immune system, allowing a variety of some one hundred different strains of rhinoviruses to mutate and replicate at such rapid rates, it’s impossible for a vaccine.”