The Hero of Numbani Read online

  “Yes, Mama,” Efi said, but as she crept back into her workshop, seeing all those Junie parts piled on the table gave her an idea, one that would let her keep in touch with her friends all day long without having to inject bionic neurons into anyone’s brain.

  Her mother huffed, probably sensing that Efi was caught up in her own thoughts again. “And, contrary to popular belief, you can’t solve all your problems with robots.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Efi said again out loud, but thought to herself: Watch me.

  When Efi rejoined her friends in the workshop, she was giddy with excitement. She took a deep breath, inhaling all the positive energy lingering in the air of her favorite place. This space had been her playroom when she was a toddler, once covered in primary colors and plushy cartoon monsters with big, friendly eyes, but slowly she had dissected her toys, turning her talking dolls and light-up electronics into piles of circuitry and actuators and sensors. And once she’d figured out how they worked, she started building creations of her own. Efi’s parents hadn’t been too happy at first, seeing all those expensive toys meet their untimely demise, but one day, they brought home a robotics kit for their inquisitive daughter, and the rest was history.

  “All right,” Efi said to her friends. “Let’s try this again.” Her optimism was infectious, and soon they were all gathered around the workshop table, cheering on the little Junie as it navigated toward the edge, centimeter by centimeter, and just when there wasn’t any space left, it stopped, turned, and moved along the perimeter. It was a small success, but Efi swelled with pride, and once she’d done a little more testing, she uploaded the new firmware to all the bots they’d assembled. Hassana and Naade packaged them up in their boxes, ready for shipping.

  “A dozen in one day,” Naade said, nodding at the stack of Junie boxes. “That’s twelve customers who will soon be very happy.”

  “Make that ten customers,” Efi said.

  Hassana looked up suddenly. “What? Did you get some cancellations?”

  “No,” Efi said, pulling down two boxes from the stack. “But I want you each to have one to take with you to school.”

  “Sweet!” Naade pumped his fist. “Now all I need to do is hide a little pillow in my backpack and—”

  “No sleeping through class, Naade,” Efi cut in. “I was thinking the Junies could follow you around, see what you see … and report back to me. That way, when I go to my high school classes after lunch, I won’t miss anything that’s going on.”

  Hassana’s smile turned slowly downward, and Naade shook his head, probably remembering that fateful day in the school library when Efi had asked for two volunteers to help her demonstrate her science fair project. You accidentally overamplify a gravity field one time, and no one ever lets you forget it, Efi thought. She’d had dozens of successful inventions since, and no one had gotten hurt.

  “Please?” Efi asked. “Just try it out. Think of it as a test run. Maybe it’ll help boost sales, too! Come on. What could go wrong?”

  Ms. Okorie scribbled furiously on the classroom’s holographic monitor, writing a calculus function that peeled away from the screen, letter by number by math operator, then hovered five centimeters in front of the surface. To Efi, she was something like a DJ, the way she worked the front of the classroom, but instead of dropping beats, she was dropping equations. She worked the problem, navigating through coordinates and constants and derivatives, while 3-D tangent models spun next to her like backup dancers. Normally, Efi would bob her head along, solving the equation on her tablet at her desk, but today she just couldn’t concentrate.

  Efi kept her eye on the LIVE FEED button flashing on her screen. She’d linked up to Hassana’s and Naade’s Junie robots, but so far she’d resisted looking at the feed, because while Ms. Okorie was a pleasant enough teacher, you definitely didn’t want to be on her bad side. Still, the temptation was real, and Efi couldn’t stop wondering what her friends were doing this very instant. Had anyone “pulled an Isaac” in the science lab today?

  Maybe she’d just take a little peek.

  She pressed the button and was met with an image of Naade walking through the hallway, beatboxing to himself. The Junie’s cameras offered 360 degrees of visibility, meaning if something was happening, Efi wouldn’t miss a thing. He hung a left, passing the art classroom, and Efi was able to catch a glimpse inside. In that half an instant, she thought she saw Stevie Igwe passing a note to Sibe Oye.

  A paper note. Whatever was written on it had to be something so important, so private, that he wouldn’t risk it getting caught up in the school’s digital filters. And that was scandalous enough, but it was a well-known fact that Stevie and Sibe hated each other. Sibe was the president of the student council, and Stevie was captain of the debate team and a devil’s advocate on every issue that could possibly cause offense to someone, somewhere. Stevie had heckled Sibe during her entire campaign, particularly on her ideas about having a special appreciation day for the omnic staff at the school. Stevie hated the idea, claiming that omnics were already a liability and not to be trusted, and that at any moment, their school could break out into a miniature Omnic Crisis.

  Efi scrunched her nose up. She didn’t care for Stevie much, and thankfully, there weren’t many people in Numbani who thought like he did. However, her interest was piqued over the paper note, if that’s truly what she’d seen. She paused the image and zoomed in, but it was too blurry to make out the object for sure.

  Wait, Hassana had art class right now. Efi switched feeds, wound back thirty seconds, and saw Hassana painting strokes on her canvas. The Junie must have been perched on her shoulder. She was creating a self-portrait, lines crisp and colors deep. Hassana was never one to miss details, and Efi had no doubt that every single braid upon her friend’s head was accounted for in her painting, all of them sweeping into a neat knot up top.

  Efi swiveled the feed to see the rear of the classroom, catching a blurred image of Naade as he walked past in the hallway. In that exact moment, Efi saw what she thought she’d imagined.

  A note passing. And a definite smile shared between the two.

  This was big.

  This was huge.

  This was—

  A message from Efi’s cousin and classmate, Dayo, popped up on her screen:

  Efi slid the feed closed, quickly brought the equation back up, and started furiously scribbling at solving it. Ms. Okorie’s powerful perfume suddenly overwhelmed Efi, and still looking down, she could see the bottom of her teacher’s skirt as she stopped beside Efi’s desk.

  “Efi,” she said. “If you’re not too busy, could you please show the class how to solve for the y-coordinate?”

  Efi cleared her throat. “Yes, ma.” And she stood up, passing Dayo’s desk. He looked up, concern on his brow. She mouthed thank you to her cousin for sending the message. He nodded and looked back down at his tablet before Ms. Okorie’s wrath befell him as well.

  Efi stood at the front of the classroom, finger to her temple like she was thinking really hard. She knew how to find the solution. She was actually three chapters ahead in her lessons, but she’d learned quickly that teenagers, even smart teenagers in IB calculus classes, didn’t like being shown up by almost twelve-year-olds. It wasn’t like she was being dishonest, though … She’d never fake like she didn’t know an answer, but a little acting went a long way. Finally, she made the “aha!” gesture that meant she’d figured it all out, and began to solve the equation. She dusted her hands when she was done and began to return to her seat, but instead of the “Very good, Efi,” she was used to hearing from her teacher, Ms. Okorie said, “Very close, Efi. Can someone show her where she went wrong?”

  Efi stood stock-still as her teacher called on Dayo. He grabbed his cane and walked up to the front of the room, then swiped away the bottom fourth of her work. The pixels dissolved out of existence, providing him with a clean slate. He solved the problem, and it became immediately apparent where Efi had made her mistake.
How could she have been so sloppy?

  She knew how. Instead of keeping her mind on her studies, she’d spent half the class period goofing off. Hadn’t she just warned Naade about the same thing? Efi needed to focus on being here instead of worrying over what her friends were up to.

  “Wonderful,” Ms. Okorie said, right as the bell dismissed the class. “Please do exercises Thirty-Four A, B, and C for tomorrow. Don’t forget to clearly show your work!”

  Efi packed her satchel and tried to walk quickly out of the room, but her cousin followed close behind. Dayo’s school uniform looked almost like formal wear on him. No doubt that he’d tailored it himself, adding gold embellishments to the school’s emblem and the stitching around the cuffs—enough to get noticed in the halls, but not so much to draw the attention of teachers and administrators. He wore his hair in the tiniest of twists—one hundred fifty-seven of them, he’d once told Efi, for his favorite prime number. Efi had suffered through the misfortune of asking why it was his favorite prime number. He’d said that numbers held important meanings and then delved into an impromptu math history lesson with more tangents than Ms. Okorie could ever fit on her holoboard.

  “Efi, wait up. Where are you running off to?” Dayo asked as he cut Efi off from her speedy exit.

  “I don’t know. I just need some air. I’ve never messed up like that before, in front of everyone.”

  “Nobody’s perfect all the time.”

  Efi nodded. She knew she wasn’t perfect. She’d once gotten a B on a science project. And then there was that time she’d gotten her hair trapped in the gears of one of her robot’s motors. Dayo had been there for that fiasco as well, and thanks to his handy scissor work, he’d salvaged most of her bangs. Now she wore her hair natural, twisted and tied back into a ponytail, out of the way and far from the reach of her experiments.

  Yes, she made mistakes, but she learned from them.

  “What were you looking at, anyway?” Dayo asked. “You were squinting so hard at your tablet, I thought you were about to fall into it.”

  “A live feed from the Junies I gave Naade and Hassana. I love being here and learning at your school for part of the day, but I feel like I’m missing out with my friends.”

  “Hey, this is your school, too. And you’ve definitely got friends here!”

  “You? You have to be my friend. We’re cousins.”

  “Nah, if you weren’t cool, I’d just as soon pretend you didn’t exist.” Dayo nudged Efi in the shoulder. “I saw my brother at the tram concourse a few weeks ago, right as the doors were closing. I could have stuck my hand out and held them open, but I just straight ignored him.”

  “Ooh,” Efi said, sucking in her breath. “Did you tell Auntie you saw him?”

  “Nah, no reason to get her upset all over again. Anyway, Bisi’s chosen his path, and if you ask me, he deserves a lot worse than a tram door closing in his face.”

  Bisi was Dayo’s older brother, but they hadn’t talked to him in well over a year now. Efi understood why Dayo was bitter about seeing him, but that didn’t erase all the good memories Efi had of hanging out with him. Bisi had even given Efi her first tool set … Not like the plastic set her parents had gotten her for her fourth birthday, but real, carbon-steel tools. Bisi was smart. Smarter than Dayo, probably. He could have done something great with his life.

  But after high school, he’d gotten caught up with some bad people. He’d owed those bad people some sort of debt, and when they came to collect, they’d mistaken Dayo for Bisi. They’d collected their debt by beating Dayo up, leaving him with a shattered hip, a severe concussion, and a big, shameful stain upon their family.

  Bisi had come to see Dayo in the hospital, muttering apologies, and then just … disappeared. Sometimes Efi wondered if Dayo would be glad to see his brother come home, once he got over his anger. Just like Efi would.

  “Hey, Dayo!” called a guy from down the hallway. “This little lady giving you grief?” He laughed.

  “You know my cousin Efi,” Dayo said. “Efi, this is Sam.”

  “Yeah! The brainiac, right?” Sam said, staring at Efi like he was waiting for her to perform a mathemagical trick and pull an irrational number out of her sleeve or something. Efi hated that look, which was almost always accompanied by some variation of “Say something smart.”

  She wanted to fit in, not stand out.

  “Efi’s having trouble making friends here,” Dayo said, giving Sam a shrug.

  Efi’s eyes widened. Oh no, he didn’t just say that, did he? She felt horrified and beyond embarrassed. “I … uh, have to go. Don’t want to miss my tram!” And then Efi got out of there as fast as she could. Efi loved Dayo, she really did. He was nice to her. He even let her call him by just his first name at school, so she’d feel like his peer and not his kid cousin obligated to show respect. But sometimes he could be majorly clueless.

  Efi hopped on the #47 tram from school to home. Outside the tram windows, all of Numbani sped past: a sleek, high-tech skyline nestled within swaths of nature and sprawling beauty. The glass on the buildings blended into the too big, too blue sky, and nearly every tiered balcony boasted a garden of some sort, so that it was difficult to tell where the structures ended and nature began. On one terrace she saw omnics and humans working together to tend a terrarium bursting with orchids. Efi could almost feel the energies flowing through her city, like it was breathing, uniting its people in harmony. She sometimes heard her mother and aunt speaking of the òrìṣà, spiritual beings who were an integral part of the natural world and touched their lives in ways Efi was still struggling to understand. She’d tried to ask questions on how technology and AI fit into it all, but she was usually swatted away.

  Efi sighed as she popped in her earbuds and turned her attention to her tablet. The live feed was just Naade snoring in class, and Hassana was mumbling to herself during a spelling quiz, so Efi switched to archive footage and rewound through the day.

  Then she found something. Between fourth and fifth period, Stevie Igwe and Sibe Oye were holding hands!

  Efi texted Hassana as soon as school was out.

  Efi scrolled through the feed to after Hassana’s gym class. And there it was. This was it! But everything was dark. Efi could barely make out muffled screaming. And name calling. Sounded like Sibe was saying Stevie was a “backwoods stinking alligator with an ice cream cart”? Or maybe she’d said “backward-thinking omnic-hater with an ice cube for a heart”? It was hard to tell.

  Efi went to Naade’s feed from the same time. Maybe he’d seen something. But right when the breakup was happening, Naade was heading into the restroom. Thankfully, he remembered to hit the privacy setting, and the video went out, but apparently there was a slight glitch in the code, because the audio was still recording. Efi hit the mute on her tablet in time to stave off what she thought would be the worst of the day’s footage, but she was so, so wrong. The worst part by far was sifting through hours and hours of tedium in search of that perfect nugget of gossip. There was the gum smacking. The hair twirling. The toe tapping. The mouth breathing. A thousand little irritants the Junie’s microphones and cameras picked up.

  This definitely wasn’t the best use of Efi’s time. Efi went online looking for algorithms to do the data sorting for her. She wanted to create something that would skip the boring parts and put all the juicy bits in a nice montage she could watch on the tram ride home from school.

  She was browsing the posts on Free Thinkers, the site where she got most of her open source code, when she saw an announcement for a new grant for roboticists. Everyone in the forum discussion was excited about it. It paid a decent amount of naira. Efi knew better than to get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help but think about what that kind of money could do. She could upgrade her computers, make them state-of-the-art, so she wouldn’t spend as much time twiddling her thumbs while her code compiled. Maybe she could even purchase a model with advanced AI.

  Efi clicked the details of the grant
, and the normal stipulations applied—for teachers only. Efi sighed. There were dozens of grants listed on the site, but it seemed Efi never met all the qualifications. Sometimes she was too young. Sometimes she didn’t have the fancy degrees required. Sometimes her robot-making business was too small. Or too big. There was always something holding her back.

  Just as Efi was about to log out in frustration, the mail icon on her screen lit up. She opened the inbox and saw a new message sitting there.

  Ha. Right. Efi didn’t click on it. Probably all kinds of malware and viruses buried in that message. Efi was more than aware of the Adawe Foundation’s “Genius Grant”—one of the most prestigious in the world, given in recognition of a person’s scientific accomplishments. It was set up in honor of Gabrielle Adawe, a founder of Numbani. There were few people Efi admired more. Last year, she made a diorama in history class on how Adawe had helped create Overwatch, an organization of heroes who worked to end the Omnic Crisis and keep the peace. It was an assignment Efi was rather proud of, despite her dreadful crafting skills. She much preferred wires and circuit boards over construction paper and glue sticks, but even so, her diorama was brilliant. It showed Adawe when she was under-secretary-general of the United Nations, her fist held high as she hailed the original members of Overwatch: Jack Morrison, Gabriel Reyes, Ana Amari, Torbjörn Lindholm, and Reinhardt Wilhelm, among others. It inspired Efi to know that an African woman—a woman whose roots were buried in the same rich soil as Efi’s—had more than likely brought the world back from the brink of destruction. Adawe was a hero. Efi would give anything to be nominated for the grant.

  That made this fake nomination cut so much deeper. Efi clicked on the message out of spite. She’d scrub her tablet for viruses when she got home. Giving this “anonymous” user a piece of her mind would be worth the risk.