The Hero of Numbani Read online

  “Efi, why aren’t you listening?” her mother asked, snapping fingers in front of Efi’s face. Efi came to and saw her mother looking down at her, and though she’d just defended her child with a ferociousness that Efi had never seen, somehow Efi felt that she’d made a mistake.

  “Why did you have to bring so much?” her mother asked. “I thought the whole point of this vacation was for you to get away from those robots!”

  “Sorry, Mama. But I needed my dev box to code on. And my test box to run my simulations, which means I need to run a Maxwell Interpreter to autosort all eight billion permutations into virtual hash matrices, which means I need a dedicated MI box. Unless you expect me to do all that on my tablet with the preinstalled version 3.44 VAvmpCompiler, which is absurd.”

  “Sooooo absurd,” Naade said, trying to break the tension. “And you can’t bring the super-accelerated tiddlywinks without the double-hydrogenated thingamabobs and can’t have the micro-whoozits without the nano-whatzits.” He raised a brow, then opened his mouth to say something else, but closed it again when he fell under the cold stares of both Efi and her mother.

  “Mama, asking me to stop thinking about robots is like asking me to stop breathing. Would you ask a painter not to paint a beautiful sunset while on vacation? Would you ask a historian not to visit historical sites on vacation? Making robots is not just what I do, it’s who I—”

  Boom.

  A blast from behind Efi sent her to her knees. Concrete dust suddenly filled the room, along with about a dozen different alarms. The floor shook, and it felt like the whole world was coming apart.

  It took a moment for her head to stop spinning. Someone was reaching for Efi, her father. She hadn’t recognized him with all the white dust on his face.

  “Efi!” he said, with an exhale of relief. “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” she said, but he was already pulling her into the relative safety of an alcove. Mother rushed ahead of him with Naade and Hassana tucked under her arms. Another explosion rocked the concourse. People were running frantically away from the disturbance, some with their phones drawn, thrown up behind them, trying to capture the destruction as they fled. Efi’s heart dropped into her stomach. The monotone voices of the OR15s filled the concourse, demanding that the assailant cease and comply.

  People were screaming. Crying.

  Her mother was cut, a deep slash upon her forearm. But the worst, the absolute worst for Efi was seeing the look in her mother’s vacant eyes, like she was miles away. A lifetime away. She rocked back and forth, squeezing Naade and Hassana so tightly that they struggled to get a glimpse of the scene behind her. Efi worried that her mother’s mind was back there, during the Omnic Crisis, caught up in the old traumas that lingered at the edges of her memory. In that instant, Efi realized what that conflict had stolen from her mother, and what it had stolen away from tens of millions of people around the world.

  The broken bones had healed. The cuts had scabbed over. The worst wounds left by the crisis, however, were the scars that had formed on the inside. Scars that were readily torn apart when the mind wandered back too far. Efi hurt for her mother, and everything she had been bottling up came flooding out of her.

  “What’s going on? Why is this happening?” Efi cried. Her words tasted of concrete and smoke.

  “Iyawo mi, look,” Efi’s father whispered to her mother. He snapped until he brought her out of the deep trance, then she followed his stare across the terminal. A teenager was pinned by a hunk of fallen concrete, out in the open.

  The fear on his face made Efi wince. She felt that fear, too, but she couldn’t give in to it. She always said she wanted to be a hero. Now was her chance.

  “We have to rescue him,” Efi said.

  “Who’s going to rescue us?” said Naade.

  Efi pulled out her Junie, but Mother shoved it roughly back into her bag. “No,” she ordered. “Let the OR15s handle it. That’s their job. Our job is finding a way out of here quickly and quietly.”

  “But, Mama—I can do something!” she whispered back.

  “No, Efi,” her mother said again. The shake in her voice made cold shoot through Efi’s veins.

  While her mother and father scanned the settling dust, Efi turned back to the wall, set the Junie down, opened her tablet, and used the navigation software to guide it into place. The trip was dangerous for a human, but not a robot. She pulled up the video and audio inputs and there, she saw it.

  The concourse was littered with chunks of concrete, abandoned luggage strewn all over the place. From the low vantage point of the Junie, the rubble looked like mountains. One of the OR15s guarding the transport cart closed in on someone. A man, Efi could make out through the dust. Very large. Very strong. A cascade of electrical sparks from broken wiring temporarily gave her a good look at his face. Efi sucked in her breath.

  No. It can’t be.

  Doomfist.

  Hassana and Naade stared at the screen over her shoulder and let out a collective gasp. Efi zoomed in. She was certain his muscles couldn’t possibly be that large, wondering if it was a trick of her camera lens.

  “But he’s in prison,” Hassana said.

  “Not anymore,” Efi said.

  Efi’s eyes went right to the gold-plated cybernetic devices implanted into his fists and spine, linking to the communications piece covering his ears. They’d removed most of his implants immediately after the trial, Efi was sure of that. The world had watched as the court-appointed cybernetic surgeon pulled the imbedded tech from Doomfist’s skin, hastily sutured the war criminal up, then sent him off to be locked away for good.

  But now Doomfist was back. And the implants were back, and better—not the kind of tech you could get from your local Axiom. He had help, Talon most likely—the terrorist group that masqueraded as a bunch of mercenaries trying to strengthen humanity through conflict. Were there other Talon agents here as well?

  Doomfist raised his left hand, and cannons blasted bright yellow bursts from the cybernetic implants, knocking a spatial sensor off the side of the OR15. The robot stumbled in circles, trying to compensate for the sudden change in its sensory input. Finally, it aimed its fusion driver at Doomfist, but it was too easy a target now. Before the robot could fire off a single burst, Doomfist pummeled it with more cannon shots, sending the bot’s titanium plating flying in all directions and exposing vulnerable circuitry.

  Doomfist laughed, a deep, weighty laugh that Efi could feel inside her own chest. “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” he said in Yoruba, leaping forward through the barrage of fire as two more OR15s charged onto the scene. The frayed, rust-red wrappa tied around his waist flapped as he cut through the air. He landed in front of the incapacitated robot and punched right into the open access panel. The sound of crushed circuit boards followed. The angry red lights on the OR15’s face plate flickered yellow, then green, then blinked out altogether.

  More reinforcements cut through the panicked travelers who were still looking to escape. One robot’s arm clipped a woman as she fled, knocking her to her knees. The robot didn’t care. Didn’t even look back to see the harm it had caused. Talon agents materialized from the shadows, like crabs rising out of the sand. They held the OR15s at bay as Doomfist jumped on top of the transport cart and smashed the glass canister. The robots fired their fusion drivers, hard balls of green light slicing through the air and taking out two agents. They pivoted and shot down two more, synchronized, like they were following the same coding instructions. Just when it looked like the OR15s were gaining the advantage, Doomfist raised the gauntlet into the air, now firmly upon his right arm.

  Doomfist flexed his fingers, metal spikes jutting up from the knuckles. He nodded, like he was pleased with the perfect fit. Then he set his eyes on one of the OR15s. He pointed at it, then cocked the gauntlet back. Electricity gathered, blue bolts of lightning feeding into the massive clenched fist. Then it sped forward toward the robot so fast, Efi would have missed it if she
’d blinked. A concussive blast traveled a few meters through the air, colliding with the robot and sending it flying back into the wall behind it. Concrete busted all around the OR15, leaving it pressed into the crater. Most of it anyway. Parts of the robot had crumbled away on impact, like it had been held together with an off-brand glue stick.

  The impact jostled the broken ceiling, and now Efi could tell Doomfist was close—dangerously close to them. She looked up from the tablet to see a huge chunk of concrete dangling from a length of rebar. Below, the trapped teenager screamed as another round of dust fell on him.

  “Don’t look,” Efi’s mother warned her, trying to draw her attention away from the carnage. Efi was terrified, but she couldn’t look away if she wanted. Doomfist had been dangerous before, but now he seemed unstoppable. His fighting style was fast, accurate, and powerful, which made it easy to miss how he controlled his body with such grace. The level of concentration Doomfist had was superhuman.

  The teenager didn’t have long, so Efi scraped together an idea that wouldn’t fail. It couldn’t fail, because if it did, Efi didn’t know if she’d ever recover.

  “I’m going in closer. Maybe we can distract him long enough to help that guy get to safety.” Efi maneuvered the bot so that it was coming in the opposite angle, away from where they were. Then she pulled up the avatar of the one person she knew Doomfist wouldn’t be able to ignore: the Scourge of Numbani, the second Doomfist. The man whom this Doomfist had killed to gain his gauntlet and his title. His hologram rose out of the dust, until it was face-to-face with the successor.

  Efi felt the world around her stop. The gunfire ceased, and for a moment, Doomfist looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Her frantic heartbeat was the only sound in her head as she watched her dad rush across the terminal, with Hassana keeping low at his heels. Doomfist reached out his ungauntleted hand to the hologram, while her father and best friend silently lifted the block of cement off the teenager’s leg, then rushed him back over to the safety of the alcove.

  The distraction was just that, though. A distraction. Doomfist realized where the projection was coming from and Efi flinched as he fired a single cannon blast at the Junie. The screen of her tablet flashed bright blue; then the feed went to black. Without the Junie, she didn’t have a clean line of sight, but then Doomfist was leaping high into the air, so high he could have slapped the ceiling if he’d wanted to. He came down with the same targeted swiftness and catlike reflexes, but as he did, he drove his fist into the ground.

  The impact was so great, it rocked the terminal and caused Efi to bite down on her tongue. She could taste the blood in her mouth. The other OR15s didn’t get off so easily. The discharge tore through them, turning metal to shreds. The dangling piece of the ceiling finally crashed down onto the spot where the teenaged boy had been stuck not a minute earlier. Efi shielded herself as best she could, breathing through her shirt to avoid inhaling concrete dust, holding on to … someone. Through all the grit, all the fear, and all the confusion, she couldn’t tell if it was her mother or father or a complete stranger. It didn’t matter, because that someone was holding tight on to her, too, and she never wanted them to let go.

  Finally, the air started to clear, and the sounds of explosions ended. They waited an eternity, wondering if the fighting would return, but all was quiet. Father tried to go out by himself to assess the situation, but Efi refused to let him out of her sight. She refused to let anyone out of her sight, and so they moved all together, slowly, until they saw the destruction.

  Efi’s teeth pressed together so hard, her jaw ached. Fifteen OR15s lay prone, out of commission. Sparks spit out from their busted chassis. Several were missing heads or limbs. It was a bloodbath … or rather, a hydraulic fluid bath. It was pouring out everywhere, pools of it causing a honey-gold sheen on the ground.

  An enormous hole gaped in the side of the terminal. Through it, a trail of even more OR15s. What would this mean for Numbani? The most highly advanced security ever commissioned for civilians had been smashed flat by a single man. Now that Doomfist had his gauntlet—a weapon that was rumored to level skyscrapers—the danger seemed insurmountable.

  The shock was still thick, but three thoughts made it through Efi’s brain:

  There would be no trip to Rio.

  There would be no Unity Day celebration.

  And there would be no peace in Numbani until Doomfist was stopped.

  Efi let the warmth of the coffee mug soothe her nerves, staring at the emblem of the Numbani Civic Defense Department on the side. She took small sips, hoping she could blame some of her jitters on the caffeine. It was more milk than coffee, but she’d convinced her parents that if she was old enough to help save a boy from getting smashed by Doomfist, then she was old enough to drink coffee.

  Her parents said it was too late in the evening for such a drink and that it would keep her up tonight. After all Efi had been through today, she didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to help out however she could.

  Her parents stood behind her, her guardians, and not just in the parental sense. She felt like they were supersoldiers, and even the smallest infraction by these officers would bring down their wrath.

  “So, Efi,” one of the officers said. She was polished yet friendly, and wore zigzag braids ending in a neat bun. She talked directly to Efi, unlike the other officers, who talked around her as if she were a potted cactus. “We understand that you have footage of the attack.”

  Efi nodded. “Yes, ma.” Her finger trembled as it hovered over the file icon on her tablet. She looked up at the officer to confirm that she was ready to receive the file, then she slid her finger in the direction of the officer’s tablet. The icon floated through the air, blinked out of existence, before appearing above the officer’s screen.

  “Have you watched it?” the officer asked.

  “I saw it live,” Efi whispered. “But I haven’t watched it again. Was anybody hurt?”

  “Only minor injuries, fortunately. Unfortunately, airport security cameras were compromised minutes before the attack. We’re trying to piece together what happened based on cell-phone footage, but so far it’s all been bad angles and blurred motion.”

  “This isn’t, ma. The video is solid. 360-degree view. If there is something to be seen, the video captured it.”

  “Very good,” the officer said, then pressed the file icon.

  Efi couldn’t see the screen as the video played, but the sound was enough to make her go stiff. Mother’s hand touched lightly on Efi’s shoulder, but it did nothing to calm her. Anger welled up, and all the emotions Efi had kept bottled up threatened to become tears. She willed them away, and only one of them made it down her cheek.

  So much screaming.

  “Eish,” the officer said, cringing.

  “It was all my fault,” Efi said. “We should have gone to the beach. I shouldn’t have applied for that grant. I—”

  “Shhhh, honey,” her mother said. “This is none of your fault.”

  “This is exactly the footage we’ve been looking for,” the officer said, “but I’d imagined the OR15s would have put up a better fight. I’m sorry, Efi, but we’re going to have to keep this quiet for a while. If people found out how truly useless the OR15s are against Doomfist, all semblance of safety would be lost.”

  Efi nodded. She didn’t want to see those images ever again, and she surely didn’t want to make anyone else suffer through them.

  “Did you notice anything else before the attack?” the officer asked.

  Efi almost shook her head, then remembered trying to boot up her laptop for airport security. “I saw a weird wireless signal for a second. ‘344X-Azúcar.’ It could have been the malware they used to crack the camera systems. I … can’t remember more than that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “You’ve done more than enough, Efi. We’ve taken statements from your friends as well, and they all pointed to how bravely you acted. You’re a hero.”

  Was she a hero
? She had given the civic defenders a leg up on capturing Doomfist. She agreed with that, but she didn’t agree that she’d done enough. She hadn’t done nearly enough.

  “What comes next, then? Who will protect us?” Efi asked as the interview concluded.

  The officer drew in a breath, then sighed. “That, Efi, is the big question.”

  It was the big question, and Efi couldn’t let it go unanswered. The OR15s had proven useless against Doomfist, but they didn’t have to be. Suddenly, she had thoughts running around in her head that were too idealistic and too ambitious and too costly.

  Well, maybe not too costly.

  Efi had received the first quarterly installment of her grant money: five million naira, currently sitting in an account at the Numbani Credit Union. And in her Overwatch coin bank, she had at least two hundred thousand naira from birthdays and holidays and perfect report cards, protected by Reinhardt’s intimidating rocket hammer. Plus, she expected another three hundred thousand naira once she shipped the next batch of Junies out. Her profit margins were low so she could keep them affordable to her customers, but every bit would count.

  “I’d like an OR15,” Efi said to the officer, forcing the words out. Was she really going to do this? “One of the robots that Doomfist destroyed.”

  The officer smiled warmly. “That’s not something we can arrange, I’m afraid. Auditors would be up my … in my business. Those things aren’t cheap.”

  “I’ll pay,” Efi said.

  “What?” Efi’s parents said simultaneously.

  Efi ignored them. “I’ll pay. Five and a half million naira.”

  “Honey, that grant money is for—”

  “It’s not just the money,” another officer cut in, arms crossed over his chest, standing off in a shadowy corner. “That kind of tech is dangerous. It isn’t for kids.”

  Efi looked up at the officer. If she never heard another person in her life dismiss her as a “kid,” it would be too soon.

  “The grant money is from the Adawe Foundation for me to build robots. I’m working on advanced tech with their guidance. I know I’m young, but I have the experience. I have the ideas. I have the money. All I need is for you to let me have one of those robots so I can build a new and improved OR15. One that can outsmart Doomfist.”