Solaris Rising (3 page)

I name you, Kwame Charles Damoah. I name you Kofi Mensah. I name you before God and the whole congregation of the dead. I shame you, Raymond Kufuor. Shame on you, Development Minister James Anang.

I am Faith Anang, and I am dead, alas. Cancer the size of a football chewed out my bowel. We all die of something. But I am rising up my spirit house, and I am talking to you, James Anang, yes, you. I am talking to you from this grand and novelty spirit house with all its fine furniture and the French windows and the decking and infinity pool, which you bought for me. Tell me, where did this money come from? You can’t defy me, you rascal, not your own grandmother. Yes, your own grandmother! I know you. Here, all you protestors and students: here’s a thing only a grandmother would know. He’s away on a trade mission to Ivory Coast – checking out all the money he has stashed there. You want to protest? You want to make him listen? You can march around Independence Square until you are dizzy, but if you really want to hurt him, listen to his grandmother. The account is in the Banque Nationale Cote D’Ivoire, sort code 987645, account number 1097856432, Ibann number: cdi109785. You’re students, you know about computers. That is all I shall say.

(Television interview with Obo Quartey:

Ten O’clock News,
May 27
^th
, 2021)

John Tettey
: Good Evening, Mr Quartey. The obvious question first: is the fact that you’re giving this interview from Northern Mali not an indication that you feel threatened by the Fourth Republic?

Obo Quartey
: Not at all, John, not at all. We’ve been working on moving our server farm to Mali for some time.

John Tettey
; Well, I’m just saying how it might seem to the average viewer seeing the CEO of Teshie dot org, which has been threatened with closure by the government, opening up a new headquarters in another country.

Obo Quartey
: Teshie dot org has been a major investor in Sahel Solar, which has brought prosperity and employment to what is undeniably a poor country. Mali offers us stable and cost-effective electricity. Oil prices are simply too volatile, and from Teshie’s point of view, it’s not just economically but environmentally and politically foolish to tie ourselves to local oil. It was local oil that started the problem in the first place. You can’t sell off the sun.

John Tettey
: Yes. So it is politically, environmentally and economically prudent, but is Teshie doing exactly what the protestors down in Independence Square accuse the government of doing, moving cash and assets out of the country?

Obo Quartey
: John, our accounts are transparent. Anyone can go online to Companies House and look at them. It’s cheap solar, first and foremost. But, if that cheap solar happens to remove us from the jurisdiction of a government that doesn’t understand the nature of modern telecommunications and social media, that’s a benefit, isn’t it?

John Tettey
: What do you say to Justice Minister Kwame Charles Damoah, who has called for the Mali Government to arrest and extradite you?

Obo Quartey
: Well, I think he’ll be a long time waiting for the Malian justice system to do anything, even lubricated with some of his oil money. But I’m not in hiding. I’m overseeing a transfer to a new server farm.

John Tettey
: So, nothing to do with the fact that your company has refused to hand over the identities of people posting lampoons and critical messages masquerading as dead relatives?

Obo Quartey
: Not so much refused to hand over, John, as
can’t
. We don’t collect those details, we don’t have those details. We can’t hand over what we don’t have.

John Tettety
: Oh come on, you expect me to believe that you don’t record log-ins or keep records of ISPs?

Obo Quartey:
The Spirit Chat Channel was originally a stripped down IM system for families to keep in touch. We wanted it to be as useful and ubiquitous as possible so it could be accessed from computers, Smartphones, dumbphones – it was designed to work with everything, from anywhere. So, it’s become a vehicle for popular dissatisfaction with the government, but I’m not to blame them for that. If someone realised that speaking through the dead gives you anonymity, and also lends you a certain moral authority, yet again, I’m not responsible for that. If those same people start to think that maybe they should encrypt their postings on the Teshie network – we all need to improve our internet security these days – that’s the kind of computer-literate, savvy country we are. Certainly not Teshie dot org’s problem.

John Tettey
: But the government is threatening to close you and freeze your assets.

Obo Quartey
: Well, as you said, we are in a different jurisdiction here and we’ll have to see what the legal position is. For the government to try and close down Teshie it would have to erect a firewall that would impact the entire digital economy, not just ours. And I truly believe that, morally, it would be a foolish government that would further antagonise popular opinion by cutting people off from their ancestors and their family history.

John Tettey
: So the protests and lampoons will continue?

Obo Quartey
: Don’t ask me, ask the dead.

Tea? Yes. How are you? You look tired, Azumah. Have they been working you too hard up in Algeria? Hard people. Very serious, I hear. What was it you were working on? Remind me again. Oh yes, the solar power. Yes, that is hard work in a dry place. Tired you look, but wealthy.

Sorry about the sugar, yes, I forgot. I can’t take it without sugar. It doesn’t taste of anything.

Thank you for the money. Did any of the others thank you for it? No, I didn’t think so. You’ll have to forgive Ayii, I don’t think he even knows what you do, not really. Felix Cofie thanks you, the spirit house is looking lovely, it’s so him, all the football mementos, and I’ve added a few things myself; little things he and I would know.

Yes it’s me. You’re surprised. What surprises you, Azumah? That I’m writing the posts for Felix Cofie, that I am one of those terrible dangerous people who want to bring down the Fourth Republic, or that I know how to write a post and work the Teshie system at all? That last is easy – it’s the way these days. It’s the future of the nation – look at that Obo Quartey boy in his smart suit and his Mercedes. He came from just up the street, you know. I learnt down at the community centre. They have special classes. All my friends go, it’s the place to be. We type and have tea. I even have a little netbook, an old homeworker one. They sell them off very cheap.

Where do people get this idea that only the young care enough to change the world? I have eyes, I have ears, and when you get older, your skin grows thin and you can bear the suffering of others less. It scrapes you, rubs you raw. I saw the prices going up at Maxmart, I heard Akron Kufuor from Excelsior Taxis saying that more and more of his money was going on fuel. And I did some reading – we all did some reading, all the ladies in our little network, and we saw why the prices were going up and where the money was going to – who the money was going to – and we learned about what they call ‘resource curse’ and we thought, like a lot of other people, this is not our nation, this is not our people, this is not the way we are; we are better than this, we are better than oil. And it was an easy thing to do, to have this idea that I could pretend to be Felix Cofie, and give him a voice. We are full of stories of people being warned by spirits in the bush and ancestors in the special place in the house and I thought, now we can make this real. The dead really can warn and advise and nag.

And do you know, it’s fun. It’s fun to be your father. Because, do you know, I miss him. Can you believe that? I miss him every day. Oh, he would sit in his chair and say maybe three words a day and never pay attention to anything more interesting than how well or how badly FC Maamobi were doing, but I missed that. And I found I could give him a voice to say in death all the things he never could in life. And it made me remember why I loved him in the first place, what a big fine and loud man he once was, and how handsome. How good he was, how he cared. Life can drive that out of you.

Dangerous? No there is no danger. They will not come and break in my door with sticks. We would never stand for that around here. If they attack an old woman after they attack the dead, well, they are not far from a fall. And anyway, they won’t find me. No no no. There is a new security patch for Teshie, some clever boy wrote it. No, there are more things Felix Cofie needs to say.

That tea must be cold. Would you like a little warm-up?

(Obo Quartey on
The Dead Net: Teshie.org,

social networking and social transformation.

TED talk, concluding section)

…In themselves, the technologies don’t effect social change. I don’t even particularly believe that they enable social change. Teshie.org didn’t offer anything radically new – none of the networking platforms do. There have only been two world-changing communications technologies. The first is the telegraph; the ability to send message by wire – and that’s 19
^th
century. Switching and networking. The other is the ability to put that in your pocket and carry it around. What Teshie did was offer us the most appropriate means, and by that I mean the most culturally appropriate. Our small, well-mannered uprising of the dead would not have worked anywhere else… and they weren’t looking for revolution. Just some admission of wrong-doing, maybe a resignation. That we got a revolution – yet again, credit to us, a bloodless one – I think is a combination of unique factors: strong family ties, Teshie.org giving a shape and a structure to those family ties and turning them into a strong weapon of shame. There are guilt cultures and there are shame cultures, we are still a shame culture – when the Development Minister’s own dead grandmother says she is ashamed of him, then that is the pebble that starts the landslide. To be realistic, we would never have been more than a biting fly if the government hadn’t threatened to close us down. Whaaaat? You’re going to cut me off from my ancestors? You don’t mess with families. That started the strikes, and it was the strikes that brought down not just Raymond Kufuor but the entire Fourth Republic.

Six months on, what we have now in Teshie is a built-in subversion network. When the Government went to the courts to get an order for us to disclose our subscribers, that led directly to somebody – not us, some kid in a neighbourhood data centre somewhere – writing a cheap, mobile compatible anonymizing app. Two hundred thousand downloads in forty-eight hours? I think that deserves some appreciation. Then when they tried to shut down the mobile networks, people built their own – and cheaper and better than the private ones. The micro-working companies are moving their servers off the big telecoms onto neighbourhood networks – they’re cheaper, better, and it means people can home-work now. Anonymizing, encryption and open wifi – we are now the world leaders in popular, secure communications networks. The dead will never be silenced.

So, what for Teshie now? We’re expanding, we’re diversifying. We’re much more than a social network company that grew out of a website for Fantasy Coffins. Our investments in Mali have convinced us that solar is the future. Leave the oil under the sea. Solar – particular micro-solar – is cheap, dependable and democratic. Every district can be a micro-solar power station. Open, local, distributed wireless and power networks – that’s a strong economy and a strong society. But if there’s one thing I want to leave you with, it’s this: never underestimate a disgruntled ghost.

Yes yes yes, so I am talking again, I am grumbling and complaining but do you expect me to go back to being quiet and well-behaved? Once we’ve been disturbed in our spirit houses, once we’ve been made uncomfortable on our stools, once we’ve remembered how good it is to talk and be listened to, do you think we’ll go back to the silence? No: the country is quiet, prices are stable, we have good government and our good name in the eyes of the world back, and I hear someone is filling in the potholes on Kanda Highway. No, what I am aggrieved about is that Ike Okai Mensah is still Manager of FC Maamobi! Something must be done!

THE INCREDIBLE EXPLODING MAN

DAVE HUTCHINSON

Dave Hutchinson is the author of one novel and five collections of short stories, and the editor of two anthologies. He’s also the author of the BSFA-Award-nominated novella ‘The Push’, of which he is maniacally proud. Before being made redundant during the recent recession, Dave spent twenty-five years working as a journalist. He was born in Sheffield but lives in North London with his wife and assorted cats. One of the trickiest elements of this story was settling on the right title… He wanted it to have that Marvel Comics feel.

From a distance, the first thing you saw was the cloud.

It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.