By Raúl Gonzálvez del Águila
The last day of the last winter over old Lake Chad was also the day Dajimi’s father disappeared south, never to return. That night, though the end of the season, had been the coldest. The heater kept the cabin warm until dawn, when it gave a final pitiful hiss and stopped. Dajimi wasn’t surprised. The battery had been faltering for weeks; it was almost a miracle it lasted this long. Graphene panels were easy to find—leftovers from the upper traders’ last visit—but fixing the quantum dot required Akimi’s help. Akimi, far to the north, working on the glacier, with no promise of return.
Dajimi wrapped herself in a caribou coat over her zani and stepped out. Outside, the icy western wind wrestled with the rising sun, but the sky was clear, save for dark clouds far north and the silhouette of the Shackles chain across the horizon. The frost-crusted leaves crunched underfoot. Rajan bounded toward her, his Labrador body warm as he nudged her side, licking her face eagerly.
“Easy, little one,” she said, giving him a biscuit. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”
Few ventured near the flood center, especially since the village had moved inland before she was born. The chatter of the neodog kept her grounded, kept her from overthinking. An upper had gifted Rajan to her father when he was a pup, but Dajimi liked to think he was hers, in some unspoken way.
“Cold,” Rajan barked. “No little clothes.”
Dajimi smiled. Rajan, ever the overprotective one.
“It’s not that cold, whiner. Besides, today’s the last day of winter. We have to prepare for summer and flowers!” She tugged at his ears, making him hop around.
“I’m not cold! More biscuits?”
“Later, smarty. We have work first.”
The path to the tower was clearer than usual for winter, though each night the frozen sap sent branches crashing down. Tajime had always maintained it, but now, her father only came at night to clear it. Dajimi had tried to catch him once, but he always fled. She didn’t try anymore.
Before reaching the lakeshore, Dajimi set the metal bands of the emitter on her shaved temples. She could control the archies without it, but the connection was smoother this way. She activated it, scanning the treetops in infrared. The swarms spent their nights nestled in thick foliage—coconut and red trees by the shore. She found several dozen, coaxed them down, and marked a dozen swarms for the shore.
Rajan darted after wild ducks, sending them scattering in a flurry of feathers.
“Someday, you’ll catch one!” she laughed as he vanished into the reeds, heedless of her voice.
The frost-bent reeds and jaraguas along the bank glistened. The mud crunched beneath her boots, ice a half-finger thick. Dajimi frowned. If the cannon ports were frozen, she’d have to divert archies to thaw them, and she was already short.
She arranged the swarms, ten units per cubic centimeter, in hexagons around the tower, rising twenty meters high. A few smaller swarms would clear the ice. By mid-morning, the battery would be charged, the cannons free from risk of breakage.
Satisfied, she took out her thermos, sipping fish soup. Her favorite moment of the morning was interrupted by a rustle. A shadow moved through the reeds. Her father’s face flashed in her mind, but before she could speak, it retreated into the marsh.
Dajimi sighed. As the mboko worsened, her father had grown elusive. Two months ago, just after Akimi left for the glacier, he abandoned their cabin, retreating to the jungle. Each time she thought of it, a lump rose in her throat. He would join the others eventually, vanishing into the dark southern forest, never to return.
She shook off the melancholy, focusing on her tasks. She directed the swarms as planned. The tiny archies, invisible unless gathered in resting swarms, danced on the emitter’s screen as they rose above the tower to capture light. The underground battery began to fill.
The tower, ten meters tall, was the largest structure Dajimi knew. It controlled the entire lake’s flooding system. Her father said that when it first began, the shore was kilometers away; now, the lake lapped at the old auxiliary buildings, half-submerged. One day, the tower itself would be underwater. But that was a long way off. Dajimi liked watching the shores recede, the banks sinking beneath the rising water. A few meters from the edge, the stilt house she built last summer still stood, nearly lost in marsh grass.
Since she was five, she’d built a stilt house each summer, watching birds, gazelles, even the occasional rhino or cheetah. More often now, caribou and bison that fled the north. Rajan had entered her life around that time, and she knew her father had brought him to protect her from her own wildness.
She imagined this summer’s stilt house, but the thought of leisure vanished. With her father gone, the flood center would be hers alone. Akimi might help, but her aunt had other concerns. The Twenty-Four would soon present suitors, but at thirteen, marriage was the least of her worries. What she wanted was freedom: swimming in the lake with Rajan, as she always had.
Rajan appears suddenly, barking excitedly. “Sky stranger! Stranger!” He pointed north with his nose.
Dajimi scanned the sky. The transmitter picked up an oval-shaped shuttle. It was an upper vessel, and it was coming down fast, set to crash on the lakeshore in ten minutes.
Before the ice gripped the Earth, every territory had a name. Her father had said that the ancient name of the lake was “Chad,” meaning a place rich with water. Dajimi often wondered why the ancients had been so eager to name things, as if naming the land, the air, or the water gave them power over it.
She had already informed the commune about the shuttle. Two councilwomen were en route to the lake, but they wouldn’t arrive in time. Dajimi had tried to contact the shuttle, but no one responded. At least the craft had begun to slow, its path veering near the tower where Dajimi stood on the top floor, watching it descend.
Stories told of a time when the lake had nearly dried up, shrinking to a shallow basin just kilometers across. The ancients had built the tower and its cannons to pull water from the atmosphere, refilling the lake. The elders said this happened before the ice age, but Dajimi doubted the tower was that old, or that the lake had ever been so empty.
“Is it here yet?” Samia’s voice came through the transmitter.
“Not yet,” Dajimi replied. “But it’s close. I’ll send you the feed.”
“It looks like a Vortex class,” Hasä said. “What’s it doing out here?”
Upper merchants often arrived unannounced, though they usually sent word ahead so the village could prepare. But merchants typically came in larger ships, not small shuttles like this one.
“We’ll get there after it lands—the path’s a mess of mud. Don’t approach until we arrive; we don’t know who they are.”
Dajimi acknowledged briefly and ended the call.
The shuttle hovered over the old landing strip and descended with a sharp hiss. Without her intervention, a swarm of archies moved from the tower, charging the shuttle’s batteries.
Rajan sprinted toward the landing, and Dajimi followed, eyes fixed on the vessel—a white, petal-shaped craft about five meters long. A door opened, and even from a distance, Dajimi could make out the figure stepping onto the cracked asphalt.
The upper was small and round, like an oversized infant, naked despite the cold. His skin was newly sprouted, grass-green and marbled with turquoise patterns that shifted like oil.
He stumbled on the uneven surface, not noticing Dajimi until Rajan barked and bounded over.
“Friend! A friend!” Rajan called, thrilled.
Dajimi reminded herself that, for all their differences, the uppers were still human. She hurried after Rajan. The upper had wide, blue eyes, bright as the lake in summer, but he was shorter than she had expected.
“I welcome you, esteemed guest. I—”
“Where’s Tajime?” the upper interrupted, his voice sharp. Hearing her father’s name startled her. “Tajime,” he repeated. “You’re his daughter, right? Where is he?”
“I… I’m not sure…” Dajimi began. “Mboko.”
The upper’s face twisted into something like a grimace. “He hasn’t gone south yet?”
Dajimi shook her head.
“Good. Let’s find him. I’m Hobbe. You must be Dajimi.” Now, for the first time, he seemed to really notice her, looking her over carefully. “Has he started wandering?”
“He’s been walking the woods for two months, but he doesn’t stray far. Why are you looking for him?” Dajimi hesitated to guess whether Hobbe was male or female.
Before Hobbe could answer, the hum of a caterpillar vehicle approached.
The councilwomen arrived, their faces muddy, their movements calm despite the tension in the air. Samia and Hasä kissed Dajimi on the forehead and bowed to the upper.
“Honored superior,” Samia began, “how can we serve you?”
Villagers had no choice but to comply if an upper decided to stay among them. Sometimes, the uppers grew tired of their skybound lives and descended to live with those below, only to drift away again.
“How is your father?” Hasä asked Dajimi.
Hobbe pulled a small silver disk from his skin and aimed it at the councilwomen. In an instant, both fell to the cobblestones.
Dajimi fought the urge to scream. She cradled Hasä’s head, relieved to find her still breathing.
“They’re just asleep,” Hobbe said flatly. “We don’t have time for pleasantries. We need to find your father.”
Sometimes Dajimi wished her father had already left, like the others afflicted with mboko. The shuddering footsteps in the night, the groans at dusk—she had spent months trying to ignore them. But even the first signs of his transformation hadn’t prepared her for what came after.
Dajimi knew her father’s habit of wandering the undergrowth near their cabin in the early hours, while she worked in the tower. So, when Hobbe headed in that direction, she wasn’t surprised. He surely had some advanced upper technology to track her father.
Her father’s transformation had been so swift that Dajimi had barely adjusted to it. Though mboko wasn’t uncommon in the commune—each year saw two or three cases—the symptoms varied widely. Some took years before they finally left, while others, like her father, changed in months, their bodies overtaken by scales before they wandered south and disappeared.
“Father close,” Rajan growled, who had also begun avoiding Tajime, even showing aggression when they crossed paths.
Hobbe led them to a clearing scattered with splintered logs. The trees had split during a harsh frost years ago, their valuable mulch long carried inland to cultivate crops. Now, only bleached stones and rotting trunks remained. Between two felled logs, her father crouched, picking at the wood like an insect. A wave of nausea hit Dajimi, but she forced herself to look. She refused to be one of those who abandoned their kin because of mboko.
He still resembled a man, but his skin was now a patchwork of scales and bulging growths; branches budding with fresh shoots sprouted from his shoulders. Tajime stood as they approached, not running this time. Dajimi noted he had grown nearly half a meter taller. With a low, mournful groan, her father looked toward Hobbe. The upper advanced confidently, the silver disk in hand.
“Are you going to kill him?” Dajimi asked, her voice barely audible as she followed.
“Of course not. Your friends are unharmed, aren’t they?”
Her father lowered his head. The only recognizable features were his upper lip and eyes, lost amid the scales and cysts. Dajimi looked at him closely for the first time in weeks, wondering how long she could still see him as family. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She wasn’t sure if any part of the man she had loved still existed within that shell of wood and keratin.
Hobbe transformed the disk into a colorless needle, sliding it into her father’s arm to extract a blood sample. Tajime stood still, his expression impassive. Hobbe studied the dark liquid before it vanished into a fold in his skin. Dajimi asked the question she already knew the answer to.
“Can you…?”
“No.” Hobbe cut her off. “Even if I could, we don’t have the time.” He looked at her father, laying a hand on his arm. “Believe me, I wish I could.”
Without another word, Hobbe turned and started back. Rajan followed. Dajimi stayed behind for a moment, watching her father rise and disappear into the underbrush. She didn’t even try to stop him.
By the time she returned to the tower, Hobbe was already at the shuttle. “Good,” she thought. “Whatever he needed from Tajime, I hope he has it and leaves.” Her thoughts turned to Samia and Hasä, still unconscious. Once the upper departed, she would call the village and explain. No one would ask too many questions. The actions of the uppers were never questioned.
The transmitter buzzed softly at her temple: the tower’s batteries were charged, and the cannons free of ice. “He won’t mind if I get back to work,” she decided, activating the engines. The familiar hum rose from deep underground as the closest cannon—one of fifty scattered around the lake—shot a stream of clear water, catching the light in a small rainbow. She grimaced. Her peaceful moment was spoiled by the upper, who still lingered near the shuttle.
“Come on!” Hobbe called impatiently. “Which part of urgency don’t you understand?”
Dajimi froze. Was he asking her to come with him? That was impossible. Uppers never took anyone with them. She stepped back, for the first time, feeling a cold spike of fear.
“You can come willingly, or I can make you,” Hobbe said, holding up the metallic disk.
Realizing she had no choice, Dajimi dropped the transmitter and walked toward the shuttle. Rajan was already inside, barking at something. As she followed his gaze, she saw it. Another upper lay crumpled in the vessel, their skin dull and yellowed with death.
Dajimi had never seen the lake from above. For a moment, the sight made her forget she was being abducted. Her heart raced as the floor of the vessel turned transparent, giving her the feeling of falling. But once reassured by the solid ground beneath her feet, she found herself mesmerized by the landscape below—the aquamarine shores, the dark brown of mudbanks, and the deep indigo of the inland waters.
Even with their speed, Dajimi could pick out fishing boats setting out at dawn, dark spirulina farms, and the shadows of animals seeking water. Flamingos cast pink reflections across the lake. One of the northernmost water cannons churned the surface, jarring her moment of wonder.
Her gaze fell on the second upper’s body. Rajan lay beside it, and Hobbe hovered over the console, his attention elsewhere. Dajimi wanted to feel anger, but all she felt was resignation. After a moment, she spoke.
“Where are we going?” What she wanted to ask was, “How do you know my father?” She suspected Hobbe was the one who had given Rajan to her.
“Give me your arm,” was his only reply. Dajimi moved closer, offering her arm without resistance. Hobbe summoned the needle-disc, this time filled with opaline fluid. “It won’t hurt,” he said softly. His fingers were warm and gentle. She barely felt the needle slide into her skin, and soon it was gone, the fluid empty.
The turquoise patterns on Hobbe’s green skin shifted, flowing from his skull to his thighs. Dajimi knew their skin spoke a language of its own. If only she could understand it.
“There’s no harm in you knowing,” Hobbe muttered, studying the needle.
Dajimi wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Curiosity tugged at her, but her upbringing had taught her not to meddle in upper affairs. Hobbe gestured, and a chair emerged from the wall.
“Speaking with you is difficult at times. Be patient.” Hobbe closed his eyes briefly. “I’ve known your father and aunt since before you were born,” he said. “I gave you Rajan, as you’ve probably guessed.” The dog’s ears perked at his name, though he stayed by the dead upper’s side. “Your father always bragged about your mind.
“And it wasn’t just that. We worked together. We tried to do what seemed impossible—change the world.”
Dajimi stared at the floor, unsure how to respond. Her father, her aunt—they were simple artisans. How could they have worked with uppers, beings who seemed nearly divine? Beneath her feet, the lake gave way to the northern jungle, its dense greenery thinned by desert winds. Beyond it lay a sparse forest of conifers, then a savannah dotted with herds.
“What do you mean?” she asked at last.
Hobbe’s gaze had drifted to the dead upper. He waved a hand, and the shuttle’s ceiling disappeared. They seemed to be flying on nothing but air, and Dajimi’s stomach lurched. Below, the savannah slowly gave way to yellow sand dunes, stretching like a second golden sea. Hobbe pointed ahead. The glacier, still distant, was a white scar clinging to the earth.
“If we could go higher, you’d see it covers everything,” Hobbe said, his face twisting into a grimace. “From north to south. Ice blankets the world, and it spreads a little more every day.”
Dajimi knew this. Everyone did. The Earth had been frozen for as long as anyone could remember. Only a narrow band around the tropics remained untouched, divided by deserts and jungles.
“That’s our task,” Hobbe murmured. “To melt the ice.”
Dajimi blinked.
“Melt all the ice?” she repeated, her voice echoing her disbelief. She sounded like Rajan when he failed to understand something. Speaking it aloud didn’t make it any more real.
“The Earth wasn’t always a frozen place, as you’ve learned.” She nodded. Her lessons had taught her that, long ago, only the poles had been covered in ice.
“We want to go back to that time,” Hobbe continued. “To a planet where most of the world can be lived in again. We’re reversing the freeze.”
“But… can you melt that much ice?” Even the layers that formed on the cannons in winter were hard to melt, even with the archies. Dajimi struggled to grasp the scale of what Hobbe was saying.
“Your aunt thought it was nearly impossible. But she believed it had to be tried. This icy state isn’t the Earth’s natural one. It never was. We have to set things right.”
“Then why did it freeze in the first place?” Dajimi asked, unable to picture her aunt working with an upper on equal terms.
Hobbe’s face darkened.
“The ancients’ folly,” he said, managing a smile devoid of teeth. “It’s ironic. The same warmth they cultivated caused the glaciation.”
Below, the dunes lengthened into shadows, soon replaced by the barren landscape of stone and rock. The northern glacier grew larger on the horizon, its brilliance so intense it hurt to look at.
“Romanticizing the ancients is common,” Hobbe resumed, “even in the Shackles. But they were just humans—flawed, full of mistakes. They made countless errors before trying to fix them. They lived in a world with little ice, already warm, and yet they kept heating it. Polluting it. They took resources and burned them.” He snapped his fingers. “All to gain a fraction of the energy they needed to survive their madness.”
Dajimi had to stifle her disbelief. In her village, the ancients, the uppers, and the gods were revered. She had never heard an upper speak so harshly of the ancients.
“They bred without control. Imagine your village multiplied a thousand times, and then again. That was Earth—a crowded, dirty anthill on the verge of collapse.” Hobbe shook his head. “Even ants would have managed better. They would have worked together to fix it. But the ancients kept consuming more energy, burning coal, oil, trees—anything they could for power.”
“But if they used so much fuel, how did the planet cool instead of warming?”
“At first, the Earth did warm. It melted enough ice to raise sea levels. Deserts spread, storms raged. The ancients paid the price for their short-sightedness.”
Dajimi struggled to understand. “Didn’t they know the Sun could provide energy without burning anything?” For her, energy came from the sun, harnessed by the archies. The idea of burning resources seemed barbaric.
“They knew, but they lacked the will to change,” Hobbe sighed. “They only acted when they were nearly drowning in their own chaos.”
Dajimi felt unsettled by Hobbe’s portrayal of the ancients. In her world, they were just below the gods. They had given them the flood center and the archies. The uppers were supposed to be their successors, but this upper spoke with no reverence.
“When they finally acted,” Hobbe continued, “they found many ways to generate energy without harming the planet. Your archies are one example. We can’t deny them that.”
“Don’t you use archies?” Dajimi regretted asking when she saw Hobbe’s patronizing smile.
“For us, they’re outdated. But they still work. That’s why we let you have them. They’re simple enough for you to use but advanced enough that you can’t make them on your own.”
Dajimi felt a twinge of embarrassment. The archies were essential in the village; without them, survival would be impossible. They stored the sun’s energy, powering lights, vehicles, and even the flood center. Life would come to a halt without them.
Her memories were filled with the archies. She remembered her father’s long hours in the repair shop, or afternoons spent at Akimi’s house, watching her aunt fix the tiny machines. She hadn’t understood why the uppers sent them more archies whenever they asked, yet they still spent so much time repairing the broken ones.
One day she had asked Akimi the same question.
“The beauty of the archies,” her aunt explained, “is that, like a beehive, one is insignificant, but together, they can do anything. Look.”
Dajimi, eight years old, had peered into the microscope. Though there was a screen, she preferred the feel of the lenses. She had believed the archies were tiny creatures, magical butterflies. When her father told her they were machines, she begged him to let her see them.
Those were the days when her father still lived in the village during winter. At twilight, she and the other children played with Rajan while the adults smoked and talked. But that was hours away. The young Dajimi had been captivated by the view under the magnifying glass.
“They still look like butterflies,” she thought, heart swelling. Two gossamer wings, delicate but strong, connected by a three-part frame, no bigger than a fingernail.
“How do they work?” she asked, eyes glued to the microscope.
“The principle is simple,” Akimi said, gently ruffling her hair. “See the dark edges of the wings? They’re solar panels, capturing sunlight.”
Each wing had sixty-four hexagons, their edges grey, and the borders almost black.
“The panels send energy to the center link, the yellow one, where a superconducting metal creates a magnetic field, like…”
“Like a magnet?” Dajimi interrupted.
“Exactly, like a magnet. When sunlight hits the panels, it energizes the superconductor, creating a magnetic field. Since the archies work together, their fields interact, and they start hovering! Levitation!” In her excitement, Akimi lifted Dajimi off the ground, spinning her around the workshop filled with the smell of oil and molten tin.
“Auntie, I’m dizzy!” Dajimi laughed, unaware of how much she would cherish these moments in the future. “But why don’t they fly all the way to the Shackles?”
“Because we tell them where to go. That’s what the lower link does—the red one. It’s their brain.”
Dajimi laughed. “Brains? They’re not animals.”
“Not quite. It’s a quantum computer,” Akimi said patiently. “Each link is a fragment of the brain that controls the swarm. Together, they act as one. Have you seen processionary caterpillars? How they move like a single creature?”
Dajimi nodded, remembering when Rajan had sniffed a line of them and fallen ill. It had taken rare medicine from the uppers to save him, and Dajimi stayed by his side the entire time.
“Well, the archies are like that. Each one can only talk to its two neighbors, and so on. The whole swarm moves as one, following the commands of the ‘brain.’ That brain tells them how to direct the magnetic fields and where to go.”
Dajimi nodded, though she didn’t fully grasp it. Later, she would marvel at the ancients’ brilliance. For now, she was content to imagine the archies as living things.
“So, we don’t need to control every single archie, just the leaders. The rest follow.” Akimi traced imaginary caterpillars on Dajimi’s back. “Once they’re in the air, the transparent parts of the wings come into play. They reflect photons, and each photon gives energy to the mirrors, which power the blue link.”
Dajimi examined the last link, shaped like a bird’s beak.
“That’s the laser emitter,” Akimi explained. “It directs energy to our batteries, heats water, or melts ice on the cannon, as your father does in winter.”
Dajimi scratched her head, knowing there was still much she didn’t understand.
“That’s why a swarm can charge a battery in five minutes under full sunlight. And that’s nothing compared to the ancients’ swarms. Before the freeze, they had archies so vast they spanned the planet, lighting the dark side like giant lanterns.”
“But we don’t need that many,” Dajimi said, growing bored of the old tales. Then, more seriously, she added, “If the uppers give us everything, why do you need to fix the broken ones? Dad’s eyes are getting bad from all the work.”
Dajimi remembered how Akimi’s face had changed then. Or maybe it was just the sunset through the cabin’s window.
“Because one day, the uppers may leave and not come back,” her aunt had said quietly. “And if that happens, we’ll have to rely on what they left behind.”
“Will you teach me how to fix them?”
“One day,” Akimi promised, giving her a quick kiss and a playful swat. “But for now, go play. Rajan’s waiting.”
Dajimi ran off with Rajan, carefree as only an eight-year-old with a talking dog could be. But Akimi never taught her how to fix the archies. Nor did her father. They slowly grew apart until her father moved to the lakeshore for good. Both kept to their work, and Dajimi found herself missing her aunt more and more during the long winter nights.
A small jolt pulled her back to the present. The shuttle now glided over a desert of white stones and snowy plains. Ahead loomed the blinding mass of the great northern glacier, glowing in the cold light of a ten-century winter. The walls of the ship dimmed to soften the glare.
“Is that why Akimi went to the glacier? To help you?” Dajimi asked, focusing again.
Her aunt had left two months earlier, offering little explanation. Since her father had fallen ill with mboko, Akimi had often visited, helping with the tower. When Akimi announced she was joining the glacier expedition, Dajimi had felt abandoned. She knew it was unfair. Akimi had her own life, and she owed Dajimi nothing. But the resentment lingered.
Hobbe didn’t answer. His gaze remained fixed on the dead upper, with Rajan still pressed against it. A wave of dread tightened in Dajimi’s chest.
“Is Akimi still alive?” she asked. The words stung.
Hobbe walked to the control module without a word.
“We’re almost there,” he muttered, his tone as cold as the glacier outside. “I’ll give you something to wear. It’s going to be bitterly cold out there.”
The shuttle skimmed over the frozen plain, immense cliffs of ice looming on either side. Icebergs, vibrant blue and jagged, stretched endlessly from east to west. Gargantuan moraine tongues, burdened with rocks the size of elephants, jutted from the glacier, spilling onto the frozen steppe. Dajimi had seen pictures of the glacier before, but seeing it in person made her grasp the scale of what Hobbe had said—this ice shouldn’t exist.
They descended between two smaller moraines, and Dajimi spotted an ice cave, its entrance barely visible beneath the glacier’s semi-dome. Beside it were the all-terrain vehicles from Akimi’s expedition. Hobbe handed her a thermal blanket before lifting the lifeless upper’s body and marching toward the cave. The cold hit her like a blow, tearing at her lungs, while the wind sliced her face.
“Akimi is dead,” Hobbe blurted once they reached the cave. “So are the others. A patrol arrived as they were deploying the archies. Debbe was with them… I was too late.”
Beside the vehicles, black bags lay half-buried in the snow. Dajimi looked away, terrified of confirming what she already feared. If Akimi were gone, she had no family left. Her world felt as if it were collapsing. The glacier, the blizzard, the upper—it all felt surreal, like a dream. “The lake is all I have now,” she thought, “and when the glacier melts, even that will disappear.” Her vision blurred with a mix of blue and white as she trembled uncontrollably.
“Let’s go! Now!” Hobbe had entered a black tent under the cave, and moments later, reemerged with urgency.
Dajimi remained frozen, staring at the glacier’s towering cliffs merging with the gray clouds above. She imagined all that ice melting, turning into a flood that would drown everything—the desert, the savannah, the lake, the village. Her breath caught in her throat as panic overwhelmed her, and she collapsed to her knees in the snow, shaking violently.
Within seconds, Hobbe was at her side, lifting her into the tent, his hands cradling her head.
“Calm down. It’s a panic attack,” he murmured.
“The lake…” Dajimi stammered, still trembling. “It will flood… everything…”
“Breathe. Deep breaths. Nothing will happen to the lake. Your father wouldn’t have helped me if there were any danger. The ice will take thousands of years to melt. You need to relax.”
“Relax?” Dajimi snapped, breaking free from his grip. “You abduct me, claim you’re going to change the world, tell me Akimi is dead because of you, and you want me to stay calm? And why am I even here? Are you going to kill me, too?”
Rajan watched with alert ears but didn’t move from the dead upper’s side.
“Do you think I planned this?” Hobbe’s face hardened, his features sharpening, the patterns on his skin rippling with subtle anger. “Did you imagine I spent eight decades preparing for everything to depend on a child like you?”
Suddenly, Hobbe lunged, pinning her against the tent’s wall, holding her arm steady as he reinserted the needle-disc. Dajimi froze, overwhelmed by the realization of how easily Hobbe could end her life. She stayed still as he drew another blood sample. He slumped onto a pallet afterward, inserting the needle into a long black cylinder.
Rajan approached, his eyes guilty, ears drooping. He would have protected her against any other threat, but Hobbe seemed to hold him in some invisible sway. Dajimi settled on the opposite side of the tent.
“I’m sorry,” Hobbe said after a long pause. His face had softened again, though the vibrant hue of his skin had dulled. “I shouldn’t have acted like that. But we can’t afford any mistakes now. It’s done. All we can do is wait.”
Rajan sniffed Hobbe before lying down beside him, tucking his head into the upper’s lap. Hobbe patted him gently.
“I’ve never seen anyone as happy as you were when Debbe and I brought you, Rajan,” Hobbe said. “It was her idea, and though your father wasn’t keen, he couldn’t resist when he saw your joy.”
Dajimi felt a jolt of surprise—she couldn’t recall that day. Rajan had always been a part of her life.
“How long have you known my father?” she asked, as her anger began to fade. The scent inside the tent was too familiar. Had Akimi and the others spent days here, working?
“I’ve known him since birth,” Hobbe replied. “I knew your grandfather, and his father too. Over one hundred and twenty years gives you time for much.”
Dajimi noticed Hobbe’s toothless grin; wrinkles crinkled his eyes, and flecks of gray had begun to creep into the turquoise patterns of his skin.
“I became close to your father and Akimi. Your family’s skill with technology is why we chose them. We needed people like them down here, working quietly, unnoticed by the Shackles.”
“But why?” Dajimi pressed. “What were they helping with?”
Hobbe hesitated. The blue of his eyes dimmed, and his speech faltered, lacking the earlier confidence.
“I said before that the ice came from warming, but it’s more complicated. When the ancients altered the climate, oceans warmed, releasing gases trapped in the seabed—sulfates that reflected sunlight. At the same time, the Sun entered a quieter phase. No sunspots, less radiation. The ancients had never seen anything like it.”
Dajimi nodded, following his reasoning.
“Less radiation, less energy. And if they didn’t remove the reflective gases…” she whispered.
“Exactly,” Hobbe said. “The atmosphere, fragile after centuries of abuse, couldn’t recover. Instead of a small ice age, the planet plunged into a deep freeze. The ancients tried burning more fuel, releasing carbon dioxide again, but it was too late. Winters grew longer; glaciers spread, suffocating civilization.”
“What happened to the survivors?” Dajimi asked.
“They fled to the tropics. Epidemics wiped out most of them. You’re descended from those few who survived. Others built the Shackles, became the uppers.”
Hobbe’s words grew weaker. Gray blotches had spread across his skin, and his thoughts began to slip.
“I needed your father and Akimi to stop this endless winter,” he said, regaining focus. “Generations of artisans have worked on your archies, not just repairing them but adding a fourth link. We’ve been hiding these modified archies for decades, waiting for this moment.”
The tent walls shimmered. In the cave behind them, clusters of dormant archies glowed against the ice. Dajimi’s thoughts scattered like wild butterflies. Could her family have dedicated their lives to this one goal? It seemed impossible.
“But why? I don’t understand,” she murmured, eyes locked on the formations.
From the clusters, dark vapor began to rise, curling up the cave walls toward the glacier. The sheer number of archies stunned her. Hobbe’s smile grew weak, his lips graying like the rest of his body.
“Because a few years ago, the Sun became more active again, like in the ancient days. But it’s not enough. The planet has grown too cold; even the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is freezing. If we don’t act, the ice will consume the tropics too, and Earth will become a barren snowball.”
“But these archies aren’t enough to melt the ice,” Dajimi said, knowing it was true.
“They’re not meant to melt it all,” Hobbe coughed, writhing in pain as gray flowers bloomed across his chest. “They’ll melt the carbon dioxide trapped in the glaciers. If we release enough, with the help of solar radiation, we’ll push the Earth back from the brink.”
Hobbe convulsed violently, pink liquid spilling from his mouth. He collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
Dajimi recognized the signs of Hobbe’s impending death.
Gray blooms spread across his arms and back, their centers turning a lifeless straw yellow. He slipped into unconsciousness, Rajan whimpering beside him. Dajimi propped Hobbe’s head on a pillow, feeling a pang of sympathy but mostly thinking about what would happen to her and the neodog after he was gone.
When Hobbe stirred, his blue pupils were streaked with gray. He blinked at her as memory returned.
“Little one… I’m sorry for dragging you into this. But time was running out…” His voice was weak. “You did well.”
Dajimi nodded, but her desire to know why he’d needed her had dulled. The task was complete, whatever it had been. As she helped him sit up, his skin felt cold and clammy.
“You need help,” she said. “If we return to the village…”
“No. There’s no saving me now,” he muttered, tracing his chest with shaking fingers. “My symbionts are dying… nothing you can do. I wish I could have protected them better. We were careful, but someone betrayed us…”
Outside, the archies continued their transformation into plumes of dark smoke. Hobbe stared at them.
“So, that’s what Akimi and the others were doing,” Dajimi whispered. “Bringing the archies here?”
“They had to be deployed precisely, or it would all have been in vain,” Hobbe coughed, more gray flowers blooming on his skin. “We hid them beneath the glacier to avoid detection. But someone found out… They killed your aunt because they knew she was the key. Debbe tried to defend her, and they poisoned her, too. If only I’d arrived sooner…”
“What do you mean, the key?” Dajimi asked.
“We had to be cautious. Only one person could trigger the archies: Akimi. Her genetic marker. It was built into her blood. We couldn’t risk more than one linchpin,” he gasped, coughing harder. “We used decoys, but they found us anyway. I stopped the patrols before they could report back, but Akimi… her blood was already breaking down. Useless.”
Dajimi felt a bitter laugh rising, but she was too exhausted. A genetic linchpin. And now Hobbe needed a living carrier to activate the archies. Someone genetically similar to her aunt.
“I didn’t realize your father’s mboko had progressed so far,” Hobbe said. “He was my first choice to reconstruct the marker. But his blood was too far gone… Then I saw you. You looked just like her.”
Dajimi remembered the injections, the strange machine Hobbe had used. All the pain, all the loss, just to trigger these tiny machines.
“But why? Why such secrecy? What’s the point of all this?” she demanded, though her voice was thin, filled with sorrow.
“Oh, little one…” Hobbe reached for her hand. “Haven’t you figured it out? Most uppers don’t care about Earth or the people on it. Many of them would rather see the planet frozen solid. To them, I’m a terrorist, a rebel. You and I, we’re the villains,” he rasped, struggling to breathe. Dajimi stared at him, baffled. “We’ve become parasites. Our bodies are symbiotic with tailored cyanobacteria—these creatures sustain us, and all they need is light. The ice’s albedo is perfect. It reflects just enough radiation to keep us alive without needing to go anywhere else. Your suffering is our paradise.”
Dajimi blinked, shattered. She had always believed the uppers were humans who had transcended, a model for Earth’s future. Now she saw them as no better than the worst of humanity.
“They tried to stop us, but it’s too late,” Hobbe whispered, coughing again. Gray streaks spread down his face like tears.
“But won’t they destroy the archies from the Shackles? What is this really for?”
“No…” Hobbe managed a weak smile, his breath thick with the scent of decay. “The fourth link… years of work by your family and the artisans. It’s an electromagnetic barrier, shielding thousands of archies. Now the sun is active again… producing sunspots, plasma ejections. We’ve tracked them, and ten minutes ago, one erupted… the Great Eruption. The Shackles can’t withstand a solar storm of this magnitude. Their systems will go down—communications, devices—all of it. They’ll be blind for days, maybe weeks. That’s our window… the archies will have time to melt the deposits.”
Dajimi understood. The archies, shielded by the fourth link, not only would be safe from detection but also from the electromagnetic storm itself. While the storm raged, they’d continue their task, melting the frozen carbon dioxide, warming the planet.
“I tried to save them,” Hobbe slumped back, his body graying rapidly. “They poisoned Debbe. I contracted the virus trying to help… now my symbionts are dying.”
“You did all you could, Hobbe.” Dajimi gently stroked his cold forehead, wondering if Akimi had anyone to comfort her in her final moments.
“We succeeded, didn’t we?” His voice wavered. “Tell me… we did it.”
“We did,” Dajimi replied, though she couldn’t know if the plan had truly worked or if the uppers would strike back once the storm passed.
“You have to leave now,” Hobbe rasped. “The shuttle’s set to return to the lake. It will fly low to avoid the worst of the storm… you’ll be safe. Go.”
Relief washed over Dajimi as she stood. Hobbe’s limbs were almost entirely gray now, patches of straw-yellow hexagons blooming across his skin. He looked like a withered leaf in the sun.
“Don’t resent me for what happened to your father.”
“Why would I?” she asked, her throat tight.
“Mboko… he was trying to protect you. When I told him how the infection spreads, he kept his distance… from you, from Akimi. He didn’t want you… infected.”
Dajimi stepped back, unwilling to hear more, but Hobbe pressed on.
“Our symbionts… sometimes they spread. They try to colonize, but humans can’t handle it. He and I… spent so much time together. I never… asked his forgiveness. Can you?”
Dajimi nodded, her throat too tight to speak.
“Go… go now,” he whispered. Only his head remained green; the rest of him had turned a mottled gray and yellow. “It will be beautiful, you know… the world restored. Oceans… forests… magnificent.” His eyes, wide and unfocused, locked onto hers. “Debbe, is that you? We did it, didn’t we? Everything’s going to be fine, isn’t it?”
But his gaze had already drifted far beyond the cave, his body still and silent.
Dajimi couldn’t bear it any longer. She fled the cave with Rajan at her heels, barely noticing the archies swirling from their formations or the bodies buried in the snow. Once inside the shuttle, the door sealed, and they rose over the frozen landscape. Rajan nuzzled into her lap, and they collapsed together.
“I sad,” whimpered the Labrador.
Dajimi hugged him tight, her arms aching with the effort.
“Me too, little one,” she whispered, tears streaming down her face. “Me too.”
Dajimi lost track of time in the shuttle. It never turned transparent, but she knew hours had passed when the ship gently touched down.
When the door opened, they were back at the lake, just as Hobbe had promised. The shadow of the tower stretched long on the shore, the sun sinking low, casting the last of its reddish light on the water. She inhaled deeply, the familiar, damp air soothing her. She wasn’t ready to process all that had happened. She just needed to see that Samia and Hasä were well and let the village know.
At the base of the tower, she found them, awake and waiting. But they weren’t alone. Her father stood with them. Tajime, now more tree than man, raised one of his throbbing, wooden arms, pointing toward the southern sky.
It wasn’t dark.
Waves of blue and green light shimmered above, dancing against a backdrop of stars. The Shackles flickered and went dark, powerless against the solar storm Hobbe had foreseen. The storm that had protected the archies—the project Tajime had devoted his life to.
Dajimi hesitated. The councilwomen stepped aside as she moved toward her father. He was still, eyes fixed on the radiant sky. Gently, she took his hand, feeling the pulse of the wooden fingers, like tiny caterpillars beneath her touch. Far to the north, she heard thunder.
“You did it, Dad,” she whispered, her gaze lost in the celestial display. “You’re going to change everything.”
They stood together until the northern clouds thickened, obscuring the sky, though the lights still flickered, casting hues of emerald and cobalt through the clouds. Her father groaned softly, then slipped his hand from hers. Silently, he turned and walked toward the jungle, southward.
It took Dajimi a moment to realize that this was the moment he had been waiting for, the day he would leave, and that she could do nothing to stop him. He paused once, halfway to the trees, lifting his arm toward her in a final gesture. Then he disappeared into the shadows, never to return.
A streak of lightning cut across the sky, followed by more, one set of lights replacing another. Samia and Hasä moved to her side, holding her as the first rain of the new spring fell on old Lake Chad, mingling with Dajimi’s silent tears.
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