2040-05-21 First Steps

"If you are really planning to accomplish something in the Central African Republic, you have your work cut out for you."

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.—Frederick G. Banting

I tweaked the settings on the external microphones, stepping up the gain and spatially distributing the output across the array of speakers in my living space. With my eyes closed, I could now immerse myself in the myriad sounds of the jungle just above my head: water trickling, birds calling, insects clicking and chirping, the slow crackle and pop of plant growth, the occasional rustle and pad of animal movement. Intriguing.

Every jungle on Earth has a slightly different sound. The variation in botanical species, the insect and animal life, the landforms and weather, all contribute to variations in the acoustic environment. I had to acclimate myself to this new environment if I were to be maximally effective. I also had to begin training the expert systems and artificial intelligences that would be my assistants.

Periscope cameras gave me overlapping coverage of the entire perimeter. Tiny robot spiders had carried hair-fine optical fibers into the canopy, giving me treetop vantages without giving my position away through wireless emissions. Display surfaces in my underground habitat enabled me to see the finest details.

"System. Orient visual displays to audio outputs."

The floating projections rotated and sorted themselves so the image of a bird chirping was now superimposed over the speaker transmitting the chirps.

All this incoming data was being processed by the new computer systems. Pattern recognition algorithms were matching plants to cataloged examples. Others were classifying movement according to sources. Different camera angles and microphones were processed by different systems, and the computers' separate conclusions checked against one another. Eventually, the computers would be able to tell the difference between a leaf moving in a breeze and one disturbed by the passage of a concealed animal.

The subterranean sensors were doing their work as well. Self-propelling probes were travelling deeper into the soil, periodically anchoring themselves and sending out low-frequency pulses to map their surroundings. Basic chemical analysis and laser spectroscopy provided data about soil composition. The three-dimensional picture of the soil and rock around my habitat was becoming more detailed by the minute.

I had the jitters. I had been on an intermittent adrenaline jag for most of a day. The final preparations before departure, the flight itself, the landing and digging in, were all stressful. The flight was especially so, as I had no direct control over the aircraft and could only lie there and watch and listen and imagine all the ways things could go wrong. It had been a relief to finally be grounded and to be able to take some action. Unfortunately, that action was limited to a series of computer interfaces. My primate brain and body wanted to run around a savannah and climb a tree or two.

Instead, I took a brief shower, ate a packaged meal, and returned to my crash couch. I knew I would have trouble getting to sleep. My customary sleep cycle was completely upset. I knew I would have to decide on a new sleep cycle, but I did not yet have the data to choose one.

For the next twenty-four hours, I would lie quiet and observe. Until I had some idea of the patterns of local animal and human activity, I should not risk being discovered prematurely. The next stage of my plan would inevitably produce some detectable noise, and I wanted that to occur when it was least likely to be heard by any local humans.

"System. Dim displays to ten percent." The displays faded to thin ghosts.

I practiced a form of meditation I had previously found conducive to sleep. Finally, I drifted off, lulled by the sounds of a strange new jungle.

I was facing a truly daunting set of challenges in trying to help the people of the Central African Republic. Early in my planning, I interviewed anthropologists and aid workers who had spent significant time in-country as a check on my research in published sources.

I started with the basics. "I understand transportation is a problem."

"If you call landlocked and undeveloped a problem. River transport is seasonal, there are no railroads, the only paved roads are a few kilometers in and around the handful of towns, and the unpaved roads are an unending series of potholes." My source was a former CIA subcontractor who went by Smith.

"What about air?"

Smith snorted. "It's worse than land. The major airport at Bangui is kept open only by a perimeter of armed troops. The smaller airports are unpaved strips that close or open depending on weather, civil unrest, and grazing livestock."

"So what do you recommend for transport?"

He shook his head. "Be somewhere else." He took a drink.

"Seriously. If I need to do some work in the CAR, how do I get around?"

Smith looked at me for a moment. "Outside the towns, road vehicles usually move at a walk, weighed down by overloads that put the fenders onto the tires. People pile on until it can't move. Spare parts, tires, and fuel are rare and expensive. Most people walk. If you want to move faster, you have men with guns on the outside of the vehicle. Fastest movers are the all-terrain armored vehicles with men, guns, and a reputation for killing people. Dirt bikes can move fast too, but those get taken down with bush knives." He tossed back the rest of his drink and gestured for another.

I thanked him, paid the tab, and left.

An anthropologist I interviewed, Dr. Anders, told essentially the same story in slightly more polite language. "The social structure is as far from cosmopolitan as you can get. Many CAR civilians never travel far from the place they were born, rarely see a stranger, and have little to no knowledge of the outside world. Unless they have been forced to flee by violence."

I shook my head. "What a way to broaden your worldview."

"It's no joke. A few years ago the percentage of IDPs, Internally Displaced Persons, refugees in their own country, passed half the population. They see new things and meet new people by being forced out of their homes. Many of them end up in the DRC, completely outside their own country." Her frown lines deepened.

I decided to move on. "So what's the best way to communicate with the locals?"

She grimaced. "That's not going to be easy. The two official languages, French and Sango, are actually spoken by only a small minority of the rural population. Literacy is estimated around thirty percent nationally, which translates to higher in the cities and near zero rural. Each ethnic group has its own languages, many of which are mutually unintelligible. Some languages have no written equivalent; those subcultures are entirely oral."

"So, printed material is going to be a very low priority."

She gave a half shrug. "Toilet paper, kindling, wrapping, shoe stuffing. No one will read any of it."

"So oral communication only, I guess. Any recommendations?"

"You will have to provide everything in a number of languages. French will be relatively easy; the others will need ethnolinguists specializing in Sango and the more obscure Central African dialects. There aren't many of us." She hesitated.

"What else?" I prompted.

She took a deep breath. "Cultural assumptions are also challenging. The lack of sustained cultural interaction from outsiders means that local folklore and traditions have gone unchallenged for a long time. 'The gods tell us to do it that way' is used to justify everything from gendered division of labor to both male and female genital mutilation. Causality is not generally recognized. If something bad happened, a person falling ill, for example, it was because a grandparent had offended the gods, not because the person had eaten rotten food or contracted an infection."

Anders continued, "If you are really planning to accomplish something in the Central African Republic, you have your work cut out for you."

I thanked her for her time and gave her a nice honorarium for the consultation.

If it had been easy to effect change, someone else would have done it long ago.

I needed a full survey of available resources before I could begin major construction. I gave myself a month. I had packaged food and stored energy that would keep me comfortable at least that long without leaving my habitat.

One of the first major constructions was drilling a well for water, both for drinking and for working processes. It was also a good field exercise for my novel construction techniques. I was eager to try it out under these conditions.

The alluvial soil I had dug into was the remains of an old riverbed. The river had shifted long ago, leaving a rich deposit of fines, gravel, and boulders. Beneath the alluvial soil was bedrock. Depending on the constitution of that bedrock, I might find a reliable water table on top of it, or in whatever fissures there might be.

The drill was an innovation of my own, based on soft robot technology that had been developed some decades previously. It did not drill through the soil so much as it insinuated itself. The head was a blunt cone covered in concentric torii of a tough, flexible plastic that could expand and contract. Operated in sequence, the plastic doughnuts could push the head forward or back by peristalsis, very much like an earthworm. By subdividing each torus into sectors, the head could be steered. Obviously, this was only of use in soils and could not penetrate rock. It was adequate for seeking water in my current environment.

One significant advantage was that the entire apparatus could be printed on demand, including the downpipe. I had a large stock of a variety of plastics and several extremely versatile printers. This took up far less space and was much more applicable to unforeseen circumstances than an inventory of pipe and fittings. Furthermore, once my reactors and other processing devices were fully deployed, I anticipated being able to create suitable building materials from the jungle around me. The contents of my habitat were just a starter set.

My relating the hours of supervising the earthworm drill in its quest for water would be tedious in the extreme for even the most forbearing audience. For me, at the time, it was nerve-wracking. If I could not find reliable, clean water, I would have to materially revise my other development plans.

A major source of illness among the rural population could be traced directly to contaminated surface water. If my monorail pylons also provided safe drinking water, I believed that would go a long way toward providing community support and protection for the monorail system. If I could drill a similar well under selected pylons and build a filtering system into those pylons, providing water would be relatively easy. If, on the other hand, the water table was not readily accessible, I would have to design and build a rainwater catchment system, which would be much less reliable in the face of seasonal rainfall and the increasingly frequent droughts.

I sat and fretted while my soft robots explored.