Then the drones spoke together, first in Oshiwambo, then Afrikaans, Swahili, English, Chinese, other languages I couldn’t name.
“We are from the African Union Peace and Security Council. This mine has been nationalized by the new Namibian government, and will be protected from now on by AFRIPOL security forces. All countries of the African Union are now united in support of the Africa for Africans program. Representatives from the Namibian government and the AU will arrive shortly to help you with this transition. Please stay seated, or feel free to move into the dining halls or dormitories while the armed personnel here are escorted off the premises.”
Which we were happy to do. The guards left on foot down the road. We cheered, we hugged our brothers, we cried for joy. The cooks broke into the pantries and freezers and made us a proper meal, trusting that more food would come in time to make up for the shortage they were creating. Which eventually it did. Troops from the AU arrived that night and declared us liberated. Nationalized, they said. Told us that now we were worker-owners of the mine, if we wanted to stay. If not, free to get on buses and ride away.
Some of us left as soon as the buses showed. Most of us stayed. We figured we could leave later if we wanted. But being an owner of the mine sounded interesting. We wanted to know what that meant. Like sweat equity, some said. Sweat equity! Hell, we had blood equity in that mine.
66
You think your birth was hard— my mom exploded! Literally, yes, in that when she went supernova the heat of the detonation exceeded a hundred megakelvins and in that pressure three helium nuclei stripped of their two electrons were crushed together and there I was, as elegant as anything in the universe: carbon, the king of the elements, sweetly six-sided and tetravalent, able to bond with the atoms of my kind in several different ways, and to compound with other atoms in almost countless ways, being so friendly. So, boom! and there I was, flying across the universe. My particular neighborhood was your Milky Way, and I flew right into the knot of dust that was swirling down into Sol, where I could very easily have been roasted or crushed into something else entirely, but happily for me I fell into a swirl of dust that was coming together around ninety million miles from mighty Sol, and not too much time later I was part of a rocky planetesimal.
Earth, you’re probably guessing, since we’re here now, but actually I first joined the Mars-sized rock coalescing at the Lagrange 5 point to Earth, a rock which now gets called Theia. So I was there for that big collision when Theia hit Gaia at speed, and they merged and tossed out a spray that quickly became the moon. A big bang! Although not compared to the real Big Bang, of course. And with that I found myself inside the hot new Earth, but in the mantle very near the surface, luckily for me or I wouldn’t be talking to you now. That was it for my catastrophic childhood and youth, everything since has been fairly sedate and what you might call adult.
Well, but I forget my escape to the surface. That was pretty dramatic too. I came out in a volcanic eruption at a mid-ocean ridge between Pangea and I forget what land mass, they go away pretty fast. Hot lava sprayed into the sky, cooling almost instantly. A few million years exposed to the photon rain of sunlight softened me up, it was like getting a sunburn and I was part of the dead skin about to get sloughed off. Fine, I was ready, a million years is a long time, not to mention fifty million years; but the question was, which atoms would I join to effect my escape? I wanted to be eaten by a dinosaur, Jurassic era, and in those days it wasn’t that hard— photons banged me, my four exposed connector electrons were all quivering tetravalently, hoping for a pick-up, and as it so often happens, I got interest from two suitors at the same time! and wham bang, I had been stuck simultaneously to two oxygen atoms, and I was in a marriage very convenient indeed, as carbon dioxide.
We made a good team. Life got busy. By flying low we kept getting picked up by plants. They would suck us in, and zoop, gurgle, I was part of a leaf, a twig, a tree trunk. I joined a proto-sequoia, that was a long date, then a fern, got eaten by an allosaur, pooped by same allosaur, yes I was a piece of shit then, and have been many times since, but bacteria love to eat shit, and quickly enough I ran into another pair of oxygen atoms and off again. But then, disaster: I was caught underwater in a muddy clutch of my fellow carbon atoms, and down we went back into the Earth, crushed there to graphite, in this case a seam of coal, where I spent many millions of years. Could even have been sucked down tectonically and crushed to diamond, and thus stuck forever in one small town of everyone-the-same, latticed in a veritable jail for all time, meaning really till the burning up of the Earth when the sun goes large, that would be my welcome release from that fate, but in this case I got lucky; my seam was mined by humans and burnt in a furnace, around the year 1634. Freedom! Back into the sky, and how I loved that. I like variety. So
