The Night of the Long Laptops

Some prose delineates the future so accurately that it can only be described as a non-fiction history that hasn’t happened yet.

THE HARSH sun beat down as hard as ever on unacclimated travellers, and one suffered as always the by now familiar push and pull of the urban divide: the farther into the city one went, the more noise, traffic, the smell of urine and sewage made one long for the countryside; once in the countryside, the stifling breeze coming in off the desert seemed to carry no oxygen, the sun reflected too cruelly off the sand, and in the distance, columns of air shimmered threatening till evening time. The most liveable time out beyond the city was from evening to dusk, before cold winds and lack of light forced one to retire to sleeping quarters. Out here, one longed again for the shelter which the city’s matrices of narrow houses offered– and in a bungalow in the city, looking down at the dust and noise of the masses, one longed to be outside again. This paradox existed only for foreigners though: the natives had long become resigned to live either in dirt or in duress.

And yet something had changed in Egypt since her last visit. Anne Laurens had come here several times in the course of her life; the first time shortly after her marriage, and now for the first time as a widow. She would be hard put to say what fascinated her about Egypt: most probably the Bible stories which filled the years of her youth– most of them, she thought, must have actually transpired in modern-day Israel and the surrounding countries: but in her imagination, they played out in a generic desert landscape: “the Old Orient”. It was infused with the mystery and grandeur which still clung to those old stories. Was it the land of Canaan, or Egypt during the Exile, or what today is called Lebanon– that was a thing for experts to know. The painted images on old bible-cards, which portrayed this or that scene from Solomon or Kings or Luke– in her mind grew entwined with the historical interest surrounding the Pyramids: and it was amongst these monumental sights and impressions that Anne sought to spend the last years of her life. She was, it must be said, a deeply religious woman in temperament and upbringing, and her trips were clearly, in her mind, a preparation for entering that great world which she had read about: she was going to ascend to the world where Samson and Job, Solomon and David, Paul, Peter, Luke, John and Jesus sat in eternal communion, feasting and rejoicing. It was this that gave her trips a happy and redemptive character, beyond the greedily demanded pleasures of tourism: she gave to the poor brown children that crowded around her tour bus, when it stopped in small settlements, before going out with the other Western tourists to gather souvenirs. It was always more pleasant for tourists to experience the most provincial, smallest bazaars possible, in the smallest and farthest off settlements. This was because the market bazaars in the big city were too precarious to navigate: pickpockets, threatening groups of young men, dust and smoke, but more than anything else, the intense atmosphere and propensity to haggle over prices, combined with the difficulty of making oneself understood. It was truly with good reason that the bus-drivers kept their charges as far as possible from the thriving city-center bazaars. They took them instead to those which were small enough to be quaint, yet large enough not to appear desperate.

And it was returning from one such stop that Anne first realized what was so odd about this visit to what had come to be her second, spiritual home: the children. Before it had been as predictable as natural law, that at each bus stop, a swarm of local children would descend upon the bus with outstretched hands. Many of them would be only half-clothed, and a number of them would be covered in dirt from playing: yet they invariable all crushed towards the tourists. This was the most despised aspect of the trips, but as Anne had come to bid farewell to earthly things as much as the others had come to enjoy them, the children often got substantial donations from her: this made the intervention of a bus attendant necessary to free her from the throng, but she maintained a patient smile, to the annoyance of her fellow travelers.

During her last three visits she had always stayed at the same hotel, and thinking back she realized that every trip out to the bus in the morning had been attended by swarms of children. Going out to the bus in the morning and returning at evening, they had to be escorted in a way reminiscent of the bodyguards of famous celebrities, who form a barrier between the person in question and their hysteric fans. The last week had seen no children approaching them– only in the outer districts had they actually seen children. Everywhere else, children weren’t even to be seen– strange for a land where idling in the open street is a past-time cultivated even into one’s mid-thirties.

But that wasn’t quite the entire truth. She had seen children, but they were– not out in the open, and not moving or playing. She had seen children standing at various places, just standing, occasionally looking down at something they were holding. Strange, that the life of the street would become so subdued– and to be honest, there was so little stirring, that it actually had become eery. The other tourists had picked up on it as well; one man commenting that the town had a conspirative feel to it, as though some force had restrained the ebullient, vacuous character of its community life, and perhaps, as the tourists thought, harnessed it to some evil purpose.

This suspicion was fueled by the mistrustful glances which many felt themselves to have encountered– strangest of all was the fact that, when one did meet a child, they didn’t ask for money: one expected, being inured after so many years, to raise one’s hand in the gesture cueing them to disperse: the hand even went up in a reflexive gesture of “I have nothing, go away”– but the children didn’t ask for money. Instead they would look at you, as if they were studying you, then typed something into the little brightly colored laptop clutched in crook of an arm. Ah yes, that was something new, these children now had laptops! As part of the plan to end poverty by distributing laptops, called “One Laptop Per Child”, each child in the city of Cairo had received a colorful XO-1 laptop. One could actually see them for sale in the bazaars, no uncommon sight, although they had only been issued two weeks ago.

Perhaps that was the reason for their strange behavior– the children had just been issued laptops, and in the two week period the novelty of their first hi-tech possession had certainly not worn off! So that was why the children were keeping to themselves– they actually had something to occupy them now, they no longer needed to beg for any shiny trinkets to play with. In fact, when Anne thought back, she realized: in the last week, she had never not seen a little one with a laptop.

The next day the weather relented and the evening was cooler than usual: the type of night one can really enjoy in this region. The tourists sat outside in the quiet of evening, eating cakes prepared from pistachios and dates– a local delicacy–while some of the younger tourists puffed on a Hooka, which is an Arabian water pipe, or played Tetris, which is a game where you have to fit falling shapes into a grid with as few gaps as possible. Although each was absorbed in his own affairs, everyone looked up when a little dirty, half-clothed child, apparently a girl, slowly approached the group. She was carrying a laptop, and in her eye a look more fiery and grim– more defiant, than anything anyone had previously seen on a child’s face: it was a look which seemed to convey hate, insofar as a child’s face can express such a weighty emotion. It was not the first time that week that the tourists had encountered this look and it startled them, touched them to the marrow: Western tourists may not be supremely well liked in this part of the world, but they are not that strongly disliked. Well, so one thought.

As the girl, who could not have been more than 6 years old, walked up to the grey-haired Mr. Seamus, the unofficial tour guide and leader of the group, an eery silence fell upon everyone. Looking back to the street corner where the girl had emerged from, some 10 meters from the hotel was a congregation of children, all massed, all looking similarly grim, and all holding laptops: they hunkered next to each other behind the cover of a large hedge. Some of the tourists could observe them, and made the rest cognizant: it became clear that the girl had come as representative of the group. The children seemed to have lost their dumb playfulness of old and been joined in an eery solidarity, which seemed directed more that anything against the Western tourists. Most of the tourists were elderly and could hardly fathom what peculiar scene was being played out in front of them: all watched with rapt attention.

The barefoot girl approached Seamus and cautiously began to open up her laptop, holding it as if to give it to him. At this point the cold look of the girl’s eyes had unsettled everyone in the group: there was no more overlooking the surreal aspect of the last few days, no more writing it off in the name of carefree enjoyment. Seamus, a stately man with silver hair, a serious face and bright, thin red lips, reached to take the laptop from the girl, as this was apparently what she wanted. She spoke, evidently having been chosen by the other children for her ability to speak English:

“Give us credit card numbers, type them.”

Seamus’ first inclination was to take this as a joke; half-wanting to allay the unrest that had settled in him as a result of the strange situation, half-wanting to relieve the same pressure for the group, he tried to turn it into humor:

“No, no dear, you have to send me an email first if you want to have that information.”

A young man, a tourist, laughed awkwardly at a more removed table; but the quickness with which his voice abated made one wonder immediately afterward, in the thick silence that followed, if anyone had really laughed at all.

“Type credit card numbers or we kill.”

The girl seemed to be possessed with determination beyond anything which one would have expected from a young person twice her age: she stared in front of her with icy determined eyes: if it were possible for a child to intimidate grown men and women, then that was certainly what was happening here. Everyone was at a loss for what to say next, and about a minute passed before Seamus even could say:

“You’ll what?”

“We kill.” The girl motioned with her laptop that someone should type something into it; behind the hedge, children could be seen moving back and forth, the laptops clutched to their chests and sides formed a bobbing plastic patchwork-rainbow that rose and fell irregularly with each child’s intake of breath. Seamus inhaled, the surreal and spinning aspect of the last minutes had been halted by the inroads of clear thinking returning after the initial surprise, and he was able to compose himself and answer her thus:

“I’m sorry, little girl, but if you talk to us that way, I’m afraid this conversation is over: you had better run along to your parents.”

The girl took Seamus’ rebuff nonchalantly, seeming unconcerned, but said in the same grim tone and with the same look:

“Tomorrow you give us credit card numbers.”

Then she walked off, her bright pink laptop swinging like an extra appendage on its little plastic handle.

The tourists looked at one another: were they to take this seriously? At night, the calmer voices prevailed, and everyone reassured each other that this was just a case of the little girl being impolite, and no real threat. Some reasoned that this was part of a new plot launched by all the children to get money from them– the children must have come to the conclusion that intimidation would work. In the end, the tendency of kind old people to reduce putative risks and adopt a compliant attitude won out: kindness of heart prevented anyone from realizing just how much danger they were in. Yet while the panicking of some members of the group could be diffused, no one was successful at revivifying the blithe and buxom spirit which they had all set out with on the trip to the land of the Nile.

It certainly ruined the mood for the rest of the evening, and it occupied the group during the two tepid museum visits the next day. The following morning the tourists were amazed to find the street-corner, usually buzzing with life, strangely abandoned. As they stood outside the tour bus, preparing to disembark to some new museum, the sight of a single child walking towards them made them pause alongside the bus. Someone drew attention to the fact that 30 meters off, a group of children was quietly approaching them from up the street. But this single child stood only 5 meters away from the group, and so attention fixed on him.

The tourists gaped as the child drew nearer, brandishing a laptop with an old rag protruding from it; the boy produced a lighter from his pocket, fumbled with it, his young fingers almost not dextrous enough to induce it to function. A gasoline soaked rag was tucked inside the closed laptop, and its battery compartment had been filled with Schnapps: the laptop had been turned into a molotov cocktail! He lit the rag and pulled his arm back to throw: however the young boy, who could hardly have been older than 10, lacked the strength to truly throw it with full force. It landed two meters in front of the Anne Laurens and exploded, throwing shattered glass and orange sorbet-colored plastic shrapnel out in all directions. One sizable piece of plastic lodged in the leg of one of the young female tourists. After the whole group had lurched to the ground, or simply away from the bomb, they reconvened around the young woman’s screams:

“Oh God, No! A piece of its in my leg, its in my leg, my leg, oh God! Oh no, God! its in my leg its in my leg!” The bleeding was already quite profuse, but in their shock and fear of the situation, no one came forth to help the girl or tend to her wound.

Nor did they have time to. At that moment, two kids began rolling a beat-up wooden wagon towards them. These were older kids, probably almost twenty, and as opposed to the other kids, who were cruel without looking it, these kids looked like trouble. Predatory smiles shone from the faces, one could not mistake that their intent was to cause harm, nor could one mistake their delight in it. The wagon they were wheeling towards the tourists was manufactured decades ago; while in use as a toy, two dogs had been harnessed to the front to provide a play-conveyance for the younger children. The dogs would chase a ball of twine and the children would rocket across the street in the wagon. But now the wagon had acquired a colorful round plastic shell that covered its upper half and extended like a dome or an igloo, from which a barrel of roughly 8 centimeters width protruded menacingly. The whole structure was made of melted laptops: as the children wheeled it ever closer, one could at length distinguish the discolored plastic squares melted haphazardly together. Clearly, upwards of 40 laptops had been fused together to create some sort of canon, which was now brought to bear on the tourists. The boy pushing the wagon signaled something to his friend, who then began manipulating some device at the rear-end of the machine, obscured by the plastic dome so that the tourists couldn’t see. All of a sudden, a hissing sound began to be emitted from the wagon. The boy knelt down with a lighter in front of the wagon and slowly raised his hand in front of the barrel until the lighter set fire to the stream of propellant hissing out of a compression chamber somewhere beneath the plastic dome. Immediately the hiss became a tongue of rumbling flame, promiscuously licking the air around the opening of the barrel. At first the flame looked small, like that of a bunsen burner. But it could not have been very small, for the tourists, crouching beside the bus a few meters away, could see it well enough. The wagon began advancing, pushed by the two boys. Although at first one couldn’t see it, they were being flanked at some distance by a group of steadily advancing children carrying sharpened laptop shanks: throwing their glances towards the other side of the bus, the tourists now realized they had been encircled. Slowly the circle of children began to close upon the tourist party.

At this point one young couple from the tourist party bolted for it: determined to escape from the death trap that was closing in on them. They didn’t make it through: two Egyptian teenagers rushed out from a hiding spot twirling ropes above their heads: on the end of each rope was a XO-1 anchored by a heavy knot around its handle. They swung the ropes with enormous velocity until the momentum of the laptops had made them almost impossible to control: and as with a single stroke, as if they had practiced this for untold hours, each laptop traced an arc through the air and came down with a crash on the head of its intended victim. The man ducked and fell to the ground, the woman simply fell, obviously knocked unconscious. The tourists were seeing the medieval Flail reinvented before their eyes, with 21st century technology being used to devastating effect. Several dull thud sounds followed one another in rapid succession, and the pair was sent into the farthest reaches of unconsciousness: whether dead or comatose, was a question left to the imagination. They lay face down on the dusty, sandy street outside the Hotel.

And no sooner had this transpired but the eyes of the terrified tourists were torn back to their own circumstances: the boys tending the wagon in front of them had twisted a valve, and all at once a horizontal bar of flame spit out of the barrel of the “canon” structure protruding from the front of the wagon: the children had built a flame-thrower. The stream of flame emitted by the canon was so massive that it immediately dispatched two of those present: the sheer sight of it induced one man to die of heart failure, another, the closest one to the flame, keeled over, his face singed, and himself most likely asphyxiated from the smoke.

At that moment fortune smiled on the tourists: should anyone be faced by an enemy with a complex and dangerous weapon, one sensible prayer would be: “God, please let this weapon have been designed by Egyptians.” For the XO-1 Flame Thrower, this was in fact true; and it fulfilled the promise of all Egyptian engineering, by breaking immediately after its first use. What actually happened was that the full heat given off by the flames proved to be too much for the plastic housing, and the barrel and plastic housing began to melt and cave in: this of course only brought the stream of flame being exuded from the barrel closer to the plastic, melting it more. Ultimately the flames were smothered by a rain of molten plastic from the upper lip of the barrel. The tourists looked on with momentary relief as the canon came to resemble a smoking Salvador Dali painting, before collapsing in on itself. The egyptian children surrounding the canon were immediately dispersed by the overwhelming fumes of melting plastic, which rose up and choked the tourists, still huddled alongside the bus. Temporarily the circling egyptian children, brandishing laptops which had been forged into all variety of possible weapons, were more concerned with avoiding the billows of plastic smoke, which caught in one’s lungs and drove all bloodlust temporarily from one’s mind. The egyptians scattered briefly; but the Westerners couldn’t realize this, they were too busy covering their face with hands and clothes to keep the smoke away, their faces streaming with tears. By the time they themselves had recovered and might have made a move, the egyptians had already regrouped.

Now this had gone on far too long for the egyptian children, as events were about to show, and their desire to wreak revenge on the tourists for the sin of being Kaffir, demanded blood-letting. A 12-year old egyptian boy sprang up and ran towards the huddled tourists swinging his OX-1 over his head and ululating a war cry. He sprang on the group from their flank as they stood, defenseless, weaponless, and completely vulnerable. Anne Laurens was almost as disheveled as a woman of such strong faith could become; smoke and dust mixed with sweat on her body to form a grimy second skin which coated her arms and face, and if indeed her heart could beat any faster, than it increased at the sight of the boy leaping toward her: the tempo of her terror. The swarthy heavy-browed boy, whose body was clothed only by a tattered brown wrap-around sheet, came furiously on. His laptop was yellow: it was curiously out of place amidst the pastel reds and browns of the city. Now he swung it without mercy down upon her. 

With disbelief her eyes watched the path traced by the laptop through the air as he brought it down towards her face. The optic nerves sent out their obligatory information with a challenge: I dare you to believe this is happening! The neurons farther down the way refused to do so: and so the realization of this was postponed until the moment of actual impact. Thwack! The laptop knocked Anne’s head to the side with blinding force, and for a moment she in fact couldn’t see. She recoiled from the blow back against the side of the tourist bus and, ever cognizant of her role as a Woman of God, her tongue thus disencumbered rebuked the egyptian boy for hitting her:

“Stop! Those things weren’t designed for that! You’re going to break it!”

At the same time, a trickle of blood came down her cheek and began to pool in the hollow of her collar-bone. Unaware that the egyptian didn’t understand Kaffir, she continued her ladylike rebuke:

“You’re supposed to use that for simple networking and playing educational games with your friends! My Lord! What are you doing?”

Another swinging laptop careened against her forehead, knocking her back against the bus which she smashed into with the back of her head, before lurching forward again and falling to the ground. She then steadied herself with her arms and tried to get up.

Now another kid, older and dirtier than the first, held aloft a hand-crank that was used to power the laptops’ generator, but he had separated it from the laptop and sharpened it at one end: now he thrust with all his might, and the cold orange plastic pierced Anne in the throat. She fell once more with her face on the sandy ground, and an angry 14-year old girl with an strawberry-sorbet colored unit delivered the death blow to the expiring lady: slamming it down on her head like primeval man might have used a heavy stone to kill a sleeping enemy.

Her body twitched for a moment while they robbed her, then she was still. Her companions had been likewise dispatched, and there remained nothing there afterwards but a pile of corpses and broken, colorful plastic.

Posted by Potential Frolic on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 01:28 PM in
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