Bamendankwe Village
Friday Night, 11:30 PM
I sat on the dirt floor of the village meeting hall, right beneath the battery bank. The red and green LEDs of my custom charge controller flickered in the dark like the eyes of a cat.
Tashi and the Colonel had left at dusk. Tashi hadn't wanted to go, but Uncle Lucas had insisted. "The boy needs to breathe the village air," Lucas had said with a wink. But I knew the truth: I was the bait.
< Thermal Signature detected at 100 meters, > Gemini whispered. < Two human entities. Moving low. They are avoiding the path of our new streetlights. >
Let them come, I thought. My heart was thumping against my ribs, but my hands were busy.
I wasn't using the Thunder Stick this time. I needed something stationary. I had spent the afternoon "grounding" the solar panel frames. Usually, you ground them for safety against lightning. I had grounded them for a different kind of strike.
I had taken the high-voltage inverter from a broken photocopier I'd found in Patel's junk box. I wired it to the battery bank, but I didn't connect it to the panels yet. I had a "dead man's switch" in my hand two bare wires I would touch together when the time was right.
< Distance: 50 meters. They are carrying heavy objects. Likely stones or iron bars. >
I crawled to the window. The mist was rolling in, thick and white, making the village look like a ghost town. I saw them. Two shadows detached themselves from the darkness of the banana trees. They moved with the practiced silence of hunters.
They didn't see me. They were looking at the roof.
One of them was tall Razor. I recognized the way he tilted his head. The other was smaller, likely a "small fry" looking to earn his stripes.
"You sure say the thing no go shock?" the small one whispered in deep Pidgin.
"Shut mouth," Razor hissed. "Na just glass. Smash am, make we comot. Bookman say if the light die tonight, the boy don finish."
They reached the side of the hall. The solar panels were mounted on a low-slung section of the zinc roof, barely eight feet off the ground.
Razor boosted the smaller man up. The boy grabbed the edge of the aluminum frame to hoist himself onto the roof.
Now, I thought.
I pressed the two wires together.
ZZZZZT-SNAP!
The inverter roared to life, dumping 5,000 volts of pulsed DC current directly into the aluminum frames. It wasn't enough to kill I didn't need a corpse on the Fon's land but it was enough to override every nerve in a human body.
The boy on the roof didn't even scream. He let out a choked "Ugh!" as his muscles locked tight. He was "clamped" to the frame for a split second before the pulse released him, sending him tumbling backward into the dirt.
"Weti happen?" Razor shouted, jumping back.
The boy was twitching in the red mud, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "The... the thing... e bite me! Razor, the glass di bite!"
"Nonsense!" Razor growled. He pulled a heavy iron wheel-spanner from his belt. He thought it was an animal or a trap. He swung the iron bar at the frame, intending to smash the nearest panel.
The iron bar hit the electrified frame.
BANG!
A blue arc of plasma jumped from the frame to the iron bar, traveling straight up Razor's arm. The force of the discharge threw him three meters back. He hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of him.
I stepped out onto the veranda. I didn't have a gun. I just had a small handheld LED that I shone directly into their eyes.
"The sun is sleeping," I said, my voice sounding older than ten. "It does not like to be woken up by thieves."
Razor was on the ground, his right arm shaking uncontrollably. He looked at me through the white glare of the LED, his eyes wide with a primal terror.
"You..." he gasped. "You really be wizard."
"Go back to the Bookman," I said. "Tell him the light in the village is not mine. It belongs to the Mfon and the soil. If he touches it again, the soil will swallow him."
They didn't wait for a second warning. Razor grabbed the twitching boy by his shirt and dragged him into the darkness of the banana grove. I heard the frantic kick-start of the Yamaha motorcycle a moment later, the engine screaming as they fled down the hill.
< Threat Neutralized, > Gemini noted. < Energy consumption: 2% of battery bank. >
I sat on the steps of the hall, watching the mist. I wasn't happy. I felt a cold weight in my chest. In 2025, I had fought with words and money. Here, in 1999, I was fighting with lightning and fear.
The news of the "Biting Glass" spread through Bamendankwe before the first rooster crowed.
When the Fon arrived at the hall at 7:00 AM, he found two deep scorch marks in the mud and a dropped iron spanner that was partially melted at the tip.
He didn't ask questions. He looked at the solar panels, then at me.
"The boy who catches the sun," the Fon said, his voice echoing for the villagers to hear. "He has put a guard on our light. From this day, the Bamendankwe Hub is taboo for any stranger. If a man touches it without permission, his blood will freeze."
He turned to the two young "technicians" I had trained.
"You two. You are no longer just boys. You are the Keepers of the Spark. If the light fails, your heads will answer."
They bowed so low their foreheads touched the dirt.
By noon, the military truck returned. Dr. Foncha and Uncle Lucas stepped out, looking surprised to see the village in a state of celebration instead of mourning.
Dr. Foncha looked at the melted spanner I handed him. He looked at the scorch marks.
"You electrified the frames?" Foncha whispered, his educated Yaoundé accent slipping for a second. "That is... highly irregular, Nkem. If someone had died..."
"If someone had died, they would have died trying to sabotage a Government project," I said. "Is that not what the Colonel's soldiers are here to prevent?"
Uncle Lucas laughed, a deep, belly-shaking roar. He slapped Foncha on the back.
"The boy is right, Doctor! He saved us the cost of a 24-hour guard. He is efficient!"
Lucas looked at me, his eyes shining with a dangerous kind of pride.
"Nkem, my brother Tashi is a lucky man. But you... you are a problem."
"A problem, Uncle?"
"A problem for the people who like the dark," Lucas said. "And in Cameroon, there are many people who love the dark."
We returned to the shop in Bamenda as heroes. But the victory was short-lived.
Waiting for us at the storefront was a white Peugeot 504 with the blue SONEL logo on the door. Two men in blue coveralls were standing by our meter box, holding clipboards and wire cutters.
Tashi jumped out of the truck before it even stopped. "Hey! Weti wuna di do for my house?"
One of the men, a tall, arrogant fellow with a gold watch, looked at Tashi with disdain.
"Mr. Tashi Mbua? We are from the National Electricity Corporation. We have received a report of illegal grid interference and 'unauthorized power generation'."
He pointed to the solar panels on our roof.
"You are selling electricity," the official said. "That is a state monopoly. Only SONEL has the right to distribute power in the Republic of Cameroon. You are in violation of Federal Law 92-006."
He signaled to the man with the wire cutters.
"Cut the connection. And seize the equipment."
I stepped out of the truck. My small shoes hit the pavement with a sharp tap.
"Wait," I said.
The official sneered. "Move, boy. This is big man business."
"It is big man business," I said, reaching into my bag and pulling out the contract Dr. Foncha had signed. "That's why I have this."
I held up the paper with the Ministry of Territorial Administration seal.
"This shop is a Designated Millennium Research Hub," I said, my voice echoing in the street. "Under the direct patronage of the Presidency's Y2K Task Force. If you cut that wire, you aren't cutting Tashi's power. You are cutting a state-funded research link."
The official's hand froze. He looked at the seal. He looked at the military truck parked right behind me, where four soldiers were currently leaning on their rifles, watching him.
"This... this is for the village project?" the official stammered.
"This is the brain of the village project," I said. "And as for the 'monopoly', if SONEL can guarantee 100% uptime during the Y2K transition, we will gladly disconnect. Can you guarantee that, Sir?"
The official looked at the crumbling transformer on the pole across the street. He looked at the soldiers. He knew the answer.
"We... we will have to verify this with Yaoundé," he muttered, backing toward his car.
"Do that," I said. "And tell your manager that Tashi & Son is looking for a partnership. We have the technology to stabilize the local sub-stations. If he's interested, he knows where to find us."
They drove off, the Peugeot kicking up a cloud of red dust.
Tashi looked at me, his eyes wide. "Nkem... you just invited the Tax Man and the Light Man to a fight. Why?"
"Because, Papa," I said, looking at the empty shelves of our shop. "We aren't just selling lights anymore. We are going to build our own grid. A grid that doesn't need SONEL. A grid that doesn't need the Bookman."
I walked into the shop.
Gemini, I thought. What's the next step?
< We have the technical foundation, > Gemini replied. < But to build a grid, we need 'Nodes'. We need more villages. We need a way to communicate between them without wires. >
"The Radio," I whispered. "We need to turn Uncle Lucas's military radios into a Data Network."
In 1999, I was about to invent the African Internet using nothing but solar power and scavenged military gear.