Victory feels like a warm blanket. Failure feels like a cold alarm.
I was asleep on the table, my head resting on my toolbag.
The room was filled with the grey light of dawn.
And a sound.
BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP.
The inverter. The "Low Battery / Fault" alarm.
I sat up, groggy.
"Turn it off," Lucas grunted from the floor, pulling his jacket over his head.
I looked at the Frankenstein regulator.
The LEDs were dead.
I looked at the multimeter.
Input Voltage: 0.00 V.
"Papa," I said. My voice was sharp enough to cut the sleep in the room.
Tashi sat up instantly. "What?"
"Zero volts," I said. "The line is dead."
"Cloud cover?" Tashi asked, rubbing his eyes.
"At 5:30 AM, we should have 1 or 2 volts from ambient light. We have absolute zero. It's an open circuit."
I grabbed my jacket. I grabbed the multimeter.
"Someone cut the wire."
We walked out into the mist.
The village was waking up. Woodsmoke curled from the thatch roofs. Roosters crowed.
It looked peaceful. Ancient.
But the long black wire—our umbilical cord to the sun—was lifeless.
We walked the line.
0 meters: Connected at the hall.
50 meters: Connected at the first bamboo pole.
100 meters: Connected.
We reached the edge of the "Sacred Grove" the dark perimeter of trees surrounding the Iroko and the Achum shrine.
The wire disappeared into the tall elephant grass.
"There," Lucas said.
He pointed to a bamboo pole that had been knocked over.
The wire wasn't hanging. It was lying in the mud.
We ran to it.
The cable our expensive, imported 4mm copper cable was severed.
It wasn't a clean cut. There were no plier marks. No machete slice.
It looked... gnawed. Hacked with a dull stone. Pulled until it snapped.
And it wasn't just cut.
The two ends of the broken wire were tied around a bundle of leaves.
Dracaena leaves. The "Peace Plant."
In the Grassfields, Dracaena is used to mark boundaries. To say: Do not cross. It is also used to ward off evil spirits.
"It's a ward," Tashi whispered. "Someone put a Juju injunction on the wire."
"Pa Thomas?" I asked.
"No," Lucas said. He squatted down, examining the mud. "Thomas would have stolen the copper. This wire is still here. They didn't want the metal. They wanted to stop the flow."
He pointed to footprints. Small, bare feet. Many of them.
"Fear," Tashi said. "They think the wire is sucking the spirit out of the grove."
We stood there, staring at the broken connection.
Behind us, the village was gathering.
Yesterday, they were an audience cheering for Terminator.
Today, they were a jury.
They stood at a distance. Silent. Watching.
They saw the wire on the ground. They saw the Dracaena leaves.
They knew what it meant. The spirits had rejected the connection.
"Fix it," Lucas said, reaching for his knife. "Strip it. Splice it. We can have power back in ten minutes."
"Don't touch it," Tashi ordered.
"Why? It's just leaves."
"If we touch those leaves," Tashi said, "we declare war on the ancestors. You can fight Pa Thomas, Lucas. You can't fight the grandmother who planted these."
A Chinda appeared from the path leading to the Palace.
He didn't carry a spear. He carried a message.
"The Fon is awake," the Chinda said.
"The light is out," Tashi said.
"The Fon knows," the Chinda replied. "He saw the darkness."
He held out his hand.
Palm up. Expectant.
"The key," the Chinda said.
I felt the heavy iron key in my pocket. The Master Key to the fuel depot. The symbol of our "Political Immunity."
I looked at Tashi.
"Give it to him," Tashi said softly.
I pulled the key out. It felt cold.
I dropped it into the Chinda's hand.
"The Fon says," the Chinda recited, "that the sun is powerful, but the night is older. He thanks you for the cinema."
"We can fix it," I said. "It is just a broken wire."
The Chinda looked at the Dracaena leaves.
"The village has spoken, Wizard. The wire crosses the path of the spirits. It cannot be fixed."
He turned and walked away.
He didn't expel us. He didn't threaten us.
He just dismissed us.
We were no longer the incumbents. We were just tourists with broken toys.
We walked back to the Community Hall.
The sun was fully up now. The solar panels on the hill were bathing in photons. Generating 28 Volts. Pumping energy.
But the energy had nowhere to go.
It died at the Dracaena leaves.
We sat on the steps of the hall.
The inverter beeping had stopped (I turned it off).
The silence was heavy.
"We lost," Collins whispered.
"We didn't lose," Lucas said, pacing. "We were sabotaged. I say we go to the hill, move the panels, and run the wire around the grove. Bypass the Juju."
"And use 200 meters of cable?" I asked. "The voltage drop would kill the system. The lights would look like candles."
"Then we move the hall," Lucas snapped.
"Physics, Lucas," I said. "We are constrained by physics."
< Correction, > Gemini's voice was cold in my head.
< Analysis: You are constrained by Sociology. The physics works perfectly. The human interface failed. >
< Warning: You ignored the Cultural Variable. You assumed 'Utility' overrides 'Belief'. Error. >
I put my head in my hands.
Gemini was right.
I had treated the village like a circuit board. I thought if I provided the connection, the current would flow.
But people aren't copper. They have resistance. Infinite resistance.
"Dr. Foncha," Tashi said.
He was holding the letter.
If you are not ready, I will contract Delta Energy.
"We failed the test," Tashi said. "The lights are out. The Fon has withdrawn support. When Foncha calls the Palace today..."
"He will hear that his contractors were defeated by a plant," I said.
Pa Thomas walked by.
He didn't stop. He didn't gloat.
He was carrying a jerrycan of diesel.
He walked toward the generator. The one we had gutted.
He whistled a tune as he walked.
He knew the generator didn't work. He knew we had taken the parts.
But he also knew that we were done.
"He wins," Lucas said, his hand twitching near his knife.
"No," Tashi said. "He survives. That is different."
Tashi stood up.
He looked at the useless solar panels shimmering on the hill.
He looked at the cut wire.
"We assumed we were saviors," Tashi said. "We thought because we were poor, we were humble. But we were arrogant, Nkem. We walked into their house and drilled holes in their gods."
"So we pack?" Collins asked.
Tashi looked at the shop tools. The expensive crimper. The rolls of cable.
The Seed money was gone. Spent on hardware that was now useless without a connection.
"If we pack," Tashi said, "we go back to plating bolts. Forever."
"We don't pack," I said.
They looked at me.
"Gemini... I mean, the logic is clear," I said. "We cannot run the wire through the village. The village rejected it."
"So?"
"So we don't bring the power to the people," I said. "We bring the people to the power."
I pointed to the hill. To the solar array.
It was outside the grove. It was on "neutral" ground.
"We move the system," I said. "We move the inverter, the battery, the TV. We move it all to the hill. Under the panels."
"That is 150 meters away," Lucas said. "Nobody lives there. It's just grass."
"We build a kiosk," I said. "A charging station. A cinema booth. Right at the source."
"The Fon won't like it," Tashi said.
"The Fon controls the Palace," I said. "He doesn't control the hill. That land is communal grazing land. I checked the map."
"And the Dracaena?"
"The Dracaena blocks the path," I said. "We aren't crossing the path anymore. We are sitting on the mountain."
I looked at Tashi.
"We stop trying to be the Utility Company, Papa. We become a destination. If they want the light... they have to climb."
Tashi looked at the hill.
It was desperate. It was stubborn.
It was exactly what a rat would do.
"Load the truck," Tashi said. "We are moving camp."