# Mother of Hydrogen (part 8 of 11)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [148], part 8 of 11. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2012-11 (from the career record), https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Contains Harappa, the target design for mass relocation, expressed as fiction.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Mother of Hydrogen (2012): Novel drawing on the shelter, meditation and pandemic work.
  - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine)
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Harappa
- Ideas developed here: Hexayurt
- Topics: Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — peter, harry, cadets (71%); Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — harry, yevish, president (17%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Harappa (14 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Mother of Hydrogen (7 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); real assets (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); camping gear (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); early warning (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); NaNoWriMo (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); refugees (7 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); social order (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); India (7 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); citizens (5 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): real assets; Harappa; social order; camping gear; early warning
- Importance: core-text score 1.00 (1.00 is the top), number 1 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [108] [User:Vinay Gupta/The Unplugged (2006)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/108.md): The Unplugged (2006): the earlier statement of the same long-term vision
  - [224] [The Unplugged: The Videos - Shareable (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/224.md): The Unplugged (2006): the earlier statement of the same long-term vision
  - [822] [Mother of Hydrogen, a novel (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/822.md): same career work: Mother of Hydrogen
  - [235] [The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/235.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
- On the same works, just before: [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md); [395] Open Data Ireland 25 October inaugeral meeting (2012); [396] [Transparency International launch event, Dublin (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/396.md)
- On the same works, just after: [391] [Green Foundation Ireland - The Future of Europe (4) (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/391.md); [393] [Green Foundation Ireland - The Future of Europe (2) (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/393.md); [394] [Green Foundation Ireland - The Future of Europe (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/394.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Mother of Hydrogen, document, 2012-11, https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [148], https://guptaoption.com/texts/148.md.

## Passages, part 8 of 11
[passage 98](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) doing. Transparency is Hell. I'm sitting by my desk, staring out of the window at the smog. They're burning coal to run the city during rainy season. They don't have enough panel capacity - well, enough batteries, really - to keep the city full steam ahead during the low sun periods, and they supplement with coal. It's insane, it's very nearly unique globally, and once in a while they try to sell it as a tourist attraction. Weather control is good enough they can chance throwing a few megatons of carbon a year without unleashing the climate again. Good old Kinshasa. African innovation at its finest. My 2:30 is late. This is expected. It's not a date, so she's not going to be on time. "Julie" Mbele, project manager for KBR down here, trying to help us get access to Orientale Province, site of the biggest refugee city in the world, Kisangani's shadow city, Harappa. Four and a half million people scattered over a huge area, tied together with bamboo-and-solar public trans, making most of their own equipment. But it's off-limits for political reasons. I want in. Mbele arives. She's a couple of years older than me, but a straight-up-the-ladder corporate school type, she's been with KBR since she was four years old. First as a ward of the company, then as a paying student, and now as an executive. She floats into my office in a cloud of perfume, nails like red claws, and an 80s retro powersuit. Congolese fashion is brutal. I can't really stand her, but she's holding the keys. "Vine, dear Harry Vine, how are you sugah? Kiss Kiss" god save me, I mug for her. "Julie, Julie, you're keeping me lade, mistress!" She loves it. "Right, now, Harry, down to business, I don't have very much time. Explain to me what you want to do in our camp? Tell me simply, in my terms!" Three degrees, two from Harvard Network, and half way through a PhD. She loves her games. "Well, simply, we want to find the oldest people in Harappa, and we want to find out what they remember about life before the camp, their old countries, their language, and their way of life. It's straightforwards cultural anthrolpological research. A lot of talking into recorders and smart databases." "Yaaahs, yaaahs, I see, I see, I see, yaaahs. But why, what good is a bunch of old people talking to you on a recorder? Who is that going to help, and who's paying you to do it?" The tricky part. "Well, if our research pays off, we might be able to half your security bill in the camps, and every one like it." "How?" at least 50% of the act is gone. "Why do people commit violence?" Oops, wrong move. "People are born with Original Sin, Harry, their devils make them do it!" Wrong, wrong, wrong move. No save possible. Well, maybe... "Well, where those devils are in their heads, we can sometimes find angels

[passage 99](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) in the camps, and every one like it." "How?" at least 50% of the act is gone. "Why do people commit violence?" Oops, wrong move. "People are born with Original Sin, Harry, their devils make them do it!" Wrong, wrong, wrong move. No save possible. Well, maybe... "Well, where those devils are in their heads, we can sometimes find angels in their traditional stories and culture to fight back, and we can bring those angels back into common parlance, change the language to re-include them in the culture and common speech. Proverbs, say." "AH! So you're mining for positive stories, and then retelling them inside of the host cultures? This is most ingenious, most ingenious, I shall do everything possible to make this happen. Kiss kiss, Vine!" And, with that, she's gone, and we're in. I call Peter briefly. "At first blush, we're set!" Always the joint, the cloud of smoke. He's spending more and more time at Mom & Dad's now, sometimes helping with the girls (who are, very slightly, falling under Laurie's influence, but with no Induction for them, there's no real incentive) "Harry, that's amazing, well done! You're going to have a whale of a time, a whale of a time. Remember what I told you!" "Yep. Be careful, This Is Africa. I will, I will." Will I hell. This Is Adventure. I'm going to the camp as soon as I can, and I'm going to get my teeth into the first really tangible, worthwhile thing I've ever done. I'm going to make a difference. Men plan, and gods laugh. ===== It takes about six months to get everything ready, which was to be expected. My employers know how long it really takes to get buy in, and it's more than a 5 minute meeting with a junior executive. But, by the by, the wheels turn, and the team finally gets a go and all the logistical and governmental support we're going to need. Four of us from the company go inland. John McGregor, a linguist and ethnologist who's in his early fifties, born in South Africa, the team's wise man. Sally Yevish, a former State Department security expert. Thomas More ("not Moore") runs the cameras and analysis software. In addition, we have a school bus load of school teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers and all the rest, seconded to the project or hired. They're all fluent in English at least two of the region's nearly endless languages. We still don't have fully fluent translation software for most of Africa's minor languages, so you need local translators to guide the machines, to essentially answer context questions that a large corpus translator simply guesses from ten million prior examples. This is real, wet research. The trip to the refugee city is easy enough - we charter a plane, board in a gleaming concrete airport with wildlife on the runway, and will set down two hours later on a landing strip of woven metal nailed down to a cleared

[passage 100](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) a large corpus translator simply guesses from ten million prior examples. This is real, wet research. The trip to the refugee city is easy enough - we charter a plane, board in a gleaming concrete airport with wildlife on the runway, and will set down two hours later on a landing strip of woven metal nailed down to a cleared strip on the grassland. We're maybe 5 or 10 kilometers from the river, slowly circling over an almost continuous conurbation of small hexagonal metallic huts which stretches to the river, and for some distance in either direction on this bank. The sea of idential metal roofs is dotted around with larger domes and a few container-stack high rise buildings, three or four units high. The impression from the air is that somebody crinkled tinfoil on the plain, it's so regular and uniform. There's a spiderweb of towers with transit cables hanging over the city, crazy-paving the landscape in no discernable design. It's so decentralized you can't point to a focal point of any kind from the air. That's home for four and a half million refugees who've been there for 25 years, since the last time Africa exploded into an orgy of bloodletting, triggered (I suppose) by the aftermath of the Second Holocaust on paper, but really, as with everything in Africa, it's colonialism, resource shortages and education in the end. Harappa was supposed to be a better approach to refugees. The idea was to make them economically productive: build a city, set them up on their own feet, no more refugees. A solution to the refugee problem. The area was "underdeveloped" according to various global development indexes, and the Harappa project started with financials showing that with moderate investment from the international community, the "reunitees" as they were termed would be on-average more economically productive than the average resident of this area of Congo. An Indian team took Fulleresque mass-produced housing, set up a containerized factory in Kisangani, and simply manufactured a hexayurt city as refugees arrived. Once there was enough skilled labour, they picked the factory up, drove it to Harappa, and hired locals for most of the labour. They built their own houses and infrastructure as they arrived, the city scaling to the labour force, scaling to the city. Very organic, very industrial. Very India. They use the Indian transport model too - a few roads for freight, and a mass of self-driving rickshaws suspended just above the houses running on a cable network. Our team hauls its own bags out of the hold, and on to the van that meet us at the airport. It's remarkably busy, two more planes land after ours in quick succession, small electric numbers running people back and forth to other cities. I see business people in suits who you'd never know were former refugees fly out, and think "well, if they choose to live here, how bad can it really be?" I'm about to find out. ===== The original Harappa

[passage 101](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) busy, two more planes land after ours in quick succession, small electric numbers running people back and forth to other cities. I see business people in suits who you'd never know were former refugees fly out, and think "well, if they choose to live here, how bad can it really be?" I'm about to find out. ===== The original Harappa was a tiny fortress, 20000 people in ancient India. For it's time, the dawn of civilization, it was huge. Our Harappa is not a fortress. It's a maze. The van drives into the city with our luggage, equipment and two of our staff. The rest of us are going to take "skytrans" into the city, and immediately the lack of any kind of real center becomes clear. We queue for a few minutes on a gantry, fifteen feet up metal stairs, on a narrow deck. We have a destination station number that we punch into a console, and set passengers to 25. Soon enough robo-rickshaws arrive, rickety plastic covered gondolas suspended from a single rail. The ride is surprisingly smooth, as we set off down the cable run to the edge of the settlement. Once we hit town the suspended rickshaws scatter, the cars snaking across the low tower network, following a series of seemingly random paths, skimming over an enormous unformity of silver roofs with green-painted doors, some decorated with colourful sculptures, presumably so people can recognize their own houses. We're at-most 20 feet above the ground, and could unlace the plastic roof to see the ground more clearly if we wished. I consider it, but we're only going to be up here a few minutes I think. There are narrow bicycle paths below us, mostly become playgrounds at this time of day, just after school is out. The uniformity of the housing does not extend to dress - the people bicycling or occasionally riding scooters below us wear literally everything. Far more diverse than Kinshasa, much brighter, wilder colours. They're like collages. I feel they might be compensating for the crushing awfulness of the architecture, but it's more complicated than that, as I find out later. The kids below us look happy and healthy enough. Bellies are occasionally plump, but not from malnutrition I don't think (not that I'd know it if I saw it, probably.) Out of the rickshaw window I watch them in the streets, and it's more smiles than fists. Ball games look friendly rather than fiercely competitive, and a plane-load of professionals coming into town isn't an object of wonder, if they can see us in here. On first blush, I have to say, this seems to be working for people. The rickshaw keeps changing direction, taking some kind of a random walk over the network of elevated rails, which are on a (god help us) triangular grid. It's supposed to be more efficient. It bounces a little at every transition. I can clearly imagine Dr. Gupta's face (the original architect of Harappa) head

[passage 102](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) this seems to be working for people. The rickshaw keeps changing direction, taking some kind of a random walk over the network of elevated rails, which are on a (god help us) triangular grid. It's supposed to be more efficient. It bounces a little at every transition. I can clearly imagine Dr. Gupta's face (the original architect of Harappa) head waggling in the celebration of the awfulness of his construction. I've watched the tapes of his original pitch for this place. His original vision of a scale-free centreless city violates everything sane men believe about architecture and urbanism. He was frail, even before the outset. He must have been 70 when they started, pushing a hundred now. He was fascinated by our research when I called him a month ago, and remembered Peter from Peter's visit to India thirty years ago. He asked me about how my meditation practice is going, and mentions that he taught my father. He thinks I'm Peter's son! All I can say about the old duffer is that he was well-intentioned when they started this, but it's probably just as well he's too old to travel here. I'm not sure he'd approve of how it's all turned out. I suspect he's just staying alive to see what happens. We've arrived. The rickshaws pull in, one after the other, to another metal gantry. We disembark, waiting a few minutes for the last of the rickshaws to arrive at the station, and walk a couple of hundred meters to our compound, following our devices very carefully in case we get lost in the maze. People's huts open directly on to the path we're walking down, dusty in the sun, and they stare at us as we walk past, not with curiosity, but with a sort of reserved watchfulness. Not unfriendly, but not welcoming. At the gate, our biometrics are already loaded. We pass through a 4 meter high fence, no razor wire on top mind you, into our home for the next six months. The compound has a four-story container stack for offices, a secure container for telecommunications, and two dozen or so of the bloody silver huts for the staff. They're still setting up the huts when we arrive, a truck with a crane takes folded units off its back, reaches right over the fence, and pops them out in the air and positions them on hexagonal bases screwed into the mud with big silver flanges on each point, levelled roughly by eye by a team with manual crank handles for the ground screws. Simple, modular, mass-produced. It's a Fordist (Henry, not Junior) revolution in housing, with a predictable result: insanity. It takes the van with the bags another half hour to turn up. The roads, few as they are, are exactly as congested as roads are anywhere else in the world. The price of road transit is what the market will bear. Our "concierge" leads us on a brief tour of the compound. He's about

[passage 103](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) with a predictable result: insanity. It takes the van with the bags another half hour to turn up. The roads, few as they are, are exactly as congested as roads are anywhere else in the world. The price of road transit is what the market will bear. Our "concierge" leads us on a brief tour of the compound. He's about my age, maybe a little older, almost jet black. Slacks, safari jacket, big shades, and, god help me no, a pith helmet with a little fan running from a solar panel. The heat is not oppressive after Kinshasa (the metal roofs, perhaps, reflecting off the sun?) so it's almost pure affectation. "Here's your water supply, you see we don't bury the pipes deeply, when we need a new supply we just pull the soft pipe up and screw in some more taps. This box over here is the filter, you can check the health of the system on the side, there are lights, so if the water in the pipe is for some reason contaminated, your filter will fix it. We do everything that way here: point of use utilities." "Each one of your homes" (he avoids the words hut, yurt, hexayurt and similar, they are "homes") "has a solar collector on the outside, and a building-integrated solar cooker. It stores heat for several days, so you should always be able to cook, even at night." We walk over with him to the toilet block. "Solar pasturizing solar toilets. You use as normal, but there is no flush, there is a replacable paper cone. The toilet drops it's contents into a sealed bay, which is heated by the sun and pathogen-free after only one day. Once every few days, a person will call and collect the waste, and credit you with the value of the embodied energy." They run a city half the size of New York on this basis. Almost everything is one low story because if you block their access to the sun too much, the toilets don't work and the food is cold. I begin to understand Gupta's maxim: "The city is a human jungle. All life is present there." They compete for sunlight, and his design is archtectural socialism. I want to punch the bastard. This is madness. Our guide finishes by explaining the hat. "We take much of our culture from the original users of this building system, an American town called Black Rock City, which prototyped much of our lifestyle technology. We imitate their dress code and manners, and once every year, throw a week-long party in their honour. Welcome home." He leaves us to unpack. Somebody will be by to cook us and the local ground team dinner later on. Twenty minutes later, I sit leaning against the flat, hexagonal wall of my low hut, examining the sparce interior as I try to take it all in. The furniture is made from identical square section stock, joined by bolts. The fixing points run

[passage 104](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) to unpack. Somebody will be by to cook us and the local ground team dinner later on. Twenty minutes later, I sit leaning against the flat, hexagonal wall of my low hut, examining the sparce interior as I try to take it all in. The furniture is made from identical square section stock, joined by bolts. The fixing points run all the way down every piece, so you could reassemble the bed into a table, the bookshelf into a chair, or merge the bookshelf, bed, bedside table, chair and desk into... pretty much whatever you wanted, if you got the design right. It's all rock-solid and totally simple. The little logo on each piece says "Gridbeam." It's then I realize that these people really are refugees, and this really is a refugee camp. Suddenly Gupta doesn't look so crazy after all. I imagine a sea of tents, lined up in identical north-south alined rectangular rows, metal camp beds, central wells, sewage and food trucks coming by once every few days, and endless lines, queuing in the sun for every little thing, people sitting around waiting for help. They did this on about the same budget, and the people all around me, stretching to the very horizon, built it with their own bare hands. It's a refugee camp, none of these people have history or roots here. We dine at a long, low trestle table set up outside. It's protected from the rain by a high canopy, and from bugs by the usual anti-mosquito lasers, not that anything will have made it this far inland from the river. The camp's dotted with defences. At dinner, we begin to map the social structure of the camp-city. The local political reps (not... mayor, they're doing something more complicated, surprise) explain "reassortment" - people with similar values simply exchange houses, until pretty much everybody likes their neighbours. Everybody has a remote, a bank account, a population profile. Systems match buyers and sellers of not just goods but services, so it's hard to remain idle if you have even one skill, like braiding hair, never mind the people who were laywers, doctors, teachers in their previous lives, and are again. The bigger domes we see dotted around are not private spaces, but community buildings, built using the same panels as the ordinary housing stock - a single design for everything here. The mathematics is taught inside of the domes constructed using it: convex tiling, rather than Fuller's spherical trigonometry. They still teach using the Harriss Manuals. On paper, it all works. But these are the political elites, those elected to make decisions on behalf of the collective. They're the winners. Our job is to find the losers, to find the unhappiest, most violence-prone people in the camp, and try to improve their lot from their own (or, just possibly, their neighbours) cultural resources. The locals like our plans. "Ah, Dr. Vine" (I don't correct him, he's in mid-flow) "you're exploring our cultural dislocation, the underbelly

[passage 105](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) the collective. They're the winners. Our job is to find the losers, to find the unhappiest, most violence-prone people in the camp, and try to improve their lot from their own (or, just possibly, their neighbours) cultural resources. The locals like our plans. "Ah, Dr. Vine" (I don't correct him, he's in mid-flow) "you're exploring our cultural dislocation, the underbelly of our cosmopolitan lifestyles." He's not entirely joking - they're from all over Africa, some from families which were in camps in Kenya for nearly a hundred years before moving here. "Yes, yes, there is a lot of dislocation, such a radical change from our old lives. But anybody you see here from around your own age down was born here, they've always lived in an environment of substantial material equality with their neighbours, they've always had reassortment as an option - a Muslim neighbourhood observes limited Sharia law, say - and they've always had collective purchasing of food from our agricultural neighbours to obtain best prices. This is to say that they've never been "poor" in the sense you would expect, if you see what I am saying, and that helps minimize the other kinds of tensions you would expect in our formerly dislocated, newly-rooted population." It sounds too good to be true, and we find out that it is. ===== The work goes well for four or five months. I settle in to the routine of Harappa. You spend a fair amount of time adapting to the infrastructure - somebody has to let the toilet guy in, somebody has to check the water filter is correctly functioning or it simply stops delivering water until checked - and the main urban network is bizarre. It's a 4.8 million node mesh with a replicated copy of almost every human-readable data resource on the planet. Most of the time they don't touch the real grid. It's 2066, but in many ways they're living in a tribal past. I've gotten side-tracked by the study of war veterans, the actual fighters. They're by far the worst-off general demographic profile here, and a lot of it seems to be tied up with the cult of Guembe, a failed African warlord from a generation back. Here's a typical interview. Sot Bjekrall, former South African. "None of this means anything, man, none of it, nothing. What's real is out there on the plains, on the veldt, it's the lion and the gazelle, that's us, we're the lions, and the civvies, you see, they're gazelles. And here, in this shithole, no proper toilets or anything, here we can't hunt. Everything is tagged. Everything is filed. You have a fistfight with some guy, they send you a bill for his medical expenses the next moring. You don't pay, they won't let you eat, nobody will sell you food. It's a prison, man, a prison camp. No freedom, no justice. I am in hell." There's a lot of these guys. A century of war, particularly civil war, multiple generations

[passage 106](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) a fistfight with some guy, they send you a bill for his medical expenses the next moring. You don't pay, they won't let you eat, nobody will sell you food. It's a prison, man, a prison camp. No freedom, no justice. I am in hell." There's a lot of these guys. A century of war, particularly civil war, multiple generations of veternans. I'm fascinated by it. I ask Dad. "Guembe? Yeah, yeah, I fought him. That was a big part of my war. Nasty, nasty people, they used to skin their victims and eat them alive, in proper order so they'd still be screaming through dinner as music. One of the few times I never regretted killing was dealing with their troops." I'm shocked. This is a side of the old man I've never seen. "Where possible we'd use artillery on their camps so we wouldn't have to see what they'd been up to when it was time for cleanup. It was that bad." I think about the enormous war on women, the bloody sexual mutilation which was normal in the Congo in war until pretty recently, and think about the children of such unions. What dark god would they worship? Guembe, the undead lord of the night, the spookfather, the author of nightmares all through Harappa. I'd found my research topic. We came to seek positive myths, but I'm finding the negative myths, the demons of the old mind, are actually what's doing the damage here. I want to understand it. Guembe's long-dead, a confirmed kill decades ago, but the zombie form, the mythic version, lives on. Perhaps we could figure out its weakness, and kill it too? ===== "Harry, take a look at this!" John and I are sitting at a terminal, inspecting what the semantic systems are recovering from the network. It's... interesting. To say the least. We're watching a series of interviewees, telling their versions of the Guembe cult story, forty or fifty of them in thumbnail-sized silent windows. Tiny talking heads. John's correlated it to the comms grids, and it turns out that they're a widely-scattered social network. They talk to each-other far, far more than they talk to other people, and John's sure from the comm patterns that if we look in more detail, we'll discover they're socializing face-to-face too. It seems that the Cult of Guembe is more than a story, it's actually a religion. They're talking, meeting and probably even worshipping together. I suppress a shudder. I don't want to ask the question, but based on this, I must. "John, do many people go missing in Harappa?" John startles. "Sally asked me just the same thing earlier on today! And, yes, the answer is yes. 200 to 300 a year just drop off the sensor grids, they cease to exist. It's assumed to be people leaving the city, moving to other towns without closing out accounts here, but..." We've reached the same conclusion. Guembe lives. I suppose, at the time, I've fallen

[passage 107](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) just the same thing earlier on today! And, yes, the answer is yes. 200 to 300 a year just drop off the sensor grids, they cease to exist. It's assumed to be people leaving the city, moving to other towns without closing out accounts here, but..." We've reached the same conclusion. Guembe lives. I suppose, at the time, I've fallen into my own colonialist mythology. I think this is an African problem that I can solve. It's not. It's a human problem, and I am just as human as they are. I make my first mistake. I don't tell Dad. I know he's going to regale me with war stories, and I don't want any more of a reminder of what he spent his life on when he was my age. I want to think of the man who spent his days watching food stockpiles, not the one who stomped peasant armies into the mud with a five ton boot for the corps. I just don't want to know what he did in those days. My second mistake. I get curious. ===== I'm talking to the Camp Communications Chief. He's a mously little fellow, for a telecommunications exec running comms-and-computing for a major city. "I suppose we could do what you ask, Dr. Vine, but it seems like an extraordinary allegation. You really are suggesting that former soldiers have formed a... cannibal cult... here in the world's most enlightened refugee camp? I feel that I would have to have some... tangible evidence... before honouring such a request. After all, our citizens deserve some privacy, do they not? And your group already has extremely extensive databases and access to our communicaitons records. I'm afraid I cannot do what you ask, authorizing completely network access to these people's lives, without some evidence of wrongdoing." I've overplayed my hand. But I'm on my own here. Sally Yevish thinks this is strictly about our security, and as long as none of us are going to get cooked, eaten and killed (in that order) she isn't going to interfere in this. John won't touch it with a bargepole. "Positive myths for 4 million people, or a collection of ghost stories from vets with PTSD, Harry. This is not why we're here. Let the dead bury the dead, we can't help these people." He means the veternans. He's probably right. But we could be protecting their victims. Thomas More believes me, though, and is supportive. "I think, Harry, the request is perfectly reasonable. They want evidence before they'll open the kimono on this, and odds-are most of those 300 people are simply leaving down on their debts. I think we do need evidence to take this further. So let's get some? Deal?" Eminently rational, Thomas, eminently rational. How? ===== And that's how I come to join the Cult of Guembe. I alter my history - I'm now a combat veteran from a tour in the service, instead of university, fighting up north in Nigeria as part

[passage 108](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) debts. I think we do need evidence to take this further. So let's get some? Deal?" Eminently rational, Thomas, eminently rational. How? ===== And that's how I come to join the Cult of Guembe. I alter my history - I'm now a combat veteran from a tour in the service, instead of university, fighting up north in Nigeria as part of a Peace Keeper detail. I reactivate the Puppet, and put on the smooth, bland face of a murderer. I am... Sot Bjekrall at 25, I am... a man with nothing. I am not me, I'm him. I fold the origami in my mind, and put it between who I am and what I'm about to do. It's disturbingly easy to slip out again, peeking at the world from behind my Puppet. This is easy. Sot Bjekrall is my weak link, my way in. He's one of the few White Guembe followers - Guembe himself was black, and probably a Nigerian although nobody but the CIA knows for sure. Sot wants to believe that the rich white boy with the aid project is secretly just like him, the washed up old racist. "They are not laik us, Harry, they are not the same." This I am expecting. "They are better, the black ones. Tallar, stronger, and they are so very smart, not stupid book learning like our people, but real intelligence, about what is good in life. When I die, I want to be born black, son of the land, six foot six tall in my stocking feet, to live the good life, as god indentended. We are mutants, Harry, defective little bunnies that burn in the sun. Do you think he will let me be black next time Harry, if I atone for my sins? Do you?" He's almost bellowing at me, and he's very, very upset. It's been suspiciously easy to get him to open up: one story about a murder I'd committed during my field time in Nigeria, executing a prisoner of war, and most of two bottles of whiskey. He can drink. "I will tell you a secret, my son. Guembe lives! You can meet him, by the light of the next dark moon." I look blank. "Thursday. Come to my hut at dusk, and I'll show you how it really works around here. Bring another one of those mate" he says, gesturing at the whiskey. Ok then. Thomas is more worried than delighted, and spoils my mood. "Harry, if you're right, these guys are really dangerous!" "Yes, but they're not going to cook, eat and kill a western aid worker with State connections, that's crazy. I'm going to go, look around, see some sights" I gesture to the tiny cameras that Thomas has decked me out with "and we're going to get comms access and roll these guys right up. It's going to be fine, at least for us." ===== I come to Sot's hut at dusk on Thursday, a little early. I'm carrying a

[passage 109](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) I'm going to go, look around, see some sights" I gesture to the tiny cameras that Thomas has decked me out with "and we're going to get comms access and roll these guys right up. It's going to be fine, at least for us." ===== I come to Sot's hut at dusk on Thursday, a little early. I'm carrying a bottle of whisky, a sedative dart gun, and the biggest knife I could find, sheath taped against my forearm hidden under the jacket. Sot's home, with two friends. They're both younger than him, Jake and Izzy. They're maybe 30, but it's hard to tell, because of the hollowed out faces, the sunken eyes. They look like... corpses. Both have ritual scars on their faces and arms, deep scores indicating sacrifices before battles. These guys are the real deal. "Harry, give my friends a drink here mate" and I get the bottle. The dart gun seems like a good idea. Sally Yevish is monitoring the feed, she's thirty meters away and on this if anything goes wrong, but this could move fast. Sot's sizing me up again, deciding. "Harry, are you really serious about this? You know what Guembe is for, what he's like? He was a demon in his time on earth, and he is a demon still, but he is our way home mate. Do you really want to know how this all goes son, or are you a fookin' tourist in hell like the rest of you fellows?" Now or never. "I shot a man in the face, Sot, and I damn near came in my pants. You're the first man I've ever met that knows what it's like to be a killer confined in a zoo. What do you have for me?" "Finish your drinks, boys, let's go. Harry, excuse the security, but you know..." He indicates that I should stand, and Izzy produces a rough set of manacles, plastic ties with which they bind my hands behind my back. They don't search me. "Just a precaution, mate." Yevish watches, cautiously. This is escalating. However, she's carrying a real gun, light body armour under her civvies, and has a couple of gas grenades. There are hard limits on how wrong this can go. They're on the move. Harry, Sot, Izzy and Jake step out into the darkness. The houses have tiny lights on their permiters which light up as you walk past, but the lights point down. You can see your feet, but not a man's bound hands. The walkways are mostly empty right now anyway, people are inside eating dinner. Yevish can't exactly tail them, but she walks up a parallel street, and imagines a short scramble over the low roofs if something goes down. It's not far, 80 meters, perhaps 100. They walk about a kilometer, into another hut. The smell is overpowering, shit and fear, it hits Harry at the door. His Puppet smiles for him. "Who you have in here, Sot?" Sot smiles

[passage 110](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) she walks up a parallel street, and imagines a short scramble over the low roofs if something goes down. It's not far, 80 meters, perhaps 100. They walk about a kilometer, into another hut. The smell is overpowering, shit and fear, it hits Harry at the door. His Puppet smiles for him. "Who you have in here, Sot?" Sot smiles and says "you, mate" and pushes him inside. The light comes on, and it's as Harry feared. There's a young girl, tied to a chair, with - of all things - a rubber dog toy taped in her mouth as a gag. She's been badly beaten and looks terrified. Harry notices the soundproofing on the inside of the hut. And the blood stains on the floor, and a pile of gristly bones in one corner that could be from dog, but are more likely... yep, there's the skull, from a child. Harry would be sick right now, or shaking in fear, but his Puppet is calm on his behalf. "Well, now, Sot, we've got everything we need for a party here mate. Where's the whisky." Sot pulls out the bottle, and, satisfied that Harry has the Right Stuff, motions to Izzy, who slips off the cuffs. Harry takes a deep swig and thinks "well, we've go the evidence now, Yevish is going to be right outside in about two minutes, we can do this." He pulls up a chair and sits opposite the girl, staring into her eyes. She senses The Puppet and is very, very afraid. Izzy comes around behind the girl, takes a length of rope, and winds it slowly around her neck two or three times. Grinning at Harry, he begins to tighten it. The girl's eyes bug out, and she thrashes agains the chair. She begins to go rigid, stiffen, and Harry knows that after that she'll pass out, then die. He's not going to sit here and watch that happen, but before he can act, The Puppet steps in. "Eh, mate?" As the girl's brain is deprived of oxygen, the blood no longer able to reach it, she shudders and falls forwards. Izzy unwinds the rope, and holds her head up. "Izzy's a strangler" says Jake, speaking for the first time. "I'm a cutter." He gestures with a straight razor he pulls out of his pocket. "I saw them cut my mum, and it's my thing now." Yevish has had all the time she's getting. Harry trusts she's on the feed. He stands up, and walks behind the girl's chair. He gestures to Jake, and says "may I?" and takes the razor. He opens it, and dangles it by the handle, swinging in front of the girl's eyes. "Yevish! NOW!" Harry brandishes the razor like a knife. They're not going to touch her. Yevish is standing outside the hut, taking in the blow by blow. She's got the pistol pointed at the lock, and what she judges to be a safe angle judging by the

[passage 111](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/mother_of_hydrogen.txt) and dangles it by the handle, swinging in front of the girl's eyes. "Yevish! NOW!" Harry brandishes the razor like a knife. They're not going to touch her. Yevish is standing outside the hut, taking in the blow by blow. She's got the pistol pointed at the lock, and what she judges to be a safe angle judging by the room geometry on the feed. Two rounds and the lock is off, she boots the door open. Jake's very fast, in motion as soon as Harry yells. He grabs the chair Harry was sitting on as soon, and levels it into Yevish as she enters. Sot's not so fast, and Harry ducks the bottle of whisky, and drags the girl backwards out of the fray as Izzy... shit... smashes the razor out of Harry's hand with a club. Harry retreats fast. Izzy ignores the girl and follows. By the door, Yevish's gun swings on it's leash as she struggles with Jake. Sot's doubling up on Yevish, trying to grab the gun as Jake grapples with Yevish, trying to keep her arms under control while Sot gets to the piece. Unbidden, everything that Peter's taught Harry is right at his fingers, and he peels the knife off his forearm. Izzy backs up at a foot of steel, but orients and in a moment Izzy's pushing him back with the stick, swiping for the knife blade, going for another disarm. Harry keeps his distance. He's lost the razor, and he's damn well not going to lose the knife. Thinking, Harry decides the logical thing is to sort out the gun. He keeps his distance from Izzy and backs away towards Jake. Without a thought, by instinct, as soon as he's in striking distance he sinks nearly a foot of steel into Jake's back as he's grapping with Yevish, landing the knife just above the kidneys and sharply up. Jake screams, and is dead before he falls. Harry shoulder-barges his corpse to one side to get at Sot, who he then slices across the abdomen, not deep enough to penetrate the fat layer. Sot falls backwards and sits against the wall, horrified at the sight of his own blood, trying to hold the wound closed. Yevish immediately puts the gun on Izzy. He freezes. Jake bleeds, Sot tries to hold his stomache together, and Harry stands there, panting, with the red blade in his hand. "Jesus fucking Christ, Harry, what the fuck?" Yevish is shaking. "You've killed him!" Coming from a woman waving a gun, Harry's surprised at her shock. It's then he realizes that he's perfectly calm. He's standing there having killed one man and perhaps mortally wounded another, knife red in his hand, perfectly calm. By comparison, Yevish is freaking out. Harry walks over to the girl, and cuts her free with the bloody knife. "What do we do with these two, Yevish?" Harry realizes that, actually, he's in trance. It's not the blood, it might be the killing, but it

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/148-9.md (part 9 of 11).
End of [148] Mother of Hydrogen, part 8 of 11. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.