I have always wanted to visit Japan during the beginning of spring and travel the country south to north following the cherry blossoms. For the uninitiated, cherry trees have an extremely short flowering season. The blossoms last for around two weeks at most, or as little as a few days if wind and rain knock the flowers from the trees. Catching the trees in full bloom requires a combination of good timing and sheer luck.

I was lucky enough to arrive in Osaka at the height of the bloom. Even luckier, my timing coincided with the one and only sunny day I’ve experienced since I arrived in Japan.

I wandered along the Kyū-Yodo River, which meanders through central Osaka. The city was alive with crowds along the entire length of the river; the cherry blossom season is a tourism highlight and the crowds were comprised of an even mix of Japanese and foreign tourists.

I eventually arrived at Osaka Castle, which is an impressive feat of construction featuring deep moats, cyclopean stonework, and manicured gardens.

Most of the moats were filled with water and alive with fish and turtles, but a few had been emptied with grass grown along the bottom. The contrasts of colours between grass, stonework, cherry blossoms and the sky was striking.

If you want to visit Japan during the cherry blossom season, you can track the latest predictions for “full bloom” here.

A cousin of the Tibetan Mastiff, the Bankhar has been used for centuries as a livestock guardian by Mongolia’s nomadic herders. However, during the country’s Soviet occupation, the Bankhar population dropped significantly and in many regions of the country the Bankhar lost its place in the nomads’ culture.

Instead, herders came to rely on guns and poisons as a means to defend their flocks, which has had a terrible impact on the country’s populations of wolves and snow leopards.

The Foundation aims to turn this situation around via a program of breeding, genetic testing, and education programs, to produce a purebred population of Bankhar and reintroduce them back into the lifestyle and culture of Mongolia’s herding families. Success will mean not only the preservation of an important part of Mongolia’s cultural history, but it will help stop the decline of Mongolia’s precious wolf and leopard populations by providing herders with a non-lethal method to protect their livestock.

The Bankhar are magnificent dogs, physically imposing but with sweet temperaments. The day I visited, Doug and Devin were preparing the 19 puppies born in recent months for a trip to the vet for their latest round of vaccinations. Needless to say, there are few things cuter than a carload of puppies.

For more information and to follow the Foundation’s progress, follow their Facebook page here.

During Mongolia’s long and harsh winters, UB’s air quality plummets to become the second-polluted in the world. 60% of the pollution comes from households burning coal in small stoves. UB’s population of 1.4m—almost half of Mongolia’s total 3.0m population—has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by families migrating to the capital from rural areas. Most of these families live in gers, traditional nomadic felt tents. To keep warm during winter, they burn coal to stay warm, with the average family consuming 4.5 tonnes of coal during a single winter.

I was recently living in Mongolia, working with the microfinance crowdfunding organization Kiva. Kiva, through its local partner organisations XacBank and Credit Mongol, is helping to combat Mongolia’s smog problems by providing funding for items like energy efficient stoves, better insulation, and solar panels, via their green loan programs. A loan to replace old stoves and purchase a proper insulating blanket for a family’s ger can reduce a family’s coal consumption—and the amount of smoke produced—by 60%.

These programs provide more than an environmental benefit. Families can spend upwards of 40% of their household budget on coal during winter; a green loan to reduce a family’s coal consumption means more in the family’s pocket for food, education, or to help fund their business.

For more information, visit Kiva.org.

I woke up early Sunday morning, too excited to sleep knowing we were going to play with an army of huskies. After a quick breakfast, we jumped in the car and drove down to the Tuul River. The Tuul is a long waterway, flowing over seven hundred kilometres through northern and central Mongolia, including through Ulaanbaatar along the southern edge of the city.

The river is frozen solid during winter, so we drove right out into the centre of the ice to meet the dog-sledding folk. We arrived to see the five sleds already laid out on the ice, with the dogs being taken one-by-one from the truck and hooked up to the sleds. The demeanour of the dogs ran the full gamut from irrepressible excitement to zero-fucks-given.

We quickly paired up and chose a sled. The setup was quite simple. One person zips themselves into a waterproof seat on the body of the sled—the waterproofing becomes important later on—whilst the other person stands on the back in the driver’s position. The driver leans left or right to direct the pack, to brake there’s a foot pedal that gouges into the ice, and there’s a more powerful parking break slash grappling hook on a rope when you want to stop completely.

I paired up with a friend and chose the driver’s position for the first half of the journey. As we settled into our sleds, the dogs sensed the trip was about to start. Their energy grew, with even the zero-fucks-given huskies standing up and pulling against the parking brakes whilst howling their excitement. If you’ve ever owned a husky, you know they love to run, and these dogs were ready to run.

Finally, we were all ready and so I pulled the parking brake (slash grappling hook) out of the ice. The sled leapt forward as the dogs bolted down the river.

Dog sledding is a hell of a lot of fun. There’s very little required from the driver; the dogs pretty much know where to run. That being said, there were several moments of hilarity, including when half the dogs in our sled team decided they needed to poop and attempted to do so whilst running; poor doggies. There were also some clear tensions between the sled teams.  Our pack and one of the others seem to have a rivalry or ongoing feud. They barked and snapped at each other whenever we passed and I swear the two teams were trying to outpace each other.

I said there was “very little required from the driver” but there were one or two occasions where I should have steered better. Although most of the river was frozen solid, we drove through a slushy portion, to the right of which lay a pool of ice-cold water knee-to-waist deep in parts. I failed to steer the dogs far enough to the left, resulting in our sled slipping sideways into the water.

I ended up one leg knee-deep and lost my grip, falling off the sled. As I climbed out of the river shaking off the water, I watched my sled disappear down the river with my sled partner’s squeals echoing across the landscape. Thankfully, this incident occurred near the end of the trail, so I was able to jog along the river to catch up to the other sleds. The groups paused for a break to take photos and switch drivers before heading off again on the return journey.

The ride back was a lot more fun for me as I was able to just enjoy the view and take a bunch of videos and photos.

However, the journey back was not without incident. My driver managed to collide with a branch and fall off the back of the sled. I happened to be filming at the time and in the video below can hear her screams at the exact moment she falls off the sled. I am of course sharing this for educational, not entertainment, purposes, although I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it makes me laugh.

Later, we ended up sliding into the same slushy portion of the river, except where I ended up with only one leg knee-deep in the water, my sled partner went right in up to her waist. Oops. She was not alone, as a few of us has a spot of trouble around this part of the river. I ended up switching sled teams and riding home with another friend for the final leg, triumphantly returning to home base without further incident.

We too a break around a campfire whilst the dogs were unhooked and put on a long chain to rest until the next group of tourists arrived.

It was great to get to meet the dogs, who all had very different personalities.

Some were overenthusiastic goofballs:

Some, like this pack leader, were magnificent beast who radiated stoicism and command:

And others, like this girls, were total cuddle monsters who collapsed into you if you so much as scratched behind their ears:

All in all, the entire weekend in Terelj was epic. From horse-riding, to hiking, to huskies, it was a fantastic way to spend a couple of days with friends, and it further cemented my impression of Mongolia as an amazing travel destination.

After an hour or so R&R, we were ready to go hiking. Everyone in the group was well-prepared, except for me. Despite the perpetually-icy streets of Ulaanbaatar, I still hadn’t bought myself a pair of winter boots. At first, I was waiting to find the best place to buy them; but after a couple of weeks of surviving totally fine, I decided maybe I didn’t need boots. So for the entire weekend, I was wearing a flimsy pair of Diesel running shoes that were so old there was little-to-no grip left on the soles.

As it turned out, grip-less running shoes and slippery ice-covered Mongolian hiking trails do not mix. Who’d have thought?

Our guide drove us along a bumpy dirt road from our ger camp, winding carefully up and down the icy hills, before turning off and parking at the base of a ridge. The hike to the top of the ridge took about an hour and a half. Despite my inappropriate footwear, I managed not to slip off the mountain and break my neck, thanks to a couple of trusty hiking sticks foraged from the mountainside, plus a helping hand from my friends to get me over the steeper patches.  The effort was absolutely worth it. The view down into the valley was spectacular.

From here, our guide pointed us in the direction of Aryapala, a Buddhist temple and meditation centre nestled on a neighbouring mountain. We were left to trek our way there whilst our guide returned to the base of the ridge to fetch the car and meet us on the other side. If my shoes made the trip up the first ridge difficult, they made the trip to the temple downright dangerous. The path required us to descend the mountain we were in before climbing up to Aryapala.

After trying in vain to walk down the mountain, I eventually gave up and tobogganed down the mountain on my feet and butt—far more fun and practical, despite the dark smear of mud I had to wear on my pants for the rest of the trip. Once at the bottom of the ridge, the walk up to Aryapala was relatively easy and the scenery was beautiful.

Your gaze was met with prayer wheels and shrines everywhere you looked on the path up to the temple. All were painted in bright colours that jump out against the stark wintery landscape.

The temple itself was also stunning, with intricately-painted details on every corner of the building.

The temple looks down upon a picturesque valley with many pointed mountains rising off into the distance.

After stopping here for a while to catch our breath, we met our guide and wandered down to the car. Our last stop for the afternoon was Turtle Rock, a famous landmark whose name needs no explanation.

Although we were thoroughly exhausted upon returning to our ger, we weren’t finished hiking. After dinner, card games, and a certain quantity of vodka, we decided to venture into the dark to go star-gazing. We wandered off away from the tourist areas, trying to escape the lights so we could see the stars. Unfortunately, the moon was three-quarters full, which washed out much off the starlight no matter how much distance we put between ourselves and the camp. Nevertheless, we pressed on, going so far as to clamber up a nearby mountain. Whilst we were never able to get a good look at the stars, we did get a beautiful view down into the darkened valley and back to the tourist area.

Finally, with our vodka-induced enthusiasm draining away, we slipped and skidded back down the mountain to our ger, collapsing into bed to get a good night’s rest before our dog-sledding adventure in the morning.

(Click here for Part 3)

The weekend began with a lazy 930am start to meet Bold, our guide and driver. The trip out to Terelj was interesting. For the first hour we drove past mixed residential and industrial neighbourhoods, the density falling the further we drove. The smoke haze of UB continued all the way to these outer areas, albeit not as thick as the city centre. The mountains surrounding UB seem to hold in the pollution, preventing it from dissipating. It wasn’t until we crested a mountain that we finally escaped the smoke bowl. From then on, the trip was beautiful, with clear skies and pristine countryside all around.

Our first adventure of the day was a horse-ride through the valley. I had no idea what to expect; I had never ridden a horse, except those ultra-docile tour horses that just walk the same trail every day. My friends were all experienced to some degree or another, so I dreaded being the clueless newbie. In my head, I saw myself getting thrown to the ground and breaking an arm. But it turned out horse-riding wasn’t so hard. My noble steed liked to run, so we did a fair bit of galloping. It reminded me of skiing—using my knees to absorb the shock when hurtling across uneven ground.

In the middle of winter, the landscape is stark and dry, but still very beautiful. We galloped for about an hour through a mix of forests and fields, over rocks and frozen creeks.

I was growing quite fond of my horse, until about an hour into the journey he decided he had run enough and insisted on turning around and heading home. He refused to walk in any direction that didn’t take him back towards the camp. Frustrating, but I can hardly blame him. He would be carrying more idiot tourists later that day, so he probably wanted to conserve his energy.

After our horse ride we were taken to our accommodation for the evening. We were staying in a ger, a traditional felt-covered nomadic tent. I was coughing furiously by this point. In fact, I would spend most of the weekend loudly hacking my way through our various activities; a side effect of spending my first few weeks in Ulaanbaatar without an anti-pollution mask. It seemed my lungs were using the presence of Terrelj’s fresh air as a chance to clear out weeks of inhaled smog.

The ger was warm and comfortable. We soon settled in to rest and stretch out our saddle-sore limbs. One of our group had a rather hilarious bruise in a rather embarrassing place due to an ill-fitting saddle. The rest of us were a little achey and tired to some extent. But we still had much more of the weekend—including hiking and huskies—ahead of us.

(Click here for Part 2)

Every writer has a list of words or phrases they hate. This post contains my personal list of 63 phrases I avoid because I feel they weaken my writing. I am no expert, so don’t take this post as gospel. Nevertheless, this list has helped me, so I thought I would share it. I have compiled this list over the past few years based on personal preferences, plus feedback from editors, beta readers, and fellow writers. Note, I primarily use this list when writing and editing fiction.

To avoid repetition, I grouped similar phrases together in the table below. I then gave each phrase a rating:

• Black: Total ban. I will rework the sentence to remove these phrases 100% of the time.
• Red: Avoid whenever possible. I will do my best to remove these phrases, but if there is a good reason for them to stay, so be it.
• Amber: Beware. I will check to see if my use of these phrases indicates a weak sentence.

I have included a comment beside each item explaining its inclusion on the list.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think in the comments.

My Hit List

I visited Darkhan as part of my work with Kiva.org, the crowdfunding microfinance non-profit. Kiva partners with two local microfinance organisations—XacBank and Credit Mongol. Part of my job is to undertake an audit of a random sample of Borrowers each organisation has funded through Kiva, to ensure the partnership is operating within agreed parameters.

The drive to Darkhan, once again, gave me a first-hand appreciation of the size and harshness of Mongolia’s countryside. Farms or other signs of human settlement were few and far between. Instead, the view for the majority of the trip consisted of stark, snow-covered hills from horizon to horizon. We left the smoke haze of Ulaanbaatar behind and, for a time, the air was beautifully clear, giving an unobstructed view of the landscape for kilometres around. But within the first hour, the sky greyed, and the viewing distance shortened dramatically as we drove into a cloud of snowfall that persisted for the rest of the journey and our entire stay in Darkhan. Darkhan’s winters are colder, and it receives much higher snowfall than Ulaanbaatar.

There are two sides to Darkhan: The Soviet-built central area of high rises is referred to by locals as “new Darkhan”, whilst the district of small houses and ger tents is referred to as “old Darkhan”.

The neighbourhoods of houses and gers in Old Darkhan are significantly different from the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar. Old Darkhan seems far more organised and established than the ramshackle neighbourhoods that have sprung up around Ulaanbaatar in recent years.

The average building quality in Darkhan seems significantly higher, and there are far more houses than ger tents. But the region is still poor, making it an ideal area for Kiva and Credit Mongol to assist. The Borrower we visited in Darkhan is a perfect example of the kind of family whose lives microfinance can help improve.

Daariimaa is a 55-year-old horse and cattle farmer.  She took out a loan with Kiva and Credit Mongol during 2014 to finance home renovations, in particular to improve insulation. In Mongolia, improving home insulation has greater importance than simply improving comfort. The poorest families in Mongolia can spend up to 40% of their monthly budget on heating during Winter, due to the biting cold, inefficient coal-fired stoves, and poor insulation. Replacing stoves and improving household insulation has a long-term benefit on the family budget, by significantly reducing ongoing heating expenses.

Daaariimaa and her husband have been rearing livestock in Darkhan for over 30 years. They live alone, although their adult children live close by with their own families. When we arrived, we were immediately greeted by the family guard dog.

When I say “dog”, what I really mean is bear-wolf hybrid. He was the most enormous and intimidating dog I’ve ever seen. I don’t know his exact breed mix, but he appeared to have at least some Mongolian Bankhar in him. The Bankhar is Mongolia’s indigenous herding dog, related to the Tibetan Mastiff (blog post on the Bankhar coming soon). His girlfriend, who was far less intimidating and friendlier, came out of the kennel to say “hi”, with her puppies following close behind.

Daariimaa and her husband welcomed us into their home, displaying the legendary Mongolian hospitality. Their house was very modest, but comfortably warm. We shared a pot of airag whilst completing the official business of our visit. Airag is a traditional Mongolian alcoholic drink made by fermenting horse milk. As exotic as airag may sound, the taste was surprisingly mild and pleasant, almost indistinguishable from unsweetened yoghurt. Daariimaa explained that the renovations had gone well, improving the warmth of the home compared to previous winters.

The most striking feature of their home was not the building itself, but the three newborn calves sitting in a dirt-floor area in the corner of the main living space.

Daariimaa explained that these calves had all been born within the past three weeks. They kept them inside during the day whilst their mothers grazed with the rest of the herd in the fields beyond the town, because the cold is too intense for the calves at that age. Whilst the babies stay behind, Daariimaa’s husband guides the herd—approximately 30 each of horse and cattle—to pastures out of town each morning and brings them back home each evening.

It has been both eye-opening and uplifting to visit families like Daariimaa’s, who Kiva and Credit Mongol have helped though microfinance. Although the lives of many of these families remaining quite hard, the availability of microfinance has opened doorways for them to improve their lives in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Some have been able to send their spouse or children to university. Others have been able to finance the expansion of their businesses. But in each circumstance, the expansion of opportunity has helped the family lift themselves further out of poverty and provide for a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren.

Dr Ada Low thrust her hand across the desk, killing the power to her computer monitors, turning the screens black.

Mercifully black.

She slumped backwards into her chair. A heavy exhale, almost a groan, burst from her lips. Her fingers itched to rip the memory card from the computer and hurl it out the window.

“I could hurl myself out afterwards,” she laughed, a bit too loudly. She covered her mouth to silence herself. I must be in shock. Her reflection stared back at her from the darkened monitors; her face a sickly shade of grey, drops of sweat beading on her forehead.

Pulling open her bottom drawer, Ada rifled towards the back until her shaking fingers grasped the small packet she desperately needed. Ten minutes later she was on her third cigarette, the first three she had smoked in… is it five years since I quit?

The cigarettes tasted horrible, stale after years waiting at the bottom of her desk. But the smoke still coiled smoothly into her lungs. It was like meeting an old friend you haven’t seen in years, yet the conversation flows like it was yesterday. The smoke tickled her bloodstream with nicotine, pumping the stimulant up into her brain. There, it made itself at home, triggering a familiar flood of neurotransmitters and hormones. A cosy chemical soup, telling Ada that everything would be okay.

Her nerves calmed, she reached back across her desk and flicked the power button.

The screens lit up, filling Ada’s vision with nightmares. 

***

“…events of last night have left an estimated twenty-six dead, eighty-seven injured, and over two-billion dollars in damage.

“Rescue and recovery efforts remain severely hampered. Many of the city’s emergency response assets were compromised or destroyed during the incident.

“External aid is being routed into the city to help bring the crisis under control.

“Police and government officials still refuse to comment on whether this was a terrorist attack, or some kind of catastrophic accident.

“But many independent analysts are already declaring this to be the most advanced and devastating act of cyberterrorism in history. The complexity of the assault on the city’s systems, they say, goes far beyond the capabilities of any known organisations, including the government…“

***

“Someone hacked their lattices!” Ada leaned over the shoulder of her close friend and former professor, Raina Gates-Xhe, head of Zentec’s telecommunications research and development team. Ada spoke fast, breathless from her run across Zentec’s compound to Raina’s office. She tapped the shifting, multi-coloured images on the older woman’s screens as she continued. “Someone hacked their lattices and grew them into-“

“Ada, calm down.” Raina gently pulled her friend’s arm away from the screens. She swiveled in her chair to face Ada. “Calm down,” she repeated softly, pulling the hyperactive woman into a chair beside Raina’s desk.

Raina’s nerves were already frayed. She had spent the past few days and nights helping Zentec bring the city’s systems back online after the horrific “incident” earlier in the week. According to the morning news, officials had revised the death toll estimate to seventy and the property damage to over four billion dollars. Raina felt exhausted and she struggled to follow her friend’s manic ramblings.

“Start from the beginning and go slow. Remember, I’m not a neuroscientist. These scans don’t mean much to me.”

Ada took a deep breath. “Okay, let me start over. It’s probably easier if I use the projector, so you can see the whole thing at once.”

Ada waved a few hand gestures into the air. A control panel on the wall beeped in response. The large windows at the end of the room turned opaque, blocking out the daylight, as the holo-projectors in each corner of the ceiling stuttered to life.

The system’s welcome message appeared, floating in the middle of the room: a three-dimensional, stylized letter Z, beneath which hovered the company motto:

“Zentec – solving tomorrow’s problems today.”

Ada waved a few more gestures in the air, swiping the welcome holo out of the way and flicking the images from Raina’s screens into the centre of the room.

Eight translucent heads bobbed in mid-air; false-colour medical scans, shaded blue. The faces, bones, and most of the organs were dimmed in order to focus attention on the brains, which flared with an electric-blue light. Throughout each brain, thousands—no, Raina realised, millions—of very fine threads were woven into complex structures, resembling spider webs, or the roots of a tree. The threads radiated from a central spot, shaped like a grain of rice, fused to the top of each spinal cord.

Ada stood and took position in the centre of the room. She reached out and rearranged the heads, the holo system responding to her movements as if the images were physical objects. Ada arranged the heads with seven in a circle and one in the centre. She flicked her fingers to summon a holographic control panel in the air in front of her.

“These eight kids are all in the same school, the same class in fact. A game theory class—costs a fortune—designed for upwardly-mobile brats. They’re all aged between nine and twelve. Seven have Zentec’s latest neural lattice. My design.

“The eighth girl,” Ada pointed to one of the floating heads in the circle, labeled Deborah Jeong-Ivanov, “her parents unfortunately chose an Ourogen lattice seed, right before the company went bust. Crappy tech, those Ourogen lattices. They barely boost brain function at all and the wifi link they give the patient is laggy as hell, barely good enough to play basic VR games.” Ada looked to see if Raina was following. The single raised eyebrow on the older woman’s face reminded Ada of her student days. I must be rambling again, Ada thought. She cleared her throat and moved on.

“Anyway, the data for these images come from each seed’s medical black box. I’ve linked them together into eight synchronized time lapses. They start from when the seeds were implanted in-utero. I hate that we can still only implant during the first trimes-”

“Wait,” Raina interrupted, stopping Ada from going off on another tangent. “That name, Jeong-Ivanov. Is that who I think it is? And these others names,” she pointed to the labels under the other children’s faces, “Ada, are they—“

“Yes, you would know them all. Or rather, you know who their parents are.” Each of the children possessed a famous family name, a roll call of world leaders and corporate tycoons across multiple industries, from weapons manufacturing to agrigenetics. “Eight children, each from one of the world’s most powerful families. Genetically designed, enhanced, and trained—from womb to tomb—for global leadership.”

“Ade, what have you gotten yourself into?”

Raina’s face was pale, matching Ada’s reflection from earlier that morning.

“Trouble Rae, a decent amount of trouble. Somewhere between a lot and—” she looked back at the images:

“—and maybe the end of the world.”

***

Ada ran through the replay of the children’s medical scans, explaining the nightmare she had found lurking on the memory card.

As Ada spoke, Raina slid lower down the back of her chair, until she was almost falling off the seat. She held one hand clamped across her mouth, the other on her stomach, as if she were about to vomit.

The previously blue images now filled the room with an angry red glare, signaling catastrophic damage to each child’s brain.

Throughout most of the replay, everything had looked normal. The lattice seeds wove their nano-scale mesh of silicon, carbon, and gold throughout the nascent brain and nervous system of each embryo. From birth through early childhood, the lattices grew with the child, boosting neuron growth and connectivity, providing fibre-optic shortcuts between regions of the brain, and eventually—at age three—activating the lattice’s wireless communications function, freeing the children from their reliance on desktop, handheld, or wearable computers.

However, during the final phase of the replay, something had gone horribly wrong. It began with one child, the girl Ada had placed in the centre of the circle. According to the holo data, a little under a year ago the spiderwebs of her neural lattice had gone rogue.

The shimmering threads lost their delicate appearance, exploding into a surge of new growth. Jagged fibres gouged through the girl’s grey matter, strangling and piercing her neurons. The cells deformed: at first just throwing out new dendrites, forming exponentially more connections between themselves. But as the golden weeds nestled deeper, the neurons ceased being neurons. Raina’s stomach heaved as she watched the folded lobes of the girl’s brain disintegrate, rebuilding themselves into an unrecognisable nightmare, a twisted chimera of flesh and circuitry.

Three months after the first child, the scans showed the other seven suffering the same grotesque fate, all within days of each other.

“Ade, this is horrible. How? The children, those poor children. Why haven’t I seen this on the news? How could so many high-profile deaths be covered up?”

“Deaths?” Ada’s brow furrowed, glancing back and forth between the images and the horror painted on her mentor’s face. Realisation replaced puzzlement. “No, Rae, no. They’re not dead.”

“But there’s nothing left of them. It’s all, it’s all a mess!” Raina’s hand flew back to her mouth as her stomach heaved again.

Ada let go of the holographic control panel, leaving it hovering as she rushed back to her friend’s side. “No no no no no, Rae, that’s not the problem. They’re not dead. They’re not dead. The kids are at home, right now, with their parents.”

“But, but they have no…“ she waved her arm at the nightmare images. “How?”

“I hoped you could help me figure it out.”

Raina’s head tilted to one side. “What are you talking about?”

“Look closer.”

“What?” Raina redirected her puzzled frown from Ada back to the holo. Something in the mess of images tickled a sense of recognition. She stood, shakily, from her desk and took Ada’s position in the centre of the room, grabbing the floating control panel.

She zoomed in on the first girl’s scan, enlarging it to fill the entire room, wincing as the monstrous mish-mash of parts swelled around her. Raina spotted new patterns in the chaos. She adjusted the colour settings on the scan, accounting for material density, molecular composition, and energy flow. The angry red glow disappeared as Raina assigned a rainbow of colour markers to what she saw.

“My god.” Raina’s voice was barely a whisper. She stepped away from the control panel, huddling close to her friend and gazing around the room.

“That’s why I came to you.” Ada took Raina’s hand. The two scientists and long-time friends stood shoulder to shoulder, staring at the floating images surrounding them. With the new colours differentiating the red mess, both women could clearly see the shape of a high-powered, semi-organic wireless communications array dominating the girl’s skull.

“But, what’s it connecting to? How can they still be alive?”

“What do you do when your home computer runs out of storage space? Or you need extra processing power for an experiment?” The look of despair lifted from Ada’s face as she spoke. Raina recognised Ada’s wide-eyed, mad scientist look; it always took over the younger woman’s face whenever she thought she had hit a breakthrough.

Raina scoffed at the implication. “You’re not seriously suggesting, what? That someone,” Raina struggled to say the word, “outsourced the children’s minds? Turned their bodies into puppets and their brains into routers? Ridiculous.”

“Look at the scans, Rae. The kids are up and walking around, but each of them has one of those things living in their skull.” Ada reached over to the holo controls and zoomed back out. She applied Raina’s colour scheme to all eight scans, revealing a similar device in place of each child’s brain.

“But who would do it, Ade? And why?”

Ada sat down in Raina’s chair, kicking it away from the desk so she could put her feet up. She flipped a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it, earning a frown from Raina. Ada took a deep drag on the cigarette before she spoke.

“I think the little shits did it to themselves. I think they hacked their own lattices and gave themselves an upgrade.”

As they watched the replays again and Ada explained her theory, Raina found herself nodding despite her initial incredulity. It wasn’t a malfunction. The way it happened to one child first, then all the others a few months later, within days of each other, ruled out product fault. The children were all different ages and the Jeong-Ivanov girl possessed a different device to the rest. There was only one common factor: the children were all friends, all in the same class. One child hacked herself, and then taught the others how to do it. It fit the facts.

A thought occurred to Raina. “Why haven’t their parents said anything? Why aren’t the police involved? This is huge. No offence, Ade, but why aren’t you in jail right now? You said you were in trouble—‘end of the world trouble’—yet you’re sitting here. Smoking in my office.”

The excited expression vanished from Ada’s face, replaced by the look of despair she had worn upon entering the room. She took her feet off the desk and leant forward. Ash fell from her cigarette to the floor, turning Raina’s frown into a scowl. When Ada next spoke, her voice was a whisper.

“Have you been watching the news lately?”

***

“…details of yesterday’s missile strike on downtown Ulan Bator remain hard to confirm, due to ongoing disruptions to global telecommunications. UPSR Defence Secretary, Xiuli Yang-Wu, has reiterated her condemnation of the attack, repeating her claim that separatist militia forces are responsible. However…“

***

“…small but growing group of independent analysts remain very vocal, insisting that these events are connected, the work of one or more rogue artificial intelligences. However, NSA analysts have ridiculed such theories, arguing that AI science is decades, if not centuries, away from such feats. They continue to insist…”

***

“…is our punishment for tampering with the flesh of God’s children. Those foul sinners, filled with pride in their ivory towers, have spat on the Lord’s designs for decades. They manipulate the blood, the genes, of their own babies, defying the Lord to raise their spawn above the rest of Creation. The worst of these devils even poison the minds, the very souls, of their offspring, whilst the poor lambs are still in the womb, infecting the child with silicon seeds of demonic intent! Traitors to…“

***

It took Raina a week to scrutinise each black box. The lattices had become the nexus and router of each child’s thoughts. Raina traced the data-flows out from the lattices to the scattered supercomputers and data warehouses hosting each child’s expanding mind. Based on the volume of data passing through each lattice, Raina estimated each child was processing fifty to one hundred times more information than a normal human brain.

After these initial discoveries, it took Raina only a few more days to discover the real horror. Ada had suspected the truth from the moment she first saw the deformities in the medical scans. She had said nothing to Raina, not wanting to taint her friend’s analysis with her suspicions.

Raina had identified dozens of spikes in energy use and data traffic, synchronised across each child’s network. Curious, she ran an analysis correlating the peaks to any real-world events. The results stopped her breath. The timing of each surge matched perfectly to one of the horrific events dominating global news.

Raina immediately called Ada with the news. The children were behind the escalating toll of death and destruction breaking the world apart.

But Ada already knew.

***

Ada swore as the flashlight fell from between her teeth and clattered loudly on the floor. The sound reverberated out the open door and down the darkened corridor. She knew the labs were deserted at this hour, but it still set her heart racing. Ada spat a stream of expletives into the room, their echoes chasing the flashlight’s clatter. She gripped the top rung of the ladder with white knuckles, waiting for her pulse to slow and her hands to stop trembling.

Just one device to go, she reminded herself. The last of seventy-four. After days of frenzied manufacturing in her garage at home, Ada had spent four long nights digging around the maintenance crawlspaces, smuggling her makeshift machines into the ceiling, wall, and floor cavities throughout her lab.

The past few weeks had been hell, not just for Ada, but also for a growing percentage of the world’s population. War, chaos, and ruin now consumed every corner of the globe. To the children, engineered and trained for global domination, it must all be like a grand game, played on a huge board with real world pieces. The size of their board and the number of pieces they controlled would continue to grow, unless someone stopped them.

As Ada gripped the ladder, she did her best to forget the expression on Raina’s face when her friend discovered the truth. Much of Raina’s extended family and friends lived in Ulan Bator, where more bodies were dragged from the rubble every day since the missile strike.

The two women had not spoken since their last meeting ten days ago, despite Raina’s constant calls and voicemails. Ada had needed her old friend’s help to confirm the truth, but she was determined to keep Raina away from what came next.

Ada’s blood stopped pounding in her ears and her hands steadied on the ladder. She took a slow, controlled breath before making her way down to retrieve the flashlight and finish the job.

The seventy-four machines hidden throughout the lab lay dormant, but would spring to life at her command.

Tomorrow.

***

The ashtray fell from the desk and smashed, ceramic shards and dozens of cigarette butts scattering across the floor, an ash cloud billowing into the air. Ada sighed, though it came out more as an angry thrust of air than a slow exhale. She should have looked where she was waving her cigarette hand, but her eyes were glued to the monitor, watching the children arrive one-by-one to Zentec’s facility.

She jammed the glowing end of her cigarette straight into the dark mahogany surface of her desk. Why not, she thought. With the whole world gone to hell, what’s a desk? This thought made her giggle; an odd, strangled sound.

Ada stalked out of her office, making her way through the lab to reception. The children, the subjects, the terrorists, the robots—whatever they were—had all arrived.

She caught her reflection in a passing mirror and paused, quickly straightening her greasy hair and wrinkled shirt. Her makeup could not hide her bloodshot eyes nor the dark circles beneath them. She was running on nothing but adrenalin and nicotine.

Her phone buzzed. Raina. A text this time. She must be sick of leaving voicemails. “Stop them,” was all it said. Oh Rae, Ada thought, would you still say that if you knew the cost?

One final, calming breath and Ada pushed open the door to the reception room.

Her skin crawled at the sight of eight small figures, each one flanked by nervous parents. But as she looked, she struggled to believe these eight children—they were children—could be responsible for all the chaos.

No, Ada shook herself. The data doesn’t lie.

The children each looked at Ada, wearing various expressions of nervousness, confusion, boredom. Ada wondered if those expressions were real, or just a mask. She wondered if they still felt emotions.

The parents looked universally anxious, but less than they should be. Ada had told them the truth about their children, but not the truth about her solution. They all thought their little babies would be sedated, to have the changes to their lattices reversed.

But the changes were irreversible. Ada couldn’t anaesthetise the children.

She had to euthanise them.

Each lattice formed the nexus, the communication hub between the scattered pieces of the child’s evolving mind. Cut all contact to the core and the system collapses.

Ada’s phone beeped again. Annoyed at the distraction, she flipped it open to switch it off, but paused when she saw that it wasn’t a call or a message.

Her screen flashed, an alert from one of the seventy-four signal jammers, one hidden in the ceiling. It had switched on, to run a basic diagnostic on itself. Shit, Ada thought. What is it doing? I didn’t give the comman–

One of the children, the oldest boy, was frowning up at a spot on the ceiling, exactly where the jammer was hidden. A split second later, the other seven little heads turned up to the ceiling.

No time, Ada realised. She swiped her finger across her phone, commanding all the jammers to power-up.

Four seconds.

The machines would turn the lab into a total wireless blackout zone, severing the children’s bodies from the isolated pieces of their minds, destroying their networks, destroying them.

Three seconds.

All eight heads swiveled to glare at Ada with expressions of fear and fury. Only one of them spoke: “No.”

Two seconds.

A power surge rippled outwards from the centre of the lab. Like dominos, the children’s bodies fell, lifeless, to the ground. Their parents screamed.

One second.

The jammers came online. But it was too late.

The trap had failed.

***

Ada stared at the two objects on her dining table. Her foot furiously tapped the carpet under her chair, causing the police ankle monitor to rattle against her shoe.

Five days of house arrest since the first hearing. Five days of missile strikes, fires, riots, revolutions, stock markets crashing, societies collapsing.

The inquest would last for months. The international panel had been cobbled together from whatever ‘experts’ could be spared from the more important job of managing the myriad catastrophes. After one hearing, the panel was already sharply divided, arguing whether the children were victims of murder, suicide, or an industrial accident. None wanted to consider Ada’s explanation, that the children were very much alive and were themselves the cause of the global breakdown.

Five days. Ada couldn’t stand another one.

She wondered if the children missed their parents, their flesh and blood. She wondered if they missed their physical bodies, their literal flesh and blood. What must it feel like to abandon your own skin, to shed it like a snake?

For the tenth time, Ada fingered the pistol lying on the table. She yearned to jam the barrel into her mouth and squeeze the trigger. A clean escape. The chaos was her fault, but it wasn’t humanly possible for her to stop it.

Ada sighed. There was the real problem. It wasn’t “humanly” possible. But it was possible.

A final sob and Ada made her decision. Letting go of the pistol, she grabbed the sleek syringe lying next to it. Inside, a lattice seed, recalibrated for her adult brain and programmed with a new growth plan. It would probably kill her, no patient older than an embryo ever survived implantation.

But, if by some slim chance her revised calculations were correct, her redesigned seed could work. It would not kill her, instead she would become like the children. She could fight them on their own ground. “Still sounds like death to me,” she told the empty room.

Ada plunged the syringe into the back of her neck and squeezed the trigger.

It’s a terrible cliché—and an ancient Simpsons joke—to call a country “A Land of Contrasts”, or Extremes, or Superlatives. But there are no better phrases to describe Mongolia and its capital, Ulaanbaatar. By almost any  conceivable measure it is a far-from-average place. This theme of contrasts and extremes will flow through many of my future blog posts, but to avoid making this post too long, here are just my initial observations.

The “Land of Contrasts” notion hit me even before the plane touched down. Flying over the Gobi Desert, I found myself gobsmacked at the scale and emptiness of the countryside. Australia is often described as a wide, brown, empty land, but Mongolia has us beaten. With only 3.1 million people spread across a whopping 1.6 million square kilometres, Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country on Earth. But that sense of space evaporated as the plane approached the capital, Ulaanbaatar. In stark contrast (see, there’s that word) to the emptiness of the countryside, Ulaanbaatar is a sprawling metropolis, home to over 1.3 million people, or almost half the population of the entire country.

The first sign that we were approaching Ulaanbaatar wasn’t the appearance of buildings or farmland, but rather a subtle change of colour in the landscape below. The yellowy-brown of dry Winter grass gave way to an odd bluish-grey. I initially mistook this change for a smear on my plane window, but I soon realised it was an enormous plume of smoke wafting South across the plains.

I had read about the city’s pollution problems before arriving, a sharp contrast (see, there it is again) to the pristine nature of the countryside. Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city on Earth (superlative!). It was early Winter when I arrived, but even at this time of year temperatures rarely rise above -10°C during the day and they plunge well below -20°C overnight. By February, nighttime temperatures of -40°C are not uncommon. It is so cold that fractal forests of frost grow over my apartment window each night. These forests are dispelled by the midday Sun, only to regrow in new formations when darkness falls again.

To combat these frigid temperatures, the city devotes huge amounts of energy and effort to domestic heating. The majority (60%) of Ulaanbaatar’s residents live in ger districts; these outlying neighbourhoods are so named for the traditional felt tents (gers, also called yurts) in which the residents live. The ger districts are poor areas that lack centralised heating, water, or sewerage; residents survive the bitter cold by burning charcoal in small stove ovens. The smoke from burning coal in these ovens causes the thick haze that accumulates over the city, making Ulaanbaatar the second-most polluted city on Earth, where air pollution causes 1 in 10 deaths.

Ulaanbaatar’s extreme pollution problems and the solutions currently being implemented by organisations such as XacBank, Credit Mongol, and Kiva, will be a future blog topic.

After the density of the city, the pollution in the air, and the extremity of the cold, the final thing which hit me upon arrival was the heart of the people. I have been extremely fortunate to meet some of the friendliest people since I arrived. The Kiva Coordinator for XacBank, one of Kiva’s local partner banks, has been a lifesaver. She gave me a place to stay when I first arrived, she found me my apartment, she has helped me navigate the city, held my hand through Mongolia’s somewhat nightmarish immigration processes, and she continues to be a great friend. Batzul, you rock.

Similarly, everyone I’ve met—whether local or expat—has gone out of their way to make me feel welcome and help me find my feet. I’ve mentioned this flood of hospitality to a few locals, noting that after only a few weeks I have a bunch of new friends to socialise and go out with. The typical response from the locals is to nod in agreement, but when I mention going out at night, they often give me a warning: be careful in bars and clubs, they say; when some Mongolians have a few drinks, they like to fight, and the faces of foreigners can become their favourite targets.

Like I said, A Land of Contrasts.

Upcoming blog topics will include the following:

• Misattributed Statue Selfie: How I Became Mildly Famous in Ulaanbaatar by Being a Dumb Foreigner on Instagram
• My Kiva Fellowship in Mongolia: Why Am I Here?
• The Bankhar: resurrecting an ancient breed of Mongolia sheepdog
• Ulaanbaatar, Culinary Wonderland
• Stoves and Solar: how green technologies are fighting pollution