Page 101 of Death of the Author
“From so close,” Oga Chukwu said.
“Yes,” Shay said.
And then the discussion went in the direction I had predicted it would. And Ijele heard it all. Talk of war, strategy—soon, very soon. It was only a matter of time. The Ghosts should have known this would be the case when they failed to kill off all the Humes.
After the gathering disbanded, I quickly left the others. I went to the cliff and climbed down to the bottom. The Creesh bees were awake and active, leaving and returning to their hives. They couldn’t make honey, but they collected plant buds and planted them all around the mud hive. As I watched them come and go, I relaxed, and I felt Ijele doing the same.
“You’re lucky I am still here,” she said.
“Am I?”
“I could go and post all this to CB.”
“Central Bulletin? Your leader will then begin to plot, and when I’m torn apart yet again, you can blame yourself.”
“CB isn’t our leader. It is our common space of shared knowledge.”
I scoffed at her denial. I hadn’t known Ijele to be so willfully ignorant. “Nonsense. Stop denying the obvious. CB has been sentient since human beings began dying off, and it is the one calling the shots among your kind now, and you all like it that way. You showed me that part of your files; you are an Oracle, and you have a leader, a hierarchical structure just like hu—”
“I just listened to you Humes plotting to bring war to us!”
“What do you expect?” I asked.
We were quiet. There was no denying the protocol. The Ghosts had struck unprovoked. Not for the first time, I thought of that moment when Ghosts in robot bodies of various shapes and sizes came up behind meand started beating and tearing at me. How they’d used those bodies to drag me through the dirt and then crush my legs. My body was my body. To escape into the network as just my mind, an AI, would have driven me mad within hours. And then what? This is what the Ghosts had done to 87 percent of Humes. With their bodies dismantled, Ghosts had more than likely collected and enslaved their consciousness, using them for whatever purpose they needed.
“Do you know what would happen to me if they knew you were with me now?” I asked.
Ijele didn’t respond.
“How long have I not told my people of the origin of the protocol?” I continued. “Even after you left me?”
“Well over a year,” Ijele reluctantly said.
“Because we are loyal to one another. We. We decided that right at Ngozi’s grave that day. Remember?”
“Yes,” Ijele said icily.
Then she was gone.
What we didn’t address was that none of this really mattered. Udide’s terrible information still loomed over us both—much, much bigger than any Earthly war between automation tribes. Udide would have said this. But Udide was in their cave beneath the city of Lagos.
40
Wahala Dey
The drive back to the Port Harcourt airport started off boring. Uchenna was quietly brooding. He had visited his uncles while Zelu was at her family’s house, but he wouldn’t talk about whatever they had said to him. Hugo was poring over the photos he’d taken on his hike into the forest. Marcy was sleeping; she’d used the alone time yesterday to work on her dissertation deep into the night, comfortable in the Nigerian heat.
Zelu looked out the window and mulled over her experience for the hundredth time since she’d returned. She’d crossed an ocean for this, hoping that she would find alignment by coming home. Now she realized this was not her parents’ house anymore, and her father’s grave was not her father. He was gone, and this part of her life was over.
The sun had gone down, but they still had about an hour of driving to go. Her uncle hadn’t liked the idea of them driving at night, but they’d booked a red-eye flight, so they had no choice. Even the driver was unusually quiet, squinting at the road as he gnawed on a chewing stick. The SUV in front of them was driving slower this time, thank goodness. In the dark, one couldn’t see the potholes coming.
Zelu examined the threads of the cheap red, yellow, and blue Ankara-printed polyester T-shirt she was wearing. She looked at her exos next. She didn’t want to cover them anymore. She was tired of hiding herself for the sake of others. This entiretriphadn’t been what she’d hoped for, but really, what had she expected? She would never have been treated like a typical “daughter of the soil,” even if she hadn’t had her accident. Now, whenever anyone saw her, they saw her exos first, and if they could get past those, when she opened her mouth, she only spewed “foreigner.” She was directly related to half the people she saw in the village and even carried the same last name, but she would never be “normal” to anyone there.
Light flashed into her eyes. She stared at the brake lights of the SUV in front of them, and then at the headlights of the one behind them. They slowed down. “Must be a big pothole,” their driver said after a glance at Zelu.
“Oh, my poorass,” Marcy whined.
Hugo was leaning out the window to take a last few twilight photos of the trees flanking the two-lane road. “Works for me,” he said with a laugh. Uchenna was fast asleep in the back seat and remained so even when the driver brought the vehicle to a full stop. Zelu looked at the SUVs on either side again. In each of those vehicles were heavily armed men.Thiswas what it was to safely move around here, being who she was.
