The Book of Phoenix

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “There was something.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, pushing the memory forward, and then I opened them. “When I died in Kofi’s house.”

  “Good.” He said. “You’ve found it.”

  But I hadn’t. Not yet. It was right on the tip of my mind but I couldn’t grasp it. There was something when I died. With Kofi burning up in my arms. As I burned. For a whole minute we flew, not speaking. I still couldn’t remember it.

  “I live outside of life and death,” he said. “So I can slip through time and space. You live inside life and death. So you can do the same.”

  I looked up at the moon. It was a tiny sliver. Like an opening, a cut into another place. That was when I remembered. A sliver. The moon. Like the slice of otherness I’d seen when I was burning up, when I was trying not to look at Kofi’s disintegrating body. My heart ached for a moment, as I remembered Kofi’s face blowing away, becoming ash, showing bone, then bone becoming ash.

  With effort, I focused on the opening into nothingness I’d seen. “There was something into something else,” I whispered. It was black. A black slit. No not black, it was nothing. I’d stared at the “bones” of my hand, realizing that my bones were some kind of metal. Then I’d slipped my hand into the slit and my hand disappeared. I brought it out just before I died. My bones were still intact, made red hot by the flames.

  “Will it hurt?” I asked. I’d only slipped the skeleton of my hand into it.

  “No.”

  “I can control what it does?”

  “Oh yes.”

  I felt my heart begin to pound as I realized what this meant, what I could do. I smiled in the dark, above the ocean. I looked at the oil tanker that carried the Big Eye, and the tanker’s crew, and wished that sea monster I’d seen last time would emerge and swallow them all up.

  The Big Eye had no idea what was coming to their coveted country, their beloved city. I am reminded of the chant that the African market women over a hundred years ago shouted when they battled against the white colonialist foreigners. One woman would cry, “What’s that smell?!” and the other women would shout in response, “Death is that smell!”

  Something scarier than that sea monster is coming.

  • • •

  That was yesterday. It is today. It is afternoon. Up ahead is the American coast and the Big Eye are signaling me to come and land on the ship. I’d told them I would never set foot on that damn ship, any damn ship. That should have been their first clue. I would never arrive in this country on a boat. Never.

  I take one last look at the coast of Miami. Then I do as the winged man taught me last night over the ocean. I look deep within myself, as I hear the Big Eye’s helicopters approaching me. I count to five as I focus inward. I am heating up. My wings are probably glowing. Then I fly forward, and I am gone. “Slipping,” that’s what I will call it. And it isn’t hard to do because I am “slippery.” And it doesn’t hurt. I am made for this, too.

  And I know exactly where and when I am going.

  • • •

  Tower 1 is a large building in the middle of a Chicago northern suburb called Naperville. It is surrounded by bushy unkempt palm trees, but it is easy to find. I can practically smell what they are doing in there. Once you’ve smelled captivity, greed, and abomination, you know the grey nose-stinging scent anywhere. I don’t need to go in through the entrance. They have high security to make sure only cleared personnel enter and none of their creations get out. This place is no Tower 7 where guards and security relied too much on technology. Here they have true Big Eyes. Especially after what I had done to Tower 7. Also, security is tighter here because Tower 1 is where it all began. Tower 1 is the nexus.

  I read about Tower 1 in my days at Tower 7. It is where the Big Eye created their first abomination. They “adopted” a ten-year-old girl from Ethiopia. They believed that she was a traceable direct descendant of “Mitochondrial Eve” and thus carried the complete genetic blueprint of the entire human race. On top of this, the girl was afflicted with hyperthymesia, an extremely rare condition that made her able to remember every moment of her entire life. They gave her the code name, “Lucy.” The portion of the records that gave her real name was deleted.

  To the Big Eye, this girl was the complete Great Book of Humanity. They did two things with her. 1. They made a perfect clone of her (when you have one Great Book, you make a back-up copy). 2. They tried to make Lucy immortal by reprogramming her DNA to not age. For eleven years, Lucy remained in the body of a ten year old. When she was twenty-one, she escaped and threw herself from the roof of Tower 1. She left no suicide letter. Nevertheless, her case was still deemed a great success. And they still had Lucy #2.

  From that point on, the programs in Tower 1 were heavily funded. They built Tower 2 in Boston, where they focused primarily on creating methods of dealing with climate change and buoy technology for floating towns and cities. Soon after that, they built Tower 3 in New Orleans, where Leroy Jackson became famous for curing AIDS and several of his students began studying the New Malaria. And so on. Behind the good intentions and amazing science, however, was abomination. Weapons, the quest for immortality, how far could we go . . . The foundation of all the towers was always always always corrupt, driven by a lusty greed.

  • • •

  To kill a snake, cut off the head.

  No one has any idea what is about to happen right here in the dead of night. It doesn’t matter who is patrolling the hallways or the streets and parking lots outside. It doesn’t matter who is perched in the trees, guns ready. None of it matters.

  Somewhere a tracking device receiver is beeping. At first, it claims that the nanobot’s host is in a department store. Then it claims that it’s outside of Tower 1. Then inside. But that does not matter either. They will dismiss this information as a malfunction because no one has injected me with the tracking nanobots yet. Not to their knowledge. That won’t be done for another two days. I’ve stepped into a different space and time. Naperville, Illinois, United States, Tower 1, Floor 4 out of 9. The most extreme research is usually done on the middle floors.

  The walls are white and low. The floors are grey, shiny, and cool beneath my bare feet. There is steel railing running along the walls of both sides of the hallway. We didn’t have that in Tower 7. The hallway is narrow, so I fold my wings tightly against my back. It’s painful but I have no choice. I’ve wrapped a black sheet over myself so that only my face shows. I pinned it below my head, so that it doesn’t fall off. I have used make-up to shade my dark brown face a light peach color. I grabbed all these things from the department store. If I am seen by their cameras, they cannot know it is me.

  I walk down the hall, the soft slap of my feet the only sound I hear.

  “Like a hospital,” I whisper. But I know it is not. This is not a place of healing. Pathologies are created here. It smells strongly of rubbing alcohol. I turn a corner and step into a hallway with walls full of glass doors. I tug my black sheet over my forehead to hide the upper part of my face and peek into the first door. I want to scream, but I hold it in. It’s not his fault. And as I look at him, my eyes understand what I am seeing. He is no different from me.

  He is a man with rich brown skin and a wide puffy crown of black hair. He could be Kofi’s brother, for all I know. A jelli telli is stretched to cover the wall in front of him. He is watching an ancient Western that I recognize immediately because the theme song had scared me so deeply when I watched it over two years ago: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As if something is mocking me, the awful theme song plays, and I shudder. It still sounds like a chorus of starving coyotes.

  Both of the man’s arms and the lower parts of his legs are complicated masses of red, black, and green wires meshed over jointed metal rods. His hands remind me of the metal bones of my own hands. Computer parts are strewn about his room, and he is standing at a table heavy with mor
e parts. His thin metal fingers are highly dexterous as he weaves wires into what looks like a green circuit board. There’s a spark. He laughs to himself and nods his head. I can’t tell what he is building.

  He looks up, and his eyes grow wide with surprise. I hold a hand up and wave. He waves back. He looks up to the side and all emotion drops from his face. His room is under surveillance. I quickly look at the ceiling in the hallway. As soon as my eyes notice the camera, a siren goes off.

  The man’s mouth opens with surprise, and he frantically points at me.

  “Hey!” he shouts.

  No, not at me.

  “Behind you!” he says.

  I turn just in time to see the guard about to grab me. There is a gun on his hip. I inhale. Then I am instinct and I’m fast. I pull my wings even closer to my body, whirl around and shove him backwards against the wall with one arm. I grab his face with the other. He is a big man but no taller than my six feet. And I am stronger. When did I become so strong? Was it the flight across the ocean? Or maybe it is the dying and coming back to life.

  The guard has blue eyes, a sparkling earring on his left ear and a bushy black beard that is scratchy beneath my pressing hand.

  My body floods with the rage that has wanted to burst from me since I left Ghana. I let it wash over the guard; I let it drown him. I slam his head to the wall, and there is a soft crunch. He goes limp. He sinks to the floor. There is blood now. I’ve crushed his head. His gun is still in its holster. He had no intention of killing me. But I have killed him. I shudder and frown, my nostrils flared. My belly flutters. What am I becoming?

  I stare down at the man. My mind feels cloudy. I am villain, I think.

  Bang, bang, bang! The man in the room is kicking his door as hard as he can. “Forget him, o,” the man says. His thick accent sounds Ghanaian or Nigerian. “He is rubbish. And he don’ peme, anyway. Go down ‘de hall! Look for ‘de square. Smash it.”

  I blink. “Square?”

  “Yes! You will see it! Go! Move, now!”

  I can barely hear his words over the siren. I look at the glass door holding him in. There is no knob. I push at it. The door doesn’t budge.

  The man looks like he is going to go mad. “You cannot release me, o!!” There are tears in his eyes. “Biko, do something! They kill us every day. They kill you soon!” He is pressing his face to the door and looking down the hall. “Run!”

  I nod. I don’t run. I am gone. I slip.

  • • •

  The third time is easier. It is natural to me. I was made to do this, whether the Big Eye meant to make this so or not. I am like a horse who has just discovered what it is to run.

  I have slipped to the same place just an hour earlier, just further down the hall, out of the camera’s view. I have not killed the guard yet; I hang on to that fact and think nothing else of it. I run in the opposite direction, this time staying in the blind spots of the cameras. When I cannot, I slip and reappear where I need to be. What do I see behind all the glass doors? More cybernetic humans, more sophisticated than I have ever seen. That must now be Tower 1’s specialization. Most have mechanical limbs, some more than others. One woman has a mechanical lower body, but with human legs. I see three people in the same room with skin that glows a soft green. At first I think they are what I used to be, but when I look more closely, I see that their skin is embedded with millions of miniscule screens.

  “How can I get you out?” I ask them.

  “Get to the glass box,” one of them shouts. “Break it!”

  I’m relieved to hear the same suggestion.

  “Keep going down the hall!” a young man with only one cybernetic arm says. He seems to expect me to run by.

  I am fully convinced that they are all able to communicate electronically when I pass the next door several feet down the hall. The old woman inside is the first Caucasian captive I see. She is entirely robotic except for her head and left arm. “Don’t let them see you!” she says.

  “I won’t,” I say. My heart is pounding like crazy. Heat pours from me, and I hope that my black sheet doesn’t catch fire. For the second time in my existence, I feel that if there is a God then I am doing God’s will. I do not think of the guard I will brutally kill in an hour. All who see me understand what I am. All creatures of the world want to be free, even when they’ve never tasted freedom. So all of these caged people are glad to see me.

  A minute later, I stand before the large room staring at the wooly mammoth sleeping on an equally massive bed of hay. I am wondering why the enormous creature does not free itself. Then I see the square. It’s the size and width of a sideways refrigerator and it’s made of glass. There is something foggy and vaguely red inside. There are screens and other equipment along the far wall, but I am focused on two things. The sleeping beast and the glass square.

  I think of the glass dome back in Tower 7; I’d made the plants crush it. I smile. Here I am again, unsure of the consequences but sure that I needed to break the glass. But what of the beast?

  My desire overcomes my fear.

  I slip.

  Blackness.

  I step out.

  I look up. Its head is nearly as big as my entire room in Tower 7. It breathes. Deep. Calm. At peace in its unnatural life. It smells like freshly broken plants with a hint of manure. This human-made beast is my kin, too. It’s resting its head on its thick folded hairy legs. Its eyes are closed, its thick brown eyelashes over an inch in length. Its sharp yellow tusks reach and curl many feet beyond me. Without thinking, I reach out and touch its huge furry forehead. The long brown-red hair is rougher than it looks. The mammoth’s breathing doesn’t change. Deep and full.

  I move toward the glass case. Upon closer inspection, the thing inside looks like a ball of forming and disintegrating red dust. A soft hum vibrates from it, and I can feel it in the tips of my wings and in the back of my head. It’s a pleasant feeling, however. Calming. Is this what is making the mammoth sleep? Is this why the mammoth doesn’t free itself? Beside the case is a smaller glass cube about the size of a shoebox. It was also full of something red, but more solid.

  Another louder siren sounds off over the still blaring one. There must be cameras in the large room. I make the decision and put my fist through the glass case. As the glass shatters, the thing inside sends out a vibration so strong that the rest of the case crumbles. Puff! For a moment, there is red dust everywhere. Then the dust particles pull into a solid ball of red sand on the shards of broken glass.

  I am stamping on the smaller glass case with the heel of my foot when I hear a grunt from behind me. I whirl around to see the wooly mammoth rising slowly to its feet. It shakes its head and lets out a horrible trumpet-like roar. Meanwhile there is something tall and red standing behind me. I turn to it as the mammoth runs toward the glass. The red creature is tall and praying mantis-like, its body made of something like thick glass and full of red smoke. Even as I look at it, the glass-like shell of its face billowed out to form a second eye. The stuff in the smaller glass case was its exoskeleton.

  “I need to free the others,” I tell it in Twi. Why not English? I have no idea. When you are terrified, you do what you do, logical or not.

  The mammoth is ramming its body against the solid wall outside in the hallway now. The arm I punched the glass with is bleeding, cut by the glass. People are shouting. And shooting. When did more Big Eye get here? I focus on the thing in front of me. Did they create this? WHAT is it?

  The air around me vibrates, and I stumble back. The creature looks up at the high ceiling and then, like a giant grasshopper, it leaps. It disappears into the vent. The mammoth throws its body against the wall again and there is a loud crash as the enormous thick slab of concrete falls out, revealing the night sky. There are Big Eye huddled in the blocked hallway shooting at the mammoth. But it’s clear that its skin is too thick to be harmed. They clo
ned the creature too well. Or maybe they cloned it and then enhanced it. Stupid.

  They seem to have forgotten about me. I slip.

  It is still night. I stand outside of Tower 1 in the parking lot covered by a black sheet. I have slipped fifteen minutes into the future. The mammoth has left a path of destruction behind it. There is the enormous opening in the side of Tower 1. The five crushed vehicles below it, embedded with rubble and the imprint of the mammoth body when it fell out. The torn gates. The car accidents down the road from when it ran into the street. In the distance I can hear its wild roar.

  And as I stand there, men and women run past me. As they run, some swing cybernetic arms, some run on cybernetic limbs. The woman with a torso of machinery slowly struts past me. “Daalu,” she says. Then she smiles and says, “That means ‘thank you’ where I’m from.”

  “You’re welcome,” I say.

  As I wonder what happened to all the Big Eye, I see the young man with cybernetic arms and limbs who first told me to find the glass box. He stands in the parking lot and turns toward the building. He holds up both of his hands and splashes of orange-yellow liquid fire shoot from them. The skunky smell of propane hits my nose. When the side of the building is burning, he brings his arms down and slowly walks up the parking lot. He will move round the building and set the other side on fire. And then another side, and another. Tower 1 does not have nearly as many stories as Tower 7. However, what it lacks in height, it makes up with width. Still, I am sure this half man half machine, this speciMen, this abomination—my kin—will find a way to single-handedly bring down Tower 1. Oh yes, Tower 1 will burn just as I had intended.

  Before I slip, I see a backward shooting star. The orange-red light leaps from the top of Tower 1 into the dark night sky. I doubt this “shooting star” will burn out, though. I doubt it’s a shooting star at all. I think it travels far into the night and then crosses the Kármán line and keeps right on going. Returning to wherever it came from before the people of Tower 1 captured it.