by Libba Bray
Research. This was what happened in Tower 7. There were similar towers around the world but Tower 7 was my home, so this one was the one I studied. I had several classified books on Tower 7. One discussed each floor and some of the types of abominations found on them. I’d listened to audios of the spiritual tellings of long dead African and Native American shamans, sorcerers and wizards. I’d read the Tanakh, the Bible, and the Koran. I studied The Buddha and meditated until I saw Krishna. And I read countless books on the sciences of the world. Carrying all this in my head, I understood abomination. I understood the purpose of Tower 7. Until yesterday.
In Tower 7, there was “transformative” genetic engineering, the in-vitro fertilization of organic robots, “rejuvenation” surgery on the ancient near-dead, the creation of weaponized weeds, the insertion and attaching of both mechanical and cybernetic parts to human bodies. There were people created in Tower 7, some were deformed, some were mentally ill, some were just plain dangerous, and none were flawless. Yes, some of us were dangerous. I was dangerous.
Then there was the tower’s lobby on the ground floor that projected a different picture. I’d never been down there but my books described it as an earthly wonderland, full of creeping vines covering the walls and small trees growing from artistically crafted holes in the floor. In the center was the main attraction. Here grew the thing that brought people from all over the world to see the Tower 7 Lobby (only the lobby; there were no tours of the rest of the building).
A hundred years ago, one of the landscapers planted a tree in the lobby’s center. On a lark, some scientists from the 9th floor emptied an experimental solution into the tree’s pot of soil. The substance was for enhancing and speeding up arboreal growth. The tree grew and grew. In a place where people thought like normal human beings, they would have uprooted the amazing tree and placed it outdoors. However, this was Tower 7 where boundaries were both contained and pushed. When the tree began touching the lobby’s high ceiling in a matter of weeks, they constructed a large hole so that it could grow through the second floor. They did the same for the third, fourth, fifth. The great tree has since earned the name of “The Backbone” because it grew through all 39 of Tower 7’s floors.
My name is Phoenix. I was mixed and grown in a lab on the 13th floor. One of my doctors thinks my name came from the birthplace of my egg’s donor. I’ve looked it up. Phoenix, Arizona is the full name of the place. However, from what I’ve read about my floor, even the scientists who forced my existence don’t know the names of donors. So, I doubt this. I think they named me Phoenix because of what I was, an “accelerated organism”. I was born two years ago but I looked, behaved and felt like a forty-year-old woman. My doctors said the acceleration would stop now that I was “matured”. To them, I was like a plant they grew for the sake of harvesting information.
Who do I mean by “them”, you must wonder? All of THEM, the “Big Eye”—the Tower 7 scientists, lab assistants, lab technicians, doctors, administrative workers, guards and police. We of the tower called them “Big Eye” because they watched us. All the time, they watched us, though not closely enough to prevent the inevitable.
I could read a 500-page book in two minutes. My brain absorbed the information and stories like a sponge. Up until two weeks ago, aside from mealtimes, looking out the window, running on my treadmill, and meetings with doctors, I spent my days with my e-reader. I’d sit in my room for hours consuming words upon words that became images upon images, ideas upon ideas. Now they gave me paper-made books, removing the books when I finished them. I liked the e-reader more. It took up less space and I could reread things when I wanted.
I stared out the window watching the cars and trucks below and the other skyscrapers across from me as I touched a leaf of my hoya plant. They’d given the plant to me five days ago and already it was growing so wildly that it was creeping across my windowsill and had wrapped around the chair I’d put there. It had grown two feet overnight. I didn’t think they’d noticed. No one ever said anything about it. I realize now that they had noticed. The plant was not a gesture of kindness; it was just part of the research. They didn’t really care about me. But Saeed cared about me.
Saeed is dead, Saeed is dead, Saeed is dead, I thought over and over, as I caressed one of my plant’s leaves. I yanked, breaking the leaf off. Saeed, my only friend. I crumpled the leaf in my restless hand; its green earthy smell might as well have been blood.
Yesterday Saeed had seen something terrible. Not long afterwards, he’d sat across from me during dinner-hour with eyes wide like boiled eggs, unable to eat. He couldn’t give me any details. He said no words could describe it.
“What does your heart tell you about this place?” he’d earnestly asked.
I’d only shrugged, frustrated with him for not telling me what he’d seen that was so awful.
He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You read all those books...why don’t you feel rebellion? Don’t you ever dream of getting out of here? Away from all the Big Eye?”
“Rebellion against whom?” I whispered, confused.
He laughed bitterly, sat back and shook his head. He took my hand, squeezed it and let it go. “Eat your jallof rice, Phoenix.”
I tried to get him to eat his crushed glass. This was his favorite meal and it bothered me to see him push his plate away. But he wouldn’t touch it. Before we returned to our separate quarters, he asked for my apple. I assumed he wanted to paint it. He always liked to paint when he was depressed. I’d given it to him without a thought and he’d slipped it into his pocket. The Big Eye allowed it, though they frowned upon taking food from the dining room, even if you didn’t plan to eat it.
His words didn’t touch me until nighttime when I lay in my bed. Yes, somewhere deep deep in my psyche I did wish to get out of the tower and see the world, be away from the Big Eye. I wanted to see those things that I saw in all the books I read. “Rebellion,” I whispered to myself.
They told me the news in the morning during breakfast-hour. I’d been sitting alone looking around for Saeed. The others, the woman with the twisted spine who could turn her head around like an owl, the man who never spoke with his mouth but always had people speaking to him, the three women who all looked and sounded alike, the bushy bearded man who looked like a wizard from a novel, the baboon who spoke in sign language, the woman whose sweater did not hide her four large breasts, the two men joined at the hip who were always randomly laughing, the woman with the lion claws and teeth, these people spoke to each other and never to me. Only Saeed spoke to me.
One of my doctors sat facing me. The African-looking one who wore the shiny black wig made of synthetic hair, Bumi. They always had her deal with me when there was upsetting news. My entire body tightened. She touched my hand and I pulled it away. She smiled sympathetically and told me a terrible thing. Saeed hadn’t drawn the apple. He’d eaten it. And it killed him. My mind went to one of my books. The Bible. I was Eve and he was Adam.
I could not eat. I could not drink. I would not cry. Not in the dining hall.
Hours later, I was in my room lying on my bed, eyes wet, mind reeling. Saeed was dead. I had skipped lunch and dinner, but I still wasn’t hungry. I was hot. The scanner on my wall would start to beep soon. Then they would come get me soon. For tests. I shut my eyes, squeezing out tears. They evaporated as they rolled down my hot cheeks. “Oh God,” I moaned. The pain of losing him burned in my chest. “Saeed. What did you see?”
Saeed was human. More human than me. I met him the first day they allowed me into the dining hall with the others. I was one year old; I must have looked twenty. He was sitting alone about to do something insane. There were many others in the room who caught my eye. The two conjoined men were laughing hard at the sight of me. The baboon was jumping up and down while rapidly signing to the woman with lion claws and teeth. However, Saeed had a spoon in his hand and a bowl full of broken glass before him. I stood there staring at him as others stared at me. He dug the s
poon into the chunks of glass and put it in his mouth. I could hear him crunching from where I stood. He smiled to himself, obviously enjoying it.
Driven by sheer curiosity, I walked over and sat across from him with my plate of spicy doro wat. He eyed me with suspicion but he didn’t seem angry or mean, at least not to the best of my limited social knowledge. I leaned forward and asked what was on my mind, “What’s it like to eat that?”
He blinked, surprised. Then he grinned. His teeth were perfect- white, shiny, and shaped like the teeth in drawings and doctored pictures in magazines. Had they removed his original teeth and replaced them with ones made of a more...durable stuff? “The taste is soft and delicate as the texture is crunchy. I’m not in pain, only pleasure,” he said in a voice accented in a way that I’d never heard. But then again, the only accents I’d ever heard were from the Big Eye doctors and guards.
“Tell me more,” I said.
After that, Saeed and I became friends. I loved words and he needed to spill them. He could not read, so I would tell him about what I read, at least in the hours of breakfast, lunch and dinner. He was from Egypt where he had been an orphan who never went hungry because he could always find something to eat. Rotten rice, date pits, even the wooden skewer sticks of kebabs, he had a stomach like a goat. They brought him to the tower when he was ten, nine years ago. He never told me exactly how or why they made him the way he was. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were who we were and we were there.
Saeed told me of places I had never seen with my own eyes. He used the words of a poet who used his tongue to see. Saeed was an artist with his hands, too. He had the skill of the great painters I read about in my books. He most loved to draw those foods he could no longer eat. Human food. Portraits of loaves of bread. Bowls of thick egusi soup and balls of fufu. Bouquets of lamb and beef kebabs. Fried eggs with white cheese. Plates of chickpeas. Pitchers of orange juice. Piles of roasted corn. They allowed him to bring the paintings to mealtime for everyone to view. I guess even we deserved the pleasures of art.
Saeed could survive on glass, metal shavings, crumbles of rust, sand, dirt, those things that would be left behind if human beings finally blew themselves up. However, eating a piece of bread would kill him as eating a big bowl of sharp pieces of glass would kill the average human being.
He took my apple and that night, he ate it. Then his stomach and intestines hemorrhaged and he was dead before morning. I never got to tell him what was happening to me. It might have given him hope; it would have reminded him that things would change. I wiped a tear. I loved Saeed.
As grief overwhelmed me for the first time in my life, I pressed a hand against the thick glass of my window. I’d never been outside. I wanted to go outside. Saeed had escaped by dying. I wanted to escape, too. If he wasn’t happy here, then neither was I.
I wiped hot sweat from my brow. My room’s scanner began to beep as my body’s temperature soared. The doctors would be here soon.
When it first started to happen two weeks ago, only I noticed it. My hair started to fall out. I am an African by genetics, my hair was very coily and my skin was very very dark. They kept my hair shaven low because neither they nor I knew what to do with it when it grew out. I could never find anything in my books to help. They didn’t care for style in Tower 7, anyway...although the woman down the hall had very long silky white hair and Big Eye lab assistants came by every two days to help her brush and braid it...despite the fact that the woman had the teeth and claws of a lion.
I was sitting on my bed, looking out the window when I suddenly grew very hot. For the last few days, my skin had been dry and ashy no matter how much hydrated water they gave me to drink. Doctor Bumi brought me a large jar of shea butter and applying it soothed my skin to no end. However, this day, hot and feverish, my skin seemed to dry as if I were in a desert.
I felt beads of sweat on my head and when I rubbed my short short hair, it wiped right off, hair and sweat alike. I ran to my bathroom, quickly showered, washing my head thoroughly, toweled off and stood before the large mirror. I’d lost my eyebrows, too. But this wasn’t the worst of it. I rubbed the shea butter into my skin to give myself something to do. If I stopped moving, I’d start crying with panic.
I don’t know why they gave me such a large mirror in my bathroom. Large and round, it stretched from wall to wall. Therefore, I saw myself in full glory. As I slathered the thick yellow nutty smelling cream onto my drying skin, it was as if I was harboring a sun deep within my body and that sun wanted to come out. Under the dark brown of my skin, I was glowing. I was light.
I pulsed, feeling a wave of heat and slight vibration within my flesh. “What is this?” I whispered, scurrying back to my bed where my e-reader lay. I wanted to look up the phenomena. In all my reading, I had never read a thing about a human being, accelerated or normal, heating up and glowing like a firefly’s behind. The moment I picked the e-reader up, it made a soft pinging sound. Then the screen went black and began to smoke. I threw it on the floor and the screen cracked as it gently burned. My room’s smoke alarm went off.
Psss! Hissing sound was soft and accompanied by a pain in my left thumbnail. It felt as if someone stuck a pin into it. “Ah!” I cried, instinctively pressing on my thumb. As I held my hand up to my eyes, I felt myself pulse again.
There was a splotch of black in the center of my thumbnail like old blood but blacker. Burned flesh. All specimen, creature, creation in the building had a diagnostics chip implanted beneath his, her or its fingernail, claw, talon or horn. I’d just gone off the grid.
Not thirty seconds passed before they came bursting into my room with guns and syringes at ready, all aimed at me as if I were a wild rabid beast destroying all that they had built.
“Get down! DOWN!” they shouted. One man grabbed me, probably with the intent of throwing me on the bed so he could cuff me. He screamed, staring at his burned, still smoking hand. Someone shot me in the leg. It felt like someone had kicked my leg with a metal foot. I sunk to the floor, pain washing over me like a second layer of more intense heat. I would have been done for if someone else had not shouted for the others to hold their fire.
Thankfully, I healed fast and the bullet had gone straight through my leg. If it hadn’t, I don’t know what would have happened due to my extreme body temperature. One minute I was staring with shock at the blood oozing from my leg. Then next, I blacked out. I woke in a bed, my body cool, my leg bandaged. When they returned me to my room, the scanner was in place to monitor me since I could not hold an implant. They replaced my bed sheets with a heavy heat resistant sheet similar in material to my new clothes. The carpet was gone, too. For the first time, I saw that the floor beneath the carpet was solid whitish marble.
When I grew hot and luminous like this, electronics died or exploded in my hands. This was why they started giving me paper books. They were difficult to read, as I couldn’t turn the pages as quickly as I could with the e-reader. And the paper books they had were limited and old. And they could monitor what I was reading. Although now I realize with the e-reader they were probably monitoring my choices, too.
I didn’t tell Saeed about the heating and glowing because at the time I didn’t want to worry him. I enjoyed our talks so much. I wish I had told him.
The door slid open and my doctors came in, Debbie and Bumi. I took a deep breath to calm myself. When I was calm, though the heat did not go away, it decreased, as did the glow.
“How do you feel?” Bumi asked, as she took my wrist to check my pulse. She hissed, dropping it.
“Hot,” I said.
She glared at me and I shrugged thinking something I had not thought until Saeed was dead—You should have asked first.
“Open,” Debbie said, placing the heavy duty thermometer into my mouth.
I saw these two women every day. I knew their names, nothing more.
“She’s not glowing that brightly,” Bumi said, typing something onto her handheld. I resisted the u
rge to grab it and hold it in my hands until it exploded. Saeed was dead because of these people. I steadied myself, thinking of the cool places sometimes described in the novels I read. I once read a brief story about a man who froze to death in a forest. I thought about that.
“It might just be menopause approaching,” Bumi said. “I believe the two factors are correlated.”
I tuned out their talk and focused on my own thoughts. Escape. How? What would they do to me? What did Saeed see? He said it was something on this floor. My internal temperature was 130 degrees, but the temperature of my skin was 220. They couldn’t take my blood pressure because the equipment would melt.
“We need to take her to the lab,” Debbie said.
Bumi nodded. “As soon as the scanner says she’s reached 300 degrees. We don’t want her any higher or things around her will start to ignite.”
They left. I paced the room. Restless. Angry. Distraught. They would be back soon.
How am I going to get out of here, I wondered. As if to answer my question, Mmuo walked into my room. He came through the wall across from my bed. My heart nearly jumped from my chest.
“Did you hear?” he asked, sitting on my bed.
I blinked, feeling the rush of sadness all over again. He was Saeed’s friend, too. “Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Phoenix.”
My face was wet and drying with sweat. “I’m getting out of here,” I declared.
Mmuo grinned but it quickly turned to a frown. “What is wrong with you? I can feel you from here,” he asked.
“I think it has something to do with how they made me. It’s been happening for two weeks and it’s getting worse.”
We looked at each other, silent. I knew we were thinking the same thing but neither he nor I wanted to speak it. If we spoke of my name, I didn’t think I’d be able to move, let alone run.