‘It’s okay. I made a lot of money on this last deal. You negotiated it with them, you can keep it,’ I say.
‘No. You earned it. I’ll keep it in a fixed deposit. When you survive the training and you’re back in society you can pick it up.’
‘I don’t want it, Klaus. I … what’s the point?’
I really don’t want the money. I am on auto-pilot, an automaton. A vital part of me, the élan vitae, died when the dome came up. I miss Oyin Da, and she’s in there, beyond reach forever.
A bell sounds. ‘I have to go, Klaus,’ I say.
‘Pavlov’s dog,’ says Klaus. ‘Keep your chin tucked in.’
‘I will.’ I hang up and trot along to the gymnasium with others like me.
I am in a classroom. I haven’t been in one since forever.
There are only ten students including me, and I am the oldest. They are kids, male and female, irreverent. I know I am kin to them and they know the same, but it is not like when I discovered my own gifts as a youngster, where I found a sense of family and acceptance with Selina and Korede. Here there is the tabula rasa of indifference. It is like attending a family gathering and realising that you are old and the new generation does not give a fuck about you or your experience. I know where they hide their money and music and love letters on their phones. I know what they value and how to get at it, and they know that I know. I am the only finder among them. Like before, being among them enhances my abilities.
There is a white board and it has the word “mycology” written in upper case and underlined. A slight, bespectacled man stands in front of the word and looks down at us like God, radiating benevolence while judging us.
‘My name is Professor Ileri. I’m a mycologist. I know fungi and my job is to make sure you know fungi,’ he says.
‘Why do we need to know about fungi?’ says a girl.
‘You failed A-level biology,’ says a boy from behind me. I get the knowledge at the same time he does. Ileri isn’t bothered by the revelation, though. No discomfort from him. No anger.
‘Do you think you’re the first cohort of sensitives I’ve taught? Here’s the first lesson, child: it does not matter what you did not know in the past. What matters is what you do know now. So you can waste your time reading off random facts from my mind, trying to embarrass me, or you can let me teach you how to be better at what you do.’
‘But why fungi?’ I ask now, with no irony. ‘Seriously, I hated this shit in school.’
Ileri flicks his eyes to my ID and smiles. ‘Have you heard of Tokunbo Deinde?’
None of us has.
‘How about ectoplasm?’
Blankness.
Ileri sighs. ‘People don’t read anymore.’
He flicks a remote and a plasma field fires up. There is a projected black and white photograph of some white people around a table. They all focus on one woman in black who appears to be regurgitating a white cloud. Within the cloud there are faces. The woman has her hair tied into a bun and pulled back. She seems uncomfortable. The exposure isn’t great, but the people around the table seem impressed.
‘Spiritualists, psychics, mediums, sensitives, clairvoyants, clairscientists, mystics, witches, necromancers, telepaths, empaths, shamans, aje, emere, iwin, occultists, diviners, psychomancers, mystics. These are some of the names you might have been called in the past, and may be called in the future. This photograph is from nineteenth century England. It shows a medium spurting ectoplasm. It was a common practice in the day and it impressed the customers. It was supposed to be spiritual material that manifested as a physical substance through which random ghosts could manifest in the physical world.’
He cycled through a few more slides showing ectoplasm emerging from the nostrils, ears, mouth, and, in one photo, between a woman’s legs.
‘They were all frauds. The Society for Psychical Research investigated them and discovered that they did it with ingested textiles, clever lighting, and the very best four-one-nine spirit.’
The class titters, but mostly they are attentive. I can hear the silence in their minds. We have become a hive, absorbing and sharing as one.
‘Now, the babalawo, the witches, the sensitives, the Victorian mediums, all were considered frauds of some kind. No credible scientist believed in psychic ability until after 2012.’
The year 2012 sends a surge of recollection through our collective consciousness. You are not a sensitive and will never experience this, but raw data surges, blunt data with errors which are slowly refined like the process of chiselling out a sculpture from a block of marble. Corrections nudge the data towards truth, or at least truth as the ten of us know it.
In 2012 an alien lands in London. It is the size of Hyde Park and immediately grows underground like an amorphous blob. At the time it is thought to be first contact, but the Americans have evidence of three earlier landings. This is before America goes dark. Two. Three landings. No space ship, just a rock enclosing a large sentient being. It turns out this sentient being, called Wormwood by some, seeds the entire biosphere with new macro and microorganisms as a result, although it takes decades for us humans to find this out.
‘Tokunbo Deinde was a microbiologist fresh out of Unilag, a Youth Corper in Nsukka. Like most Corpers, he wanted to serve out his year quietly in the dozy town. He heard tell of a powerful soothsayer in one of the villages. A hundred percent accuracy, he was told. Curious, he visited, paid his money, and waited. During the visit the soothsayer vomited, but it was a strange fluid that turned to vapour and persisted temporarily. Then she told him everything he was thinking and a large part of his childhood. He was astonished.’
Tokunbo stays with the soothsayer, eventually taking samples of the ectoplasm and analysing it. It is made of the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, and what he initially thinks is a fungus.
‘What we call the xenosphere, the psychic link that you are all able to exploit, is made up of strands of alien fungi-like filaments and neurotransmitters. We call the xenoform ascomycetes xenosphericus. It is everywhere, in every environment on Earth. These delicate filaments are too small for the naked eye to see, and they are fragile, but they form multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin. They have an affinity for nerve endings and quickly access the central nervous system. Everybody linked to this network of xenoforms, this xenosphere is uploading information constantly, passively, without knowing. There is a global store of information in the very atmosphere, a worldmind, which only people like you can access.’
Someone thinks, bullshit.
‘Bullshit,’ someone else says, but we all think it.
Ileri laughs. ‘What are the limits of your abilities? Have you noticed that your powers work better outside in the open air than inside enclosed spaces? Notice that when it rains your powers may become unreliable or conk out? Do you wonder why, or do you think it’s just a joke God plays on you?’
Ileri tells us no one is sure why people like me can manipulate the xenosphere. The information is bidirectional for us, instead of unidirectional. There are theories that we sensitives have a separate unidentified infection on our skin that allows us some control of ascomycetes xenophericus growth patterns.
Under his guidance, we experiment. Rubbing an antifungal cream all over the body suppresses the xenoforms and stops our abilities, but temporarily. They respond by increasing their growth rate exponentially. A room without windows which is disinfected has no xenoforms and our abilities are knocked out. We can block other sensitives if we flood the xenosphere with data, like reading a book.
‘Good,’ says Ileri, once he is sure that we have accepted the nature of the xenosphere. ‘Let’s talk fungi. The word comes from the Latin fungus which means mushroom. Mycology is derived from the Greek mukes, which means fungus, and logos which means knowledge …’
This is hell.
Here we are in Yerwa, in fucking May, the warmest month of the year, in full military gear, wading through swampland. In m
any ways it is the perfect training ground.
Maiduguri has been a military outpost since the British were here in 1907. It’s got the Ngadda River, which leads us right into the Firki swamps. One grand hike which, if we go all the way, will lead us to Lake Chad.
Mosquitoes are plentiful. We won’t get malaria because of subdermal implants, but nothing stops those shits from biting.
Our trainer, Motherfucking Danladi, tells us to imagine we are those heathen British explorers of yore. ‘You can’t go back, because to quit means to disappoint your queen. Pax imperia regina, lazy fucks! To quit means to shit on the memory of Livingstone. No, no, we will crack on, lazy fucks, crack on into the arsehole of history!’
Jesus Christ. Motherfucking Danladi is insane. I wish I had a fragmentation grenade — I’d bake him a shrapnel pie.
As usual, part of my brain asks me what the fuck I’m doing here, and I cannot say.
Motherfucking Danladi’s favourite phrase is splinter group. All his combat examples come from when he fought this or that splinter group. My class gave him the adjective after he made us taste the dust of our parade ground. Now we have to be careful we don’t say it in his presence.
The sun is right overhead, baking us. Motherfucking Danladi has us singing “Wading in the Water.” We wade. Blackflies join the mosquitoes. My exposed forearms are dotted with bites and wheals, but they are also bumpy with muscle. Fair trade. We disappear into the xenosphere, leaving our bodies on a kind of auto-pilot, singing the Negro Spirituals that Motherfucking Danladi seems to favour.
The shared mindspace is, unsurprisingly, filled with swamp flora, as if our imaginations cannot stretch too far from the hellish reality our bodies inhabit. I spread my wings, stretch my forelimbs, extend my claws, and indulge in a cat yawn. The lion parts of the gryphon takes precedence at times. Without Ileri to guide us we do what we like. The vegetation is polka dotted, blue and yellow, with black flowers and pollen drifting into the air like smoke from a burning oil well.
Temi’s avatar is a serpent, although it seems more like an air-swimming eel, with lateral fins that undulate when she takes to the air. She is relatively twelve feet long, although dimensions are difficult to gauge in the xenosphere.
John Boscoe presents himself as a man, a monk with the cowl pulled up and darkness where a face should be. The avatar trails a ghost image of his real self, a rookie mistake, or indicative of the humble size of his talent. He is a god at krav maga, though.
See that man all dressed in white.
I am thinking we need new music. I let this thought leak and I feel the agreement of my peers.
Oloja is a puddle of peach-coloured liquid that flows in rivulets around all of us. He dissipates into vapour and reforms with dizzying speed.
God’s gonna trouble these waters,
Temi swims close to me, coiling around the gryphon. If I beat my wings I will hurt her, so I stay still, groom myself with my beak as she frolics.
Ebun becomes completely conceptual in the xenosphere. She is an idea from infancy, the non-verbal stage. There are no words with which to understand her form, and there is no image. We are aware of her presence, but it is extremely abstract. The idea is her own, from her own early life. Even she does not fully understand it, but she can pull it out of lost memories and use it. She is safe. It is an elegant solution which I wish I had thought of.
The dark pollen from the flowers coalesces and form clouds. Someone is upset, or sad. We all feel it. Shit, I hate this hive mind shit.
‘Lazy fucks!’ Motherfucking Danladi breaks in. The clouds are from him, I think, and someone agrees.
He is stationary, and ahead of us, looking into the bush. He turns back to us, and says, ‘Hide.’ His face is fixed, set, focused. He moves ahead.
We melt into the undergrowth, covering ourselves with mud as we have been trained. More bites from more creatures likely. We dare not breathe.
Motherfucking Danladi is gone for twenty-five minutes, and when he reappears he is breathing heavy and his fatigues are blood-stained.
‘Let’s go, lazy fucks. We’ve taken too long already. Must get to Alau Dam by nightfall. Get up, get up, get up! This water isn’t going to wade in itself.’
We do, cautiously. He does not speak of what transpired, so I look into his head. We’re not supposed to, and we are told the instructors have been protected, and this is true to an extent. None of my classmates can get through the … protection. I can. It’s difficult, but I can. I have not told anyone this.
Motherfucking Danladi stalks and comes across three insurgents, a scouting group bearing light arms. He bursts among them with speed I can only follow because I am in his memory. He kills all three with his bare hands before they can get a single shot off. It is as if he is not human. With a single punch to the temple he cracks the skull of one, holds him up and unsheathes the insurgent’s knife and buries it in the neck of the second. The third is still turning toward the commotion. Motherfucking Danladi sweeps the insurgent’s feet from under him. He follows the body to the ground and, almost gently, smashes the insurgent’s head against the terrain, twice.
I am in awe, and perhaps this makes me careless, because he is staring at me, and he knows that I know, but says nothing.
When we return to base the next day he puts me on latrine duty for the next two weeks.
Professor Ileri sits down after his talk. I do not know how one person can contain so much information and wisdom, but it seems to pour out of him casually, without friction.
He says, ‘It is now time for you to show me what you have done. Time in the xenosphere is like sex. You can pick up some nasty diseases, so protection comes first. Let us see what you have built. Temi, you first.’
Temi is nervous, but we all are. She takes us into her mindspace easily enough. The classroom drops away and we are standing in front of a stone wall thousands of feet high, thousands wide, so that there is no end. We cannot see around it, and the blocks look formidable. There is a door, but this is locked with a padlock. On the other side of this barrier lies Temi’s secrets and vulnerabilities. Ileri has been teaching us to place defences in our minds.
‘This is a nice effort, Temi, but it shows a lack of imagination and stultifying conventional thinking. Stone, door, padlock? The first thing anybody attempting attack will think is that no matter how hard, stone can always be broken. Have you not read Shelly? Oyzmandias? Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. A door is weak around the hinges. Padlocks have keys. You are announcing to your visitors that this might be hard, but there are solutions.’ Professor Ileri tuts.
‘But I thought —’ says Temi.
‘Do it over.’ He turns to me. ‘What do you have?’
I feel for all the minds around me — my class, my professor — and I lift our awareness from Temi’s mind straight into mine. I feel the surprise flow like smoke through them. Nobody has ever done this.
They also gasp at my transformation. I have grown several feet, and distorted. I have feathered wings, an eagle’s beak, a lion’s body. My space is a tall, hedged maze, with cloud formations in the sky and complex combinations of wind, breeze, light, and dark. There are rotating sequences of sounds from seagulls, bats, dogs, and crickets. I beat my wings and rise into the maze and, to demonstrate, I negotiate the maze through the single multisensory line. Taking the wrong turn, pausing when you should move or moving when you should pause would cause the entire construct to collapse and lock the mind from an invader. I pirouette in the air and fold in my wings to relinquish my ride on mental thermals. I drop back to the class.
Fuck me.
Wow.
I am so dead. I’ve done nothing like that.
Ileri smiles. ‘Ladies, gentlemen, Kaaro has just jumped forward a few lessons. Finally, he has shown us why he is the oldest in the class. Impressive work, Kaaro. Tell me, why did you see the need to transmogrify?’
‘I don’t know what
that means,’ I say.
To change, to transform, you illiterate. Good-natured ribbing.
‘I don’t know. I was reading about Egypt and the Sphinx and this led me into gryphons. I liked the idea of a creature like that.’
‘Yes, Kaaro, that was your choice. But why change at all?’
‘More difficult to identify me if I don’t look like me, right?’
‘Indeed,’ says Ileri. ‘Indeed.’
I return us to the classroom.
Show off.
Teacher’s pet.
Bastard.
Making us all look bad.
‘New assignment. Any student who successfully breaks into Kaaro’s mental fortress will immediately graduate to field agent. Who’s next?’ says Ileri.
I endure many attempts on my mind, some while I am awake, some while I am sleeping, some in the open, others surprises.
Nobody ever gets through.
Every day for a year I stand outside the dome for as long as I can spare away from training. I hope that I am being watched from within. I hope that someone will come out and let me in.
Nobody comes.
The tents change to lean-tos and wooden shacks with corrugated tin. Two-wheel ruts become dirt roads and when signs go up I realise that there is a village growing around me. My soul dies in fragments.
I’m in Maiduguri for endurance training. We walk for miles without food or water, but carrying full infantry kits. I do not know why they make me do this. It’s not as if I’ll be fighting in a war. I go to the S45 liaison and talk to my boss.
‘Stay there,’ says Femi over the secure line. A soldier keeps watch outside the tent.
‘It’s a shit hole,’ I say.
‘Which is why you’re going to stay there.’
‘As punishment?’
‘No. The place has legs. They’re calling it Camp Rosewater.’
‘You guys call it Camp Rosewater. Down here it’s the Donut. And, no, it does not have legs. The hooples will go home. The dome isn’t going to open.’
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