The Rosewater Insurrection

by Tade Thompson

  “I know everything there is to know,” says Molara.

  “Do you know where the quantum ghost bedded down?”

  Molara is silent.

  “I didn’t think so. I’m going into Rosewater to find it.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” she said. “The ghost can be found in the xenosphere.”

  “Yet you haven’t found it.”

  “It’s a large—”

  “I know. Revival Scientist Lua wants this sorted out as soon as possible, and both of us working simultaneously can only improve the odds.”

  She bats her wings gently, deep blue with black spots. She floats on the mental currents, surrounded by psychic miasma. Her lips are slightly parted, and Anthony can feel the human part of himself responding. He does not know if Molara intends this.

  “Don’t get in my way, footholder.”

  “If you had done your job I wouldn’t have to be doing it for you,” says Anthony.

  “Excuse me?” Her eyes narrow.

  “This process is simple, straightforward. A human body is sufficiently taken over by xenoforms, you send the signal, the revival scientist sends the test ghost. The xenoforms are primed to accept the consciousness. So how did you fuck it up? Because this is your fuck-up.”

  “I don’t know, but I will find out.”

  “We find the quantum ghost first,” says Anthony. “You can diagnose your own sickness afterwards.”

  Molara appears to be preparing an answer, but Anthony disconnects from the xenosphere. He is barefoot, and grows a layer of callus under his feet to protect them. He sloshes through the mud and marsh, and the terra gets firma. Undergrowth becomes profuse, and he wades through elephant grass. There is fauna, but the animals flee before he reaches them: grass-cutters and bush babies and rats. It is not so windy or cold, and the robe is cotton which still billows. Here and there he encounters discarded canoes, old, decrepit. There are no paddles. He can hear burrowing animals below, traffic in front, and bats overhead. He heads for the road.

  Nobody in Nigeria will stop for a barefoot man in a hooded robe on the side of the road in the dead of night. In the headlights of passing cars Anthony can see the colour of his forearm and he makes it darker, more like that of his friend Kaaro. The colour thing confuses him so. It’s a human thing. Near identical DNA, yet they discriminate against each other based on the divisions of white light and the degree of protrusion of the jaw or the shape of the eyes or nose. Madness. Similar to their clothing fetish.

  He walks towards Rosewater.

  The city is noisier and larger than he remembers. On the outskirts he encounters some dwellings of questionable legality. Dirt-poor people living in shacks of wood and corrugated tin. Anthony can steal their clothes, but does not. One insomniac sees him and runs screaming, begging the Judeo-Christian god for mercy, thinking Anthony a spirit.

  Anthony does not stop. He maintains a steady pace trying to figure out how exactly he will find the quantum ghost. He remembers about money. Humans do not just give their shit away. You have to pay, a form of exchange or a promise of exchange. He will need to fit in, to wear regular clothes. The area around Yemaja is called Ona-oko, and it is severely deprived. He cannot further deprive them by just taking what he wants. He is contemplating the problem when he sees four reanimates on the road ahead. They are not moving, but stand close to each other, swaying as if listening to music. Anthony checks the xenosphere to be sure. They are blank mental spots, casting no psychic shadow. These are hollow men. Something from another poet.

  Very well, then.

  Violence.

  He floods his system with cortisol and adrenaline, his mind full of verse. He grows callus over his knuckles, although there is not enough time for a full layer. Anthony skips, then breaks into a run, clenching his fists as he nears them. Only one turns towards the sound.

  Silently we went round and round,

  And through each hollow mind

  The Memory of dreadful things

  Rushed like a dreadful wind.

  He remembers how to fight. He hits the first reanimate with a leaping punch to the nose, but he misjudges his own strength and shatters the skull. A gooey mess of blood, brains and bone splashes over him and the other hollow men.

  And Horror stalked before each man.

  The body falls to the ground with a wet thud, and the others attack Anthony in a blind, automatic way. He uses open-hand strikes to push each one away—he does not want the blood of their fallen comrade on their clothes. They strike at him powerlessly, without real purpose, anger or drive. He does not even have to up his endorphins to endure their attack.

  He kicks the knee of one, hears the patella and lower femur crack. He locks the head of a female and leaps over her, cracking the neck. The third is confused, and stops moving. Anthony kicks it in the chest, crushing bone and cartilage, stopping the heart instantly.

  And Terror crept behind.

  Anthony remembers that part of the clothing malarkey is that the genders use different clothes, which he finds irritating as the female clothes are more pleasing and often use more comfortable fabric. He takes the cleaner clothes off the men and discards his white robe. They are loose on him, but he grows a layer of fat to compensate. There is nothing to be done about the shoes—none of them fit. There is some money.

  He tears into the flesh of one and pulls out the implant. This he swallows, but modulates his digestive acids so as not to destroy it. He will need ID in the city, and perhaps this one has not been deactivated.

  It eats the brittle bone by night,

  And the soft flesh by day,

  It eats the flesh and bone by turns,

  But it eats the heart always.

  Anthony knows he smells foul, but at least he is more acceptable.

  Interlude: 2055, Lagos

  Eric

  The house I live in was uninhabited and unfinished when I moved in, without plaster on the walls, but this is not unusual in Lagos. In the first few weeks after I returned from Rosewater I had to lock my bedroom door, the front door of my flat, the front and back door and the gate. Then I simply did not bother opening the back door except on weekends. I made friends with the construction workers and I felt a little safer. I have never been burgled. At first I thought this was because of luck, but I later found out that S45 spends a lot of money bribing local criminals to stay away from their off-duty agents.

  I work every day except Sunday afternoons. I have an office without a window. I make the shitty commute to Lagos Island by the Third Mainland Bridge with reduced lanes while they re-introduce self-drive. In a year nobody will be legally allowed to manually drive a car on the island. I don’t mind self-drive cars, but I wonder what it will be like when all the traffic is controlled by AI.

  My office is on Broad Street, and I work anonymously with four other agents and supporting admin staff. Everyone has an office to themselves, although we are separated by plasterboard and insufficiently soundproofed. Nobody talks to anybody apart from the usual pleasantries, and because of my bruises from Jack Jacques’s beating, I avoided others for the first week. I don’t know how much they have been briefed about my failure, but I feel it acutely. I see mangled bodies all the time, reminded by everything. The heat of coffee, the grain on a faux-wooden finish, slamming doors, delivery drones, everything.

  I move data around. I receive tips on our public phone line or Nimbus. I do preliminary follow-up, then I pass it on. Once every ten days or so I get to leave the office and check something out. Mostly, it’s shit. A woman complaining that her mother-in-law drinks her blood every night; ghosts, ghosts and more ghosts; reports of alien animals which turn out to be either pranks or mistakes; a few cases of mental illness; one spectacular street fight in Ojota involving fifteen people at the same time where the police suspected supernatural influence. They were kind of right. I pick up the residue of a wild sensitive, but long-gone.

  I bristle at the nonsense I am asked to do, but I know that I
am only useful as an agent if I obey instructions, so I stay. I visit and take statements from hysterical villagers in Badagry, market folk in Mushin, and a particularly spooked Seventh Day Adventist church in Alagbado during a wave of apparition sightings. I go to fundamentalist tent-gatherings to check if any of the pastors are simulating supernatural powers using nanotechnology or xenosphere access. They are not.

  I read the daily bulletin to keep up to date, but nobody is sending me anything specific. I have to maintain fitness because of regulations, so I attend the gym and shooting range. I do the minimum hand-to-hand requirement, which is boxing.

  In the evenings I walk the streets. The carbon-scrubbers make the street lights ugly, but I suppose there is no choice. I find the latest eating joints with queues around the block and meals of peppery rice and goat meat soup. I go to concerts at Iganmu and the Surulere stadium. I find intimate jazz joints and rickety open-mic spaces where struggling musicians hope to be noticed by rich producers, military men and sugar daddies. I see the Buried Man of Ipaja, remnant of a ridiculous attempt at protecting the country with giant robots, only the ground could not support its weight and it sank into the water-logged region, head and shoulders projecting above ground for over a decade. The power cell and AI are still functional, and it spouts strange utterances like a Delphic oracle. I write down what it says when my turn comes: Haram, death, Bible, jihadi, business, overwhelming victory. This signifies nothing and leaves me irritated.

  I don’t sleep well. I fear Kaaro has left something else in my brain, something I won’t know about until the right moment, and I resent it. I feel a simmering, impotent rage. Yes, he was trying to help, and he probably did save my life, but he should have told me. You don’t go poking around altering people’s heads without their knowledge. If not for the fact that I know I would be tracked, I’d check the database for him.

  I dance a lot in clubs and on my own at home, mostly to the Latin-flavoured electronic music that young Yoruba people favour this year. I never used to dance, but I need to keep busy to stop the visions of broken bodies.

  The highlight of my year is the Weapons Update meeting. Two agents from my office and one Lagos field agent are at the closed session, and we are taught while watching holograms. We are not allowed to take notes and a disembodied voice drones on.

  High-velocity adhesive bombs from high-altitude drones. Rail guns. Coil guns. Particle accelerators. Heat-shield generators. Ionised gas dispersers. Infra-sound panic generators. Nausea guns. Graphene body armour that generates electric charge with each impact. Next-generation turret bots from India and China, and how to disable them. Tungsten space spears. It goes on and on, but after four hours I’m frazzled.

  During the coffee break I find myself at the table with the field agent. She’s tall and athletic, with a quick smile.

  “Eric Sunmola,” I say, raising my plastic cup with one hand, pointing to my ID with the other.

  “Aminat Arigbede,” she says, mirroring my pose, playfully mocking. “What do you think? This is my first one, so I don’t know how it’s supposed to go.”

  “Neither do I. It’s my second.”

  “Think we’ll ever get to use any of these?”

  I shrug. “I’ll be happy if they let me use a bow and arrow.”

  “Why do you say that?” She seems genuinely interested, but I don’t know her, and I can’t just share mission intel.

  “Just a joke. Most of my work is at a desk.”

  We laugh it off and the rest of the day passes without incident, but a month later I get orders to be part of a tactical mission and Aminat is on the team. It’s an easy by-the-numbers thing in Idi-Oro, a rescue of four albino children who are held captive as witches. Our operation is kept from local law enforcement because they leak like colanders and are possibly complicit. Once the children are out of state, 150 miles away in Ibadan, Aminat says to me, “Great to get out of the office, eh?” and I know she got me the assignment. I ask her out for a drink, but she says, “My husband is the jealous type. You don’t even want that kind of drama.” She smiles, though, and she’s one of those people you just want to spend time with. She’s not a sensitive, though. Unless she’s so powerful that she can mask herself from… No, that’s absurd.

  There’s a subtle shift in my life after the Idi-Oro raid. I get more interesting messages from my superiors. I get instructed to join field operations and even fire my weapon on a few occasions. I re-engage with the human race and attend to the news. China wins the Battle of Walls. From about 2016 most of the sub-Saharan nations have participated in creating a wall of trees at the southern boundary of the Sahara Desert, called the Great Wall by some. China took umbrage, even as the tree wall grew over the years and halted the southward progress of the desert. The African Union has finally agreed to call it the Green Wall instead. There was never any doubt; most of the black African countries are in hock to the Chinese.

  A teaching robot explodes and kills four pupils, wounding twelve others, in Maryland Comprehensive School, a few miles from my house. For a few days it’s thought to be sabotage or terrorism, but it turns out a janitor had been carrying out some unauthorised maintenance, which is a euphemism for substituting original parts for fake ones and selling them on the black market.

  I spend Christmas alone. I’m working, kind of on-call, so I can’t even get drunk. I think of Aminat a lot and I look her contact details up on the S45 system. As soon as I punch in the search string my Nimbus freezes and my phone rings.

  “Agent, explain your query?” says a voice I do not recognise.

  “I wanted to… we went on a mission together. I wanted to clarify—”

  “Don’t. You can compromise missions this way. Your supervisor is being informed of this.”

  And that is that. Since it’s my second strike, I get assigned to work the desalination wars offshore, two years of alternating fire fights and interminable negotiations between three companies contracted to supply potable water to Lagos mainland. Turns out I’m good at war, and I gain commendations, though not impressive enough to get me transferred back to solid ground.

  I get no dancing done, and I may have forgotten how. I read Das Boot obsessively and drink too much ogogoro, the only liquor we have. My liver survives, though not the music in my soul.

  Chapter Eight

  Alyssa

  Mark and Pat both burst into the bedroom.

  Alyssa initially thought Pat took after her, but the worried look on their faces is so similar that she can now see Mark in there too.

  “Al?” asks Mark.

  “Mummy, you screamed,” says Pat.

  “Sorry, baby,” says Alyssa. “Mummy has a headache.” Which is true, but not the reason she screamed. And this “mummy” talk does not at all feel natural.

  Pat notices the book on the bed and picks it up. “What’s this?”

  “Oscar Wilde. Selected poems,” says Alyssa casually.

  “Is that why you screamed? Is it bad?” Pat smiles, full of hope. It’s a smile that demands a reply, a child’s prayer that everything is all right. Nothing is all right, though. The girl edges towards Alyssa and leans against her. It really is a wonderful smile, and Alyssa is lifted for a moment.

  “Awful,” she says.

  “You’ve never opened that book,” says Mark.

  “I did today. Thou knowest all; I seek in vain; What lands to till or sow with seed—; The land is black with briar and weed; Nor cares for falling tears or rain. See?”

  Mark raises an eyebrow, but says nothing. There is a spreading patch of red running down his neck, like sunburn.

  “Pat, go downstairs. I’ll come see you later,” says Alyssa.

  Pat dials her phone before she leaves the room, and her words fade as she stomps away.

  Mark sits beside Alyssa on the bed. His weight causes her to list towards him, but she shifts away. He smells faintly of turpentine.

  “Wilde isn’t that bad,” says Mark.

  “Mark, I can m
emorise. I read the poem for the first time, and I can remember. Thou knowest all; I sit and wait, with blinded eyes and hands that fail. There’s nothing wrong with my fucking memory, Mark.”

  “Except that you don’t remember anything.”

  “Except that I don’t remember anything before today. But even that’s not true. I remember how to do things. I can make coffee and drive a car. Maybe. I haven’t tried. But I can’t remember us moving in here, or getting married, or even giving birth. I don’t feel like a mother. I don’t feel like a wife. I don’t feel like a woman.”

  “Hang on, I’ve heard this one before. After Pat was born you said you didn’t feel like a woman.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, you looked in the mirror and your belly was all… foldy and stretch-marky.”

  “I don’t remember that, but I don’t think it’s the same thing.”

  Mark slides to the carpet and shifts position till he is kneeling in front of her. He holds her hands together and clasps them as if praying. It takes all of her will-power to resist pulling free, or keeping panic from her face.

  “Whatever this is, we’ll get through it, all right? I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  It is a kissing moment. Alyssa can feel it, the tug he feels for her, the concern, the cliché of it all. She steels herself for the inevitability and when it comes she does not part her lips to his questing tongue. She breaks the bond. His head seems enormous from this perspective. Why does this feel more like her comforting him, rather than the other way around?

  “Mark, do I have a diary or journal or anything?”

  “I don’t know. You do have a MyFace page. I’ll get the terminal.”