Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  This is what happens when you care too much, Ify wants to tell her. All those conversations Grace had with her—about food, about grandfathers, about Earthland—gone. Wherever the Cantonese woman’s mind and spirit has gone in death, she has taken all those things with her. And left Grace with the grief that is surely shaking in her bones. None of what Grace did could save this woman. Now look at you, Ify wants to say, then wonders where this cruelty is coming from.

  “There was a spike in brain activity just prior to her flatlining,” the nurse continues.

  Ify had expected to find relief in treating patients other than the children who had fallen even deeper into their comas, but there is no deliverance waiting for her here. Not for the first time, she wonders if she is the right person to direct the Refugee Program. Something has cracked inside her. “How was her sleep cycling in the week prior?”

  “Irregular. She was also being treated for sleep paralysis and obstructed airways disease.”

  “Sleep apnea?”

  “No. A lung disorder.”

  Ify makes a note of that. They should have seen this coming. Still, so many of their patients had come in with irregular sleep cycles and damaged respiratory function. Hospital protocol and Alabastrine law prevented cyberization without the consent of the patient or the patient’s guardian. But what to do with those patients who could not understand the language Ify or the others spoke? Ify and the rest of her staff had the electronic capabilities to immediately translate whatever language they heard, but they could not speak it back to those who lacked that technology. And so many of the refugees had been unaccompanied minors. No guardian to give permission for them. No guardian to guide them through this new, terrifying, sterile world.

  Grace has long since stopped taking notes; she only stares blankly at the deceased.

  “Preparations had been made to treat her post-traumatic stress disorder,” the nurse droned, nodding at Grace. “But after her latest sleep, she never awakened. And it is against office protocol to perform mind-altering operations without the patient’s consent.”

  Ify’s frown deepens.

  “Immediately prior to flatlining, she screamed.”

  “What?” This from Grace, awoken from her stupor.

  “Her first vocal effort since she had fallen unconscious. It was a single scream, sustained for approximately two and a half seconds. Then her vital functions ceased.”

  A moment of grief pierces Ify’s heart. “Nightmares. Her nightmares scared her to death.” When she raises her head, new resolve stiffens her spine. “Have a record made of her brain function since her arrival in our ward. When did she first come in again?”

  “Last month, Doctor. Before entry, she had been in excellent health.”

  “Grace, let’s go.” Ify leaves the room without bothering to correct the android nurse. She has never felt less a doctor than she does walking away from the woman she could not save. The woman whose trauma none of her medical knowledge could help her heal. A familiar fear fogs her mind: I’m just some bush girl pretending to be a doctor.

  As they walk down the sterile, too-bright, ivory-colored hallway, Grace swipes at her tablet to bring up information on the next patient. “Mr. de Freitas,” she says in a hard voice after clearing her throat. “Angolan. Six feet, two inches. He began hospitalization at a weight of 172 pounds.” She continues with his physical state, but Ify stops her. “Yes, Doctor?”

  Why is everyone calling her Doctor? “Tell me. His story. What . . . what difficulty did he suffer before arriving in Alabast?” It sounds so trite and simple to put it that way, but it is the only language Ify can find for what she wants to know.

  Grace’s words stumble over themselves as she tries to find an answer. Then her expression changes. From one of confusion to one of gratitude. Finally understanding what Ify is asking, she says, “He witnessed his family’s torture at the hands of the regime. He is one of several patients from that village who have suffered the same condition.”

  “And who have endured the same trauma,” Ify finishes.

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  They arrive at the door to the man’s room. “Thank you, Grace.”

  After a stunned moment, Grace permits a small, embarrassed smile. “Certainly, Doctor.”

  As they walk in, an aerial drone assistant hovers before the man’s face, adjusting the wires connected to his temples.

  Mr. de Freitas sits up in his bed. “Doctor?”

  Ify surprises herself by smiling. “Yes, Mr. de Freitas.”

  “I can see!” he shouts. “I can see! My eyes!” He puts his fingers to his face, touches his cheeks and his chin, his eyelids. “I can see again.” He can’t stop touching his face, even his ears and his small afro. “They gave me new eyes! I can see!”

  Ify notes the small scars by his temple, the mark of recent cyberization. “And your adjustment to light sensitivity? Is the light too bright?”

  “Light? Oh my God.” He laughs. “Light. I can see light!”

  “Careful!” She rushes out to touch his arm. “Please do not stare directly at it. You may damage your new retinas. They are made to be more durable than natural eyes, but that does not mean they are indestructible.”

  He stares at Ify for a dazed second before letting out a full-bellied chuckle. “Yes. Of course. Not indestructible.” His chuckle turns into a string of cackles. “Of course. Of course.” His voice grows softer, filled with awe. “I thought I would never see again. After the things I had seen, I thought I never wanted to see anything, but I can see. Thank God, I can see. God is good all the time!”

  Ify smiles, even as tears fill her eyes. “And all the time, God is good.”

  Tears spill down the man’s cheeks. “Will . . . will crying damage the retinas too?”

  Ify takes the man’s hand in hers. “No, Mr. de Freitas. It is okay to cry,” she says, as though she’s giving herself permission as well.

  Maybe Grace was right. Maybe this thing happening right now—the same thing Ify witnessed when the Cantonese woman had motioned Grace close and whispered lovingly into her ear about the food market—maybe this thing is important too.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  The bot sits unactivated in its slot on the wall of the bathroom stall as Ify removes her menstrual cup and deposits it into the bin that sterilizes them. Most have the bot conduct the entire process automatically while they recline and read or let their mind wander. But Ify prefers to do it herself.

  When she’s finished, she leaves and heads to the sink to wash her hands. But just as the water begins to sluice through her fingers, she hears whimpering. The water stops, and Ify listens for a moment to whoever is crying in the stall two down from her own. Then she moves her hands, and the water pours from the faucet again, drowning out the sound.

  A few seconds later, Grace appears at the sink next to her, checking her face in the mirror, wiping away tear streaks, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. She gives Ify a perfunctory nod and a swift “Doctor” before she begins washing her hands.

  Ify moves her hands to the air dryer next to the sink, then wipes the remaining water away. She should leave, but she doesn’t. Something keeps her there as Grace works to put herself together.

  “Doctor?” Grace asks, her hands clean and dried.

  “Yes, Grace?”

  Grace looks Ify in the eye, and the grief is still there, despite her efforts to wash it away. “Why did you choose this work? Why this?”

  Ify folds her arms and leans against the sink, staring off into the middle distance. “Before I arrived here, I wanted to be a pilot.” The instinct rises in her to crush the memories bubbling to the surface—memories of a refugee camp in Nigeria, memories of the sister who abandoned her smiling at her and telling her to hurry up and get to school on time, memories of mechs and enemy soldiers raining fire
and death on that camp—but she lets them come. “I would look into the night sky and see the Colonies winking at me like stars, and I would tell myself that, when I was older, I’d go there to study orbital physics and flight. My . . .” The word catches in her throat. “My sister was a pilot. During the war.”

  Grace’s eyes go wide. “You had a sister?”

  The last time Ify saw Onyii’s face, it had been a blur. Ify had just undergone a surgery. Onyii had removed a tracker from inside her body. Then a haze had blanketed Ify, cocooned her. The next thing she knew, she was in the complete darkness of a cargo hold and wouldn’t see light until the shuttle she’d been put on had docked in Alabast.

  “What happened to her?”

  For a long time, Ify is silent. She moves past Grace’s question. “Whenever I think of piloting, I think of her. And whenever I think of her, I think of killing.” She turns to Grace and hopes that Grace can see the new brightness in her face. The warmth she’s trying to put there. “So I decided to study medicine. I wanted a job where I didn’t have to break things. I could fix them instead.”

  Grace sniffs against a sob and smiles.

  Ify takes a step and is close enough to see the shards of morning in her assistant’s eyes. With her thumb, she wipes the still-shining tearstains from Grace’s cheeks. “Take the rest of the day off.”

  “But, Doctor!”

  Ify raises a hand to stop any further objection. “Physician, heal thyself.” At the question in Grace’s eyes, Ify says, “I attended chapel when I was recently arrived. I would go with a very dear friend of mine while we were students. That’s where I heard that passage from Luke 4:23. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

  Grace’s smile broadens. “Thank you, Doctor.” Then she’s off.

  Ify lets out a heavy sigh after several seconds of watching the door Grace has just passed through. Then her Whistle trills. She sees the number for a mechanic and answers, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” says the young voice on the other end. “You dropped off a Bonder earlier this week?”

  Her heart races. The comatose girl’s neural data. “Yes. Is it ready? Were you able to recover the data?”

  “Err . . . you should probably come by.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  The mechanic’s shop is a pristine collection of glass surfaces. External connecting devices and custom-made cases for them, encased in glass boxes, hang from hooks in the wall. Customers mill around, attended to by aerial service bots. Light just bright enough to make everyone feel comfortable, filling the air with soft chatter, shines over everything.

  Behind the front counter leans a young man whose eyes glisten with the sheen of cyberization. When Ify draws near, she hears none of the humming and whirring of the gears and machinery at work inside of him and figures his central processing unit must be state-of-the-art. The twinkling nameplate on his chest says VIKRAM.

  “You called me with an update?” Ify asks.

  A goatee makes his otherwise shaven face more angular. There’s an agelessness about him. He could be fifty years old or just a few years older than Ify. Or he could be a fifty-year-old man in the body of someone who looks only a few years older than Ify. He holds up her Bonder with one hand, elbow pressed to the glass counter. Tattoo ink swims in designs over his forearm. “The update is there is no update. You have a minute?”

  Ify surprises herself with an exasperated sigh. “Sure.”

  Vikram leads her behind the desk and into a back room with the complete opposite ambiance of the store floor. In here, lamps illuminate small, seemingly random circles of a space otherwise smothered in shadows. Tools litter workspaces, and Ify finds herself stepping awkwardly over Bubble Wrap and empty boxes and glass cases strewn all over the floor. Nimbly, he makes his way to his desk, where mini projectors and tablets and small, cube-like data processors lie in a neat semicircle. He sits in a hoverchair and seems too preoccupied to offer Ify a seat until he extends his arm and a chair speeds out of the shadows and lands close enough for Ify to fall into beside him.

  He connects the Bonder to one of the data processors, then connects that to a larger device and enables a wireless connection that Ify can feel in her temple, connecting the Bonder to half a dozen devices on the desk. It powers up, and up from one of the tablets pops a holographic projection of its screen. The fingers of Vikram’s right hand break apart, and his wired fingertips blaze across a separate touchboard. Down scrolls the text of the Bonder’s data. A swirl of letters, symbols, and numbers.

  “I wasn’t able to recover the lost data, but I was able to stop the virus from eating any more of it.”

  “Virus?”

  “Yeah. Once you connected the Bonder to an outside device, whatever was in there just went nuts and started eating all your data.” He shifts in his seat. “You sure it didn’t contract a virus from any of your other devices?”

  “I regularly have every piece of tech in my home checked. It couldn’t have come from them. I would have noticed data loss earlier.” She only half believes herself. Worry settles in the pit of her stomach that the virus had been hiding in one of her devices all along, devices that she has connected to in the past. What if the virus is inside her? The urge creeps into her to remove her Whistle from her temple and put it in a garbage disposal unit to be jettisoned into space.

  He turns in his chair to face her fully. “Can I ask what you were doing when this happened?” He holds up the Bonder when he speaks, even though wires still hang from it.

  Ify resists the urge to squirm. How can she confess to breaking office protocol and performing an invasive search of a patient without their consent? Even if this man doesn’t know the full extent of Alabastrine law, he’d know she was up to something suspect.

  “I was inspecting materials I’d downloaded.”

  Vikram frowns. “What kind of materials?”

  The word memories almost slips out of Ify’s mouth. “Cerebral data. I work in a hospital.”

  He holds his frown for a moment, then his face loosens. “Possibly a damaged braincase, then. Either way, the virus has crept into the Bonder’s other functionalities. It’s useless at this point. Most of its projection capabilities have been corrupted beyond repair. And if you were to connect to it, you’d be in for a world of pain. And you’d risk corruption yourself. You’re not connected, are you?” It sounds like a statement coming from him.

  “No. Red-blood.” She pauses. “I do use Augments, however.” She points to her temple. “My Whistle. Here. It activates an implant at the base of my neck, connecting to my central nervous system.” She pulls back the collar of her shirt to show him the scar that will never heal. “It is removable. But that is what I use.” She lets go of her collar and straightens in her chair. “The Augment is for heightening my sensory perception—seeing farther, hearing more clearly—and it’s connected to my bodysuit for information transfer. It also enables remote connection to wireless devices. The Whistle is just for communication. Making and receiving calls, translation, that sort of thing.”

  “Like a phone,” he says absently.

  “A what?”

  Vikram waves the Bonder in the air like it’s just some disposable piece of tech. “Well, whatever you downloaded is likely the source of the virus. I’d recommend a clean sweep of whatever devices you used to connect with this. And I’d suggest having it decommissioned and put in a steel box to prevent accidental remote connection with anything—or anyone—else.”

  “That bad?” Ify says, trying to joke.

  “It might try to connect on its own.”

  “What? Without my turning it on?”

  “Yeah. Without you even turning it on.”

  Fear settles in Ify’s stomach. The cyberized girl’s memories: a poison. A virus. Her eyes grow wide with the question that rings between her ears.

  How many of those r
efugee children are cyberized?

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Paige and Amy take Peter to an artificial lake a brief walk from their cul-de-sac where teenagers wearing waterskates glide and twirl and leap as though they were skating on ice. Amy has Peter in a hoverchair with a blanket over his legs.

  Upon his return from the hospital, his arms had been leaden and he’d had to be fed his liquids with a spoon. Paige had felt too nervous to feed him intravenously. He still has a listlessness about him, a lack of reaction to most stimuli. But it is a relief to Ify that he still squints when lights shine too brightly and that he will shrink away at something that might cause him pain. And now with an artificial wind blowing in his face to simulate springtime, the slightest of smiles crawls across his lips.

  A pair of white, middle-aged neighbors waves to Amy. Amy lets out a loud squeal and beckons Ify to Peter’s hoverchair. Then Amy and Paige hurry over to join their neighbors and huddle in the mirthful buzz of excited conversation sprinkled throughout with cannon bursts of laughter.

  Ify walks slowly to Peter’s side, and for a long time, they watch the kids skating in silence.

  “I won’t remember this,” Peter says, at last.

  “What?” Ify looks down at him, this unmoving boy who suddenly contains a sadness so unbearable it can’t possibly be false. She wants to believe that every word out of his mouth is an attempt at controlling her, steering her in the direction he wants. But the stillness in his voice, its lack of tremor, rings too true in her chest.