And then he is showing me holographic video of him being child of war and shooting and killing and being small small but pointing gun and killing, then there is explosion, and then he is showing me other holographic video of him being in what is looking like hospital. And I am knowing it is hospital because I am seeing place like it in other rememberings, and there is no blood but there is being nothing but air where his legs are being. And we are turning in the remembering to see the doctor’s face and the doctor is saying things, but I am thinking that there is so much pain in the remembering that the person is not being able to hear the doctor’s words. Then I am seeing other holographic video where Uzodinma is holding himself up on two metal bars and he is looking down and his legs are metal and there is no skin on them, they are just gears and pistons and rods, and they are moving slow slow and Uzo is gritting his teeth and moaning and sweating much, then nurse is coming to hold him up before he falls to floor. Uzodinma is fast-forwarding through other memories. He is receiving new arm and he is returning to one room over and over again and he is being put into chair, and we are both feeling cord plugging into outlet at the base of our neck and then there is darkness until he is waking up.
“I don’t know what happens to me when they put me in that chair,” Uzodinma is telling me. “There is only darkness. I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if I am dying and coming back to life. But I am needing to know what is happening in that time, because that’s the secret to who I am.” He is looking at his hands and the different color skin all over them. “What I am.”
“Is that where we’re walking to?”
Uzodinma nods.
“What about the others? Do they want to go to different places?”
Uzo is looking up at the sky where it is showing between the tree leaves, and I am looking up with him and thinking that maybe he is seeing in the sky the same thing that is being inside his head. “Some of them might. But some of them want to know what they are, just like me. If I can find an answer, maybe they can as well.” Then he is looking at me. “We are the same,” he is telling me. “We are sharing mystery.”
It is taking me a long time to speak because I am feeling like he is seeing me. Not how Xifeng or Enyemaka are seeing me and not how drone is seeing me and not how people under Falomo Bridge are seeing me, even though I am calling all of these people friend. He is seeing inside me and outside me at the same time. He is seeing all of me. He is seeing the question I am asking and he is seeing the question underneath that and the question underneath that. He is seeing that I am worried and scared and that I am sadding and that I am learning new thing every day and it is filling me with fear, and I am thinking he is seeing all of these thing because he is once feeling them too. I am feeling like he is seeing me, and it is making me to want to be thanking him. “How are you knowing where to go to find this place or this person you are looking for?”
“I am retracing my steps,” he is telling me. “I am remembering that one time when I am being child of war I am walking this path, but I am going in other direction and I am leaving many dead body. So I am walking this path again and I am seeing what I am doing in my head when I am being younger and more foolish. And this is how I am knowing where to go. When the killing and the bleeding in my head is stopping, I will know that I have arrived. I will know that I’ve found what I am looking for.”
And I am thinking that maybe when he is finding what he is looking for, I will be finding it too.
When he is first saying we are sharing mystery, I am thinking he means we are both having something wrong with us or we are both having disease inside our body or our leg or arm is broken the same way, but now I am thinking that he is saying it more like we are sibling. We are brother and sister.
We share mystery. We are being family.
CHAPTER
23
The head of radiology at Nizamiye Hospital wears a shimmering white changshan with mauve magua jacket and traditional chieftain’s kufi. His pant legs whisper against each other as he leads Ify and Grace through the open ward where patients, who look the absolute picture of health, are being attended to by hovering drones and the occasional nurse. Small conversations and occasional laughter fill the room. Ify notices that every patient has bandages wrapped around their head and neck. A few have bandages swathing their arms, and through the gauze, the copper-red markings indicating a healing circular incision. An outlet.
“Many of our patients,” Dr. Ezirike says, “are farmers from the borderlands just outside the Redlands.” With a wave of his hand, he indicates the patients lining both walls. They don’t look like farmers, but then Ify wonders what she expected farmers to look like. “Proximity to radiation has adversely affected their internal organs, so they are prime candidates for the government’s mass cyberization initiative. Our target is to achieve full cyberization within the year.”
“There were quite a few empty beds in the room before this one,” Grace remarks.
Without looking back, Dr. Ezirike tells her, “A year or two ago, we were at full capacity. And before that, every hospital was strained almost to breaking. But the establishment of regional clinics throughout every state, as well as an extensive training program—thanks to the Chinese—has helped stem the flow quite a bit. Only those in most dire need of care are sent here. As you can see, our facility is more than equipped to meet their needs.”
They double back and reenter the hallway they had walked down earlier. Internists and doctors and nurse attendants hurry past, some of them making idle conversation, others with their eyes filmed over, no doubt reading reports or preparing to meet patients. A woman pushes a patient forward in a hoverchair that covers her legs, occasionally bending down to whisper something in the patient’s ear. Though the patient’s catatonic expression never changes, the woman smiles as though the patient were smiling too. As though the patient were laughing at a joke she’d just heard. There’s a levity here that Ify never noticed in Alabast. Everyone is about their work, and it is difficult work, but they don’t seem burdened by the seriousness of their tasks. There is joy in caring for the sick. Ify wonders if Grace sees the same thing, if she would see herself at home in a place like this, where it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to speak with a patient about food and family and where to find the good markets.
Down another corridor, they stop at a door. Dr. Ezirike puts his hand to the pad. It beeps, and the door slides open, revealing a warmly lit anteroom with a carpet at its center and old-fashioned leather-bound books lining the walls. Instead of a wall at the far end of the room is a window, opening out to a room where children and a few young adolescents play or sit or stare into space. Before some of them sits an easel at which they paint with their styluses, some with their fingers. Others arrange blocks into increasingly complex patterns.
Dr. Ezirike pauses in front of the window before turning and indicating the two hovering armchairs for Ify and Grace. “Don’t worry, it’s a one-way mirror. They cannot see us.”
Grace sits, stylus poised over the tablet she has in her lap, ever the dutiful notetaker.
Ify can’t take her eyes off the children.
On the other side of the glass, adults walk around the room, but they don’t wear any armor. Just robes with green and white stripes at the ends of each sleeve. Here, the kids cluster in groups, some young enough to barely be walking. A few of them rest against the wall; these ones seem older. But through the flexiglass, Ify can see movement. She can see children talking to each other. Some of them are animated, others withdrawn. But they all seem . . . alive.
Once inside the room, she sees the drawings that line the wall. She walks to one of the pictures and sees a compound sketched out, seen at an angle from above with soldiers toward the center of the page around what she realizes is an explosion. The captured moment finds the limbs frozen in mid-flight. A shaheed. A suicide bomber. Someone in a military vest stands at the bottom right corne
r of the page, looking both at the scene and at Ify.
Then an explosion outside the building, and Ify, held down by the guards protecting her, staring at one of the children, who is giggling and saying “Roses” over and over again, and Ify realizing he means the new blood on the walls outside the compound from the suicide bomber who has just detonated himself.
“Doctor?” Dr. Ezirike’s voice snaps Ify out of her reverie.
Ify closes her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose, then shakes herself out of her stupor. Her bodysuit tells her where she is, beams into her brain their location, the time of day, the year. We are not at war, she says to herself, turning to smile at Dr. Ezirike, then taking her seat in the hoverchair next to Grace.
“I was just telling your colleague,” the doctor says, “that some of our most important advances have been in the field of child cyberization. It was common wisdom that children should reach a certain age before undergoing any such operations, but with our technology and growing expertise, we are able to push that age further and further back.”
“Machines from the cradle to the grave,” Ify says before she can stop herself.
The doctor frowns at her, then opens his face again for the both of them. “Some will look at these children and see the future best and brightest of Nigeria, able to attend and succeed at the best schools anywhere. Some will see future scientists able to accumulate data at hitherto unknown rates and assimilate them and conduct incredible analyses. And in a way, we are breeding future environmentalists. I’m sure the government is trying to get all the help it can in its efforts to combat climate change. But we are also building people more able to survive in this world. Their organs don’t deteriorate at the same rate. They have automatic immunity from any number of diseases that may have devastated previous populations. Can you believe there was a time when a thing like malaria could kill you?” He chuckles softly.
Grace pauses in her note-taking. “Doctor, you said earlier that the government’s goal was widespread cyberization?”
“Yes. For a number of reasons. The health of the population, but also increased productivity. It opens the space for remote workers. We have high-speed rail from Borno State to Enugu, but for some, the trip is still not feasible. That shouldn’t keep them from having the good job they qualify for.”
“Aren’t there security concerns?” Something is niggling at the back of Ify’s mind, but she can’t quite pin down her worry. “Mass connectivity. The government can watch everything you do.”
Grace stiffens in her seat, as though a thought has just occurred to her.
Dr. Ezirike shrugs. “Would you rather the government carry your data or a private corporation? At least this way, your wallet is safer. The Ministry of Health certainly isn’t trying to bully you into buying that sweater.” He chuckles.
“No, it isn’t,” Ify says quietly to herself.
“After the cataclysm that ended five years ago, the people have been more than eager to protect against such widespread catastrophe.”
Ify’s eyes spring open. “Cataclysm?”
“Yes. The Climate Cataclysm, the Nine-Year Storm that ravaged the country for nearly a decade. It set fire to almost everything, devastated the southeast. The Igbo were hit hardest. It saw the expansion of the Redlands, rising sea levels. Almost every imaginable horror.” He doesn’t speak like someone affected by the calamity. He speaks as though this were a thing that happened somewhere far away, that killed people he can only barely bring himself to care about.
“Is that what happened?” Ify asks, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. Grace has stopped taking notes and now stares intently at the both of them.
“What? Of course that’s what happened.” The doctor laughs. “Millions died and millions more were displaced by the Nine-Year Storm. It wasn’t until 2176 that the worst was over. And that’s when the mass cyberization initiative got under way in earnest.”
“But the war—”
“Tell us more about the regional clinics, Doctor,” Grace interjects.
For less than a second, a dark expression washes over Dr. Ezirike’s face, but he continues, explaining the intake process and the local efforts to combat the worst effects of the Climate Cataclysm while caring for the climate refugees most adversely affected. But, to Ify, his voice has turned into the buzzing of a distant insect. Her gaze returns to the children, some of whom would have been alive in 2176. Some of whom would have been alive before then. Alive to have witnessed the end of the war. A war no one seems to want to talk about.
A war, it seems, that didn’t even happen.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Grace waits until the driver has taken her and Ify some distance from the hospital before speaking.
A wave of relief moved through Ify at the sight of their two new guards. Since the night of Grace’s encounter with the police, Ify has insisted that the two guards, smartly dressed and thankfully taciturn, accompany them on every trip. She was foolish to think that simply having come from here meant that she was safe from whatever dangers lurked in this place. It took Grace’s near-arrest to show her that.
“You don’t have to worry about a robot taking your job if you’re the robot,” Grace says, a hint of a smirk at the edge of her lips.
Ify raises an eyebrow. Grace doesn’t make jokes. Ify sees the nervousness in her again, the way she grips her stylus, on the verge of breaking it. She should send her home. Even though Director Towne had ordered Grace to come along, maybe to spy on her, this is too taxing a mission. Ify knows this place, as strange as it appears to her. The newness for Grace must be overwhelming. And layered on top of that unease is the stress that comes with having to uncover a medical mystery imperiling the lives of over a thousand children in Alabast. That’s what Ify will do. She’ll send her back. As soon as they’re back at the apartment, she’ll begin drafting the paperwork.
A thought strikes Ify.
“Grace.”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Why did you interrupt me? In the doctor’s office.”
Grace looks behind her. The driver and the other minder sit in silence as the jeep glides down the city flightlines. Then she presses a button on the console beside her, and the partition rises. She waits until it’s closed and, even then, leans forward in a whisper. “There were no security cameras in that hospital.”
“What?”
“I thought I was being paranoid. But when I started looking, I saw that there were none. Not a single room we walked into had cameras.”
“But surveillance drones.”
Grace shakes her head. “I had my tablet set to detect drone activity once we entered.”
Ify remembers that Grace had held her tablet to her chest almost the whole time . . . to mask the readings. “What are you saying? We weren’t being watched?”
“We were being watched. Everyone in that hospital was either cyberized or undergoing cyberization, permitting the government access to their braincases.”
Ify’s eyes widen in horror.
“Everyone was watching us.”
They’ve been watching her. Ever since she set foot in this country, they’ve been watching her.
“That’s how the police knew to come after me. They heard me asking about the . . .”
Breath leaves Ify’s lungs so that she can only speak in a whisper. “And if the government can control what people see, it can block their sight too.” Grace nods. Ify shakes her head in disbelief. “No one helped us, because they didn’t see us.”
“Couldn’t see us.” Grace glances behind her, as though unsure that the partition is still in place, then turns back to Ify. “There was no Nine-Year Storm, was there?”
A maelstrom rages in Ify’s head. Too many questions, too many clues, none of them joining together, just flotsam and detritus hurled about against the walls of h
er skull. “No,” she breathes. “There was no storm.”
The lack of memorials around Aso Rock. The attack on Grace in Abuja. This story about a massive decade-long climate event that never happened. They’re erasing every trace of the war. But there has to be something left.
The coordinates must have been buried somewhere deep in Ify’s subconscious, somewhere beneath conscious thought, beneath language acquisition, beneath her bloody childhood memories, buried in her bones and in the thick of her muscle. Because when she presses the button by her armrest that unveils a console with a digital map, her fingers blaze over the glowing keys, the map’s target reticle zeroing in on a point near the border between Enugu State and Benue State.
Things will be different in the southeast, she tells herself. There will be at least some remnant of the war. They may have scrubbed all trace of it from the capital, but where the fighting was thickest, the land must bear some scars that remain.
She doesn’t realize how tightly she’s holding on to her hope until after the maglev jeep has veered into new flightlines, taking them a few silent hours through part of Nasarawa State and Kogi State before bringing them to near-empty country roads, flanked occasionally by villages or a single solar-paneled dwelling. Their jeep then soars over the treetops of nearby jungle, and memory of the journey returns to Ify. Riding in the back of a jeep with Agu, Xifeng’s trailer behind them. Refugees either on or beside the caravan, walking with it, dancing with it, clinging to it. Ify presses herself against the window to witness the changing of the landscape, to see the snaking road the caravan had taken five years earlier. They continue, and she angles her face to see if they’ll be coming up on the converted remains of the refugee intake center she had passed through all those years ago.
“Take us down,” Ify says. “Take us down now.” She doesn’t care how urgent she sounds, how unhinged. She doesn’t care that she’s forcing the driver to break several traffic laws in descending as swiftly and as directly as he’s doing. But soon, the jeep is hovering only a foot over a patch of empty grass before lowering onto its absorbers.
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