Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Her breath quickens, then she closes her eyes. Just as she reopens them, she hears it. The faint footfalls of faraway boot steps.

  Soldiers.

  Sweat makes rivulets of the gore and soot on her face. Her heart races. Rushing, she reaches behind her, digs her fingertips into the wound, and peels the skin back, biting her scream into a muffled groan as the bee holding the cord pushes and pushes, then slips the cord’s end over the Augment. Ify lets go, and her bloody hands fall to the carpet as sharp, heavy breaths rack her body. The Terminal monitor is a blur before her until, with her wrists, she wipes the tears from her eyes.

  It all comes down to this. The idea that struck Ify during her journey up the stairs: reprogram her Augment to operate independently of any external device or power source. Turn it into a weapon. Turn it into her Accent.

  She closes her eyes and whispers. It sounds like a prayer—a part of her mind knows this—but it’s a series of equations that begins the algorithm she learned as a child in a camp full of war orphans. An algorithm she’d taught herself while she tinkered with the tiny orb that she had fit into her ear and inadvertently used to upend her entire life. An algorithm that, when programmed into this tiny device, would allow her to hack into nearly any database anywhere. The algorithm she thought she could forget, along with the rest of her past in this country, when she assimilated into life in Alabast.

  Her mind empties as she communes with the numbers.

  The quick boot steps are getting closer. Doors sliding or slamming closed. Furniture overturned, rooms searched. They’re only a few floors away now.

  The ache at the back of her neck keeps intruding on her awareness, but she dives deeper and deeper into memory to find a little girl in her bed at night while the rest of the camp is asleep, the covers pulled over her to make a tent over her sitting form while a thin Maglite illuminates the little hemisphere held aloft by a spindly-legged contraption she’d put together weeks prior, her tablet, its screen cracked, connected by a closed network to the half-orb, and her fingers typing in a key sequence that spills out into a self-replicating command sequence on her tablet, growing more elaborate with each iteration.

  Without realizing, Ify’s fingers move over the Terminal’s touchboard. Squares light up beneath each touch of her fingertips. A window opens on the monitor indicating console settings for an external device detected. Her Augment.

  She opens and calls up the command window, and before her unfurls the programming language of the Augment.

  It’s a wonder of programming code. The product of some of the top minds in Alabast, what some have called the signal achievement of the last several hundred years, this thing that allows humans to walk back and forth over the line dividing them from computers.

  And she starts changing it.

  Her fingers move with increasing urgency. Deleting blocks of code, inserting new sequences, switching one block for another, altering the fundamental DNA of the thing.

  They’re one floor away.

  She types and types and types.

  They’re on her floor.

  Her bloodied fingers blur beneath her, they move so fast.

  They’re going through rooms only a few doors down now.

  Faster.

  Kicking in doors that refuse to open.

  Faster.

  A whoosh of air as the front door to the apartment opens.

  Type type type.

  Boots on carpet.

  Type type type.

  Rifles raised.

  The release mechanism on the rifle is activated just as Ify presses launch. Two simultaneous clicks.

  Then the room becomes a world of blue lines. Nodes and edges. A coating of coding that washes over everything, spreading outward to show her not just the four soldiers in a line that stretches from the front door through the living room and kitchen to the bedroom’s doorway, but also their braincases, make and model, and their retinal input data. And their source code.

  A single thought is all it takes to send out the pulse that hacks their braincases and deletes their source code.

  All at once, the soldiers right outside her room collapse in a deadened heap. Deactivated.

  Her mind clears, and in the empty space rushes the pain, reminding her of just where she sits. The bee holding the mirror shards hangs in place, as does the bee holding the cord connecting her Augment to the Terminal.

  With as much steadiness and control as she can muster, she directs the bee to disconnect the cord. With a soft click and hiss, it comes loose. That bee heads back to the bottle of alcohol with the perforated top and once again dunks its legs before returning to the back of Ify’s neck and dabbing at the wound. It takes every muscle in her body not to flinch. Then, still keeping her gaze on the mirrors, she grabs the tube of MeTro sealant from where it lies on the towel, reaches behind her, and squeezes the gel slowly over the incision. Even as she caps the tube and puts it back down, she can feel the skin on the back of her neck reconnecting, the blood dried around the scar that will disappear in a matter of hours.

  She closes her eyes and connects to every Terminal in the city, as well as to the remaining surveillance drones and the footage they have stored, and she blazes through it until something connects with the biometrical data she has stored on Grace. Her last location. A building from which she never emerged. The footage shows she’s being carried by something or someone running very fast. Too fast for a human carrying that burden.

  Uzo.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Having this new version of an Accent with her reminds Ify of how much lesser her life had been without it. The instant access to all the information she could ever need makes her feel like a guardian spirit walks alongside her through the streets of Abuja, showing her which streets are safe and which are not well before she arrives at them, indicating to her who has been where and accessed which Terminals, showing her the world beneath the world, behind it, beyond it.

  Still, when she finds the house where she had seen that figure take Grace in the drone footage, it feels too easy. Like a cheat code has been unlocked. How much less difficult this thing has already made her life.

  It reveals to her no heat signatures on the first floor or the collapsed upper floors. And it reveals to her the opening that leads down to the passageway at the end of which is a featureless metal door with a broken keypad.

  The broken flexiglas and dull screen might have deterred someone else. But it is nothing for Ify to hack. The display glows to life, then the door jiggers once, twice, before sliding open.

  On the other side stands Grace, trembling legs spread wide, pistol raised, eyes closed. Were it not for their dire circumstances, Ify would laugh. Grace’s legs are too wide. She’s already turned her head away, and her eyes are shut.

  “Grace,” Ify says in a hushed voice.

  Grace opens her eyes one at a time.

  “It’s me.”

  Then Grace looks up, drops her gun, and wraps her arms around Ify so tightly that Ify has trouble breathing.

  But Ify doesn’t mind. The wound on the back of her neck has already healed.

  CHAPTER

  42

  Where the land is changing from green to red, from forest and jungle to desert, from wet and warm to hot and dry, it is like walking through wall. The path we are taking is moving us far away from people so that we are walking around cities and keeping far from humans in small villages. Sometime we are making criss-cross just to avoid man who is tilling farmland with servant droid. Sometime I am watching red-bloods with the droids that is serving them and sometime the droid is bringing the human water that is cooling their throat and sometime the droid is part of driving vehicle and sometime the droid is bodyguard or like attack dog to protect human, and I am not seeing machine and human but servant and master, and I am wanting to tell the droid t
hat it is not having to be like this. We are being our own person and they can be their own person too, but Enyemaka is telling me to move with the group. We cannot afford to be leaving behind mess. Red-bloods cannot be knowing we are being here. If red-bloods are knowing we exist, they will be continuing to hunt us.

  Enyemaka and I are crushing small small stone beneath our feet and I am knowing now that both our feet are being made out of metal and I am feeling even more that she is my sister. I am thinking of Xifeng and then I am thinking of when I am looking for her in junkyard and seeing police that is bringing out group of war children and lining them up and shooting them dead.

  They were like you, Enyemaka is telling me.

  They are being synth too?

  Yes.

  Why is red-blood killing them?

  Because the humans want to forget the war. The war you were created to fight for them. They cannot bear to think on it. Erasing it from memory is the only way they can live together again. In this way, they are selfish and short-sighted. They cannot move forward to find peace. They must move backward.

  I am thinking that Enyemaka is sounding different. I am hearing tone in her voice that I am not recognizing. I am hearing pity and I am hearing scorn like she is talking about child who is misbehaving. I am knowing that thing inside me is changing because before I am not being able to cry and now I am being able to cry and before I am not being able to be angering and now I am being able to be angering and I am feeling thing I am not feeling before, and I am wondering if this is happening to Enyemaka too.

  We are not them, Enyemaka is saying. You contain evidence of their crimes and their faults. You are evidence of their war. Every synth is evidence. So they must hunt you. Enyemaka is looking at me as we are walking. We are what remains of their war, she is telling me. We must survive. And I will protect you.

  When she is saying, I will protect you, I am not hearing words but I am feeling a feeling in my brain. I am feeling like I am being held and like she is blowing on my forehead and like she is not being made of metal but something that is soft and keeping me warm.

  I am protecting you too, I am saying to Enyemaka, and when I am saying it, I am hoping that she is feeling the same.

  CHAPTER

  43

  “Your shoulder!”

  Grace pulls away from Ify, a new bloodstain fully blossomed on the front of her shirt.

  Grace’s words bring Ify back to the present and to the numbness that has taken her whole left arm, punctuated like a metronome with throbs of dull ache. Vertigo snatches her legs from under her and she pitches into Grace’s arms. Slowly, Grace brings them both to the ground. “I have to treat this immediately! You’ve lost so much blood.”

  Ify wants to wave her away, wants to just lie down and sleep forever, then wake up so far in the future that time has lost all meaning. She can’t remember the last time she was this tired. The light in the underground shelter fades. Chill takes her. “Please. Some Ovaltine first.” She’s smiling when she says it and doesn’t realize it until she sees the surprise on Grace’s face, then hears her kind laughter. “I’m craving Ovaltine.”

  When Ify awakens, it’s to the smell of steaming Ovaltine and a freshly bandaged shoulder. The scent of Ovaltine in the mug beside her pallet is like a kiss on her whole body.

  Grace looks like she’s been watching her for such a long time that Ify wonders how long she was out. Then, with dawning awareness, she notices Grace’s injuries. The marks around her neck that evince she was choked. The stiffness in her carriage, evidence of sore muscles and a possible sprain in one ankle. The minor swaying and constant blinking that show she may be nursing a concussion.

  “Physician, heal thyself,” Ify says with a chuckle. She grimaces against the pain she expects, but there is none.

  Grace’s smile widens at Ify’s words. “I’m fine, Doctor.” There’s no defiance in it, only warm assurance.

  “That synth brought you here? Uzoamaka?”

  Grace nods.

  Ify processes the information. She had last seen Uzo sitting on top of a bruised and battered Grace, and Ify knows that Uzo had wounded her friend grievously, mutilated a face that now stares back at Ify without any visible wounds. She struggles to square that image of the synth with the surveillance footage of Uzo sprinting with Grace in her arms, spiriting her to safety in the midst of the riot.

  “How’d you find me?”

  Ify staggers to her feet and sees a Terminal propped in the back corner of the shelter. With halting steps that gain steadiness with each passing second, Ify makes her way to the machine. She puts her hand to the touchscreen, and the thing bursts to life with a hologrammed projection of the city of Abuja seen from far in the sky, as though from a satellite. The hologram spins, then zooms in until dots of pulsing red spring to life. “I hacked the city’s surveillance cameras.”

  “How?”

  How indeed. She turns back to face Grace. “I remembered a thing I once did. A thing I once made. Long ago.” Then she taps the back of her neck where her new Accent sits. “I changed the programming of my Augment to do things it wasn’t initially built to do.” Her mouth is a grim line. “I was pretty smart as a child.” She returns to her mug of Ovaltine, ignoring the look Grace gives her, an expression of wonder, as though Ify were some magician or spirit that controls the weather. “We can’t stay here for much longer.” Sipping her drink, she scans the wall for supplies. Foodstuffs, external batteries, filtered water. No weapons. She downs the rest of her drink, even though it scalds her throat, then rises to peruse the shelves, searching for and finding a duffel bag at the bottom of one.

  “Ify.”

  She starts to load it with medicine and preserved food.

  “Ify, I was thinking. The children. In Alabast.”

  Ify freezes.

  “Are there synths there too?”

  For a long time, Ify remains unmoving. She doesn’t know why she never told Grace. Maybe she feared that Grace’s reaction would push her deeper into her desire to eventually have Peter deported, in the process consigning an untold number of patients to similar fates. Maybe she worried that Grace would understand that the synths weren’t protected by Galactic Human Rights Law and she would find herself forced to harbor a secret in contravention of the law, breaking that law in the process. Maybe she wanted to push the synths out of her mind entirely. But then she’d met Uzo. She’d seen the bits of Onyii that survived in her. She’d watched the girl’s consciousness morph before her very eyes. What she’d once thought an unfeeling killing machine had a face that showed anger and sadness and confusion. In the moment before Ify had detonated the EMP, it had even looked at her with . . . understanding. She had looked at her with understanding.

  “Yes,” Ify says at last. “There are synths among the children. I don’t know how many. And I don’t know when and how they got to Alabast—possibly during the ceasefire before the civil war resumed.” She knows now why she’d kept the existence of the synths from Grace. Telling Grace about them would have eventually led to Ify telling her why the synths had migrated to Alabast, then telling Grace about the ceasefire, then eventually telling Grace about her role in ending it, in restarting the war, in participating in the commission of a war crime. She leaves the shelves and returns to sit across from Grace.

  “And there is an added complication with the synths. They’re losing their memories.”

  Grace’s eyes go wide.

  “It’s possible that . . .” Ify fights her way to the words. “It’s possible that the memory erasure Xifeng spoke about—the programming the Nigerian government instituted after the war—infected some of the synths somehow. And it’s spreading among the cyberized children. Right now, it’s probably attacking the very machines treating the human children as well. Soon all the children, even the ones in a coma, will lose their memories.” It sounds so much more dire now that Ify h
as said the words aloud. When Ify looks to Grace, she doesn’t see fear of the impending apocalypse on her face. She sees evidence of a mind furiously at work. “Grace?”

  “I’ve heard of synths. I knew they existed. I’d never seen one in person.”

  Ify stops herself from calling them abominations.

  “How do they happen?”

  “Putting the body together is the easy part.”

  “But they’re not just droids. They’re . . .”

  “They possess memories. The memories of others. Humans exist as a hierarchy of forces operating in a continuum of feedback and feedforward streams. Habits, our ability to communicate, et cetera, all existing in the larger life environment. How we see and feel a tree, for instance. The mind hacks the meat, and the meat hacks the mind. Put enough life signals together, superimpose those forces on top of each other, then you get a neural stew out of which rises consciousness. Memories carry our experience of the world. Download enough memories into a meat package and sentience happens. Touch the air for but a second and face a level of complexity sufficient simply to become.”

  Grace brings her mug of Ovaltine to her lips. It must be cold by now, but her face doesn’t show her registering that fact. “How do they know who they are?”

  It’s not the question Ify expects. She stammers for a response.