Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  When I am out of the remembering, I am back in her office and I am watching her sleep and then I am going back to the room where I am staying, the one with the MRI scanner.

  The blinds to the window that is occupying one whole wall are still being open and I am able to be looking through the window and seeing all the row after row after row of bed with children who is being in them, sleeping but also not sleeping. Doing something that is deeper than sleeping.

  The way the beds are being arranged, it is like they are being made to be looking the same, but I am seeing all the difference in them. How some is having scar and some is not having scar, how hair is being nappy on one and how they are curling differently on different heads, how some is missing finger or arm or whole leg, how some is metal but different. I am seeing brothers and sisters among them. And I am thinking that maybe they are child of war also but maybe they are seeing and doing and feeling and knowing what I am seeing and doing and feeling and knowing, that they are walking into their future. I am feeling good about what I am doing because Ify is telling me that it is helping them to be waking up and to be living their life. And I am looking at the children who are looking like me, and some of them are having family around them or brother or sister or friend or maybe someone they are loving once who is here waiting for them to be waking up. And I am remembering that this is what it is being like to be having someone who is caring for you. It is looking like this. It is looking like someone is smoothing out the wrinkles in the blanket on your body.

  Just like I am doing with Ify.

  Smile is coming onto my face until I am seeing two women next to one bed and one of them is sitting down in chair and rubbing hand of boy in bed and the other is just standing over them both and water is coming from her eyes. The one that is sitting is having her back to me while the one that is standing is facing me but not yet seeing me.

  I am walking closer to window and my eye is zooming in and I am seeing face and my body is doing strange thing where it is becoming too warm too fast like engine overheating and I am feeling fist clench at my side and seeing me grit my own teeth together like I am being outside of my body. My back is tensing, and my leg is shaking, and I am not in room with MRI machine anymore—I am in basement where water is dripping and my feet is dangling and my arm is hanging high over my head.

  Light is coming into room, spilling like water. And I am hearing door opening. But it is old door because it is creaking and it is squeaking and light is suddenly everywhere and I am having to be closing my eyes against it. I am waiting to be hearing hard footstep but instead it is soft like swish swish and I am knowing this is the sound of sand. There is being sand in this room where I am hanging. And I am hearing sizzling too and knowing that something is burning even if I am not smelling it, and I am knowing that I am not smelling thing because my nose is being broken. Many thing in me is broken but I am not feeling pain. And I am remembering now that the person who is walking into this room is wanting me to be feeling pain.

  That is why when he is walking in he is spitting on me and telling me I am not human and that I am rubbish to be thrown into ocean. I am wondering why he is keeping me here and as I am wondering this he is holding shockstick and he is hitting me in my stomach and chest and side with it and he is hitting me so hard on my back that he is breaking his stick.

  I am thinking that I am supposed to be feeling thing. Big man that is with the one who is hitting me is telling him is not working. And I am knowing now that I am being tortured and then I am remembering that I am what they are calling enemy combatant.

  Big man is telling boy that nothing is working because I am being made to not be feeling pain. He is saying that I am special soldier, I am synth, and I am not having pain receptor in my brain and it is this that is making me not to be feeling thing even though many thing inside me is broken. Boy is telling big man okay and big man is leaving, and I am thinking that boy is going to be leaving with big man but boy is staying and I am raising my head to be seeing his face and when he is looking at me he is smiling so his teeth are shining yellow like corn they are selling by the street, and I am seeing the way hair is over his face and the way the skin on his knuckles is broken, and I am seeing the vest he is wearing and the patches and I am knowing that he is soldier too and that he is with what I am knowing is a militia and they are small small army but they are killing just like soldier. And boy is looking at me like I am something to be eating, and then he is reaching behind him and pulling cord from his neck and he is walking close to me and he is putting cord in my neck and suddenly I am feeling everything. I am feeling the breaking in my ribs and in my back and in my crotch and in my arms and in my head, and he is smiling at me and saying now I will be feeling these thing and he is raising his stick and I am back in my hospital room with the MRI machine and I am staring out the window and my body is shaking but I am feeling like I am not outside of it anymore. I am feeling like sense is returning to me.

  Woman who is standing over boy who is sleeping-not-sleeping is seeing me and staring at me and not moving. Then she is moving away from boy and walking to me.

  Even though I am feeling like I am being back inside my own body, I am wanting to smash the glass and I am wanting to tear through the floor and I am wanting to knock over every bed between me and that boy that she is standing over before she is walking to me and I am wanting to take that boy and raise him in the air and smash him into the ground until his head is breaking like coconut. And then I am wanting to be taking machete to every part of his body and making him to be screaming and shouting and crying, because even though I am knowing that I am in this hospital room, my body is still feeling all of the thing he is doing to it.

  But woman is walking to me and tears still build like wall in her eyes and then, when she is coming to window, she is holding her hand together in front of her and her bottom lip is trembling and she is saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” in soft soft voice.

  She is not moving her mouth and that is when I am realizing that she is speaking to me in my brain. She is having braincase too.

  Why are you thanking me?

  Then she is sending me image and recording of the boy and he is being called Peter and he is sometime smiling and twirling spaghetti around his fork and sometime he is angry and shouting at woman who is being called Amy and sometime he is in hoverchair watching other children play on top of water pond. Then she is sending me feeling of love for him and how she is taking him in and accepting him and teaching him how to live and what is being peace, and then I am stopping her.

  Do not be sending me these things.

  Why not?

  I don’t care about him. You are telling me he is being good person and so he is deserving good thing to be happening to him.

  She is pausing because of shock. What is wrong with that?

  Peter is not good person. I am taking several moments to calm myself. He is fighter during the war and he is finding me one day and he is putting me in room and he is hurting me very badly. He is hurting me all over, even when he is not having to be hurting me. He is hurting me and enjoying it. I am not letting her see or feel the rememberings because I am not wanting to be giving her that access to me. I am not wanting her to be knowing me in this way, but I am telling her so that she is knowing that the boy she is loving is bad person and he is deserving to die.

  When I am finished giving life back to the children I am finding Peter and I am killing him for what he is doing to me.

  For a long time, she is not saying anything, then she is blinking at me like she is not understanding what I am saying. I am thinking I should be repeating it again, but then she is getting look in her eyes like she is asking me, Please don’t, but without saying the words. But the look in her face is also saying other thing at the same time. It is saying, No, you are lying, and it is saying, No, it cannot be like this, and it is saying, My son deserves to live, but it is also
saying, Is he my son? and all of this is happening in Amy’s face at the same time.

  I know her heart is paining her but I am not caring.

  He is my son, she is saying to me with tears falling from her eye.

  That is not changing what he is doing to me.

  She is looking at me for long time, and I am thinking she is looking for something from me. Maybe she is looking for me to be changing my voice or how I am standing, for my body to not be tensing like this. Maybe she is looking for me to be saying, I forgive him, and also be saying, I forgive you for loving him.

  But I am not saying any of these thing. I am never saying any of these thing.

  And she is seeing this and she is turning and she is walking away.

  CHAPTER

  53

  Grace is at Ify’s side as nurse’s assistants transport the first child into a separate operating room. She has all her note-taking materials out in front of her, stylus forever poised over her tablet screen, but Ify can see that the girl is too riveted by what she’s witnessing to document it.

  It had come to Ify in a dream. Céline used to joke, while they were in school, that this was Ify’s superpower. She could conjure the right answer out of thin air, and all she needed was enough sleep.

  The epiphany: words whispering a melody, indistinct and blurring together, while a circle formed out of thin air, inky and writhing. Ify remembers the circle, then another. All the while, words surround her and come together to make images of people and places and reveal snapshots of human beings caught in the throes of their living. And the circle means something, but in the dream, Ify couldn’t tell what. She remembers she had been leaning forward when caught up in the vision, but in the dream, she begins to lean back and passively accept the circle and the images and words swimming around her, then another circle appears on top of it, so that their edges are just barely touching, then another and another until six circles sit in formation before her, and they remain like this, like rings of black fire, until more circles join them, forming a honeycomb pattern. It was as she was leaning back, letting the sight fill her vision, that she saw the greater image. More and more rings of black fire joined the assemblage, and when it looked like they were going to turn into an entire wall of black, Ify saw it. Or, rather, felt it.

  It was a series of moments, a cascade. Someone taking her face in their hands and lowering it and blowing softly on her forehead, and Ify realizes that she is hearing words or more than words. She is experiencing synth speech. Because she feels hands gripping her face, but they are not just Uzo’s hands, bringing to life that moment on top of the site of that abandoned detention center in Kaduna State, and not Onyii’s either, during a moment when Ify felt the humid air of their camp was suffocating her. It is both pairs of hands and neither. It is past and deeper past, reaching into her present.

  Ify feels the warmth of a fire on her arm, and when she looks at it, she sees her arm turn to Onyii’s metal one absorbing the blow from a shockstick, and at the same time, she’s seeing her own arm as a child as a mutated mosquito drifts off with too much of her blood. So many moments, braided together so that it feels as though she’s experiencing everything for the first time but always has, in the back of her mind, a memory of the same.

  Then she looks back up at the multiplying rings of fire, and that’s when she realizes she’s not looking at a wall. She’s looking at a floor. Floor tiles.

  DNA tiles. The sentences are units of DNA. The building blocks of being. Uzo’s words-thoughts-feelings are what made her. Ify’s words-thoughts-feelings make her. Onyii’s made her. This is why Uzo always speaks in the present tense. Everything she experienced is still happening to her, ossified into the present tense in her memories. Happened becomes happens and remains is happening.

  In the dream, Ify grows suddenly like a giant, and the three-dimensional column of memory-units, interlocking rings of black fire, sits in the cup of her two hands, and for some reason, Ify thinks of a gosling, small and furry and poking its head out from the fold of skin by her thumb to gaze into her face, the very first thing it sees after being born. A feeling of wonder and love and gratitude thrills through her as she looks at this structure growing in her hands. This is Uzo’s memory of the gosling. The gosling was a thing that happened to her, Ify realizes, a burst of understanding twinned with an explosion of love in her heart.

  This is it. This is the coding. This is what is living inside Uzo’s braincase.

  When Ify woke up, she fumbled over to her workstation and had all her monitors running almost instantly, sketching the shapes that still burned vivid in her head and logging those sketches into an online editor where she watched it all come to life, the black rings of fire touching, then interlocking, growing more and more complex until they began to fold on each other like bits of origami. Then, from that, Ify had derived the algorithm to replicate self-assembly, and suddenly she was staring at the mechanism for mnemonic repair.

  The cure for memory erasure.

  And now that coding exists in a liquid filled with nanobots that nursing assistants begin to inject into the arms of the children they all stand around.

  Ify has no idea how long the mechanism will take before activating—whether it will begin its work immediately or lie dormant in the bloodstream for months or maybe even years, by which point too much precious material will have been eaten away. All Ify can do after the injections is tell the nursing assistants to stay with their patients and monitor for any change in activity.

  She’s on her way out with Grace when she hears the dull roar of cheering from far away. “What is that?”

  But Grace, now paying attention to the world around her, taps in a sequence on her tablet and gasps. “Doctor.”

  Ify turns, annoyed even now at Grace’s insistence on calling her that, but stops as soon as she sees the image on which Grace’s eyes fixate.

  Grace gulps, then reads some of the text in a document next to what appears to be a government press conference. “‘The Migration Board finds no reason to question what is stated about the health of the children affected by this current crisis. It is therefore considered that, for their recovery, they need to be in a safe and stable environment. This is necessary for full recuperation.’” Grace looks up from her tablet. “What does this mean?”

  Ify walks out to the floor where, already, families gather around the sickbeds, excitedly speaking to children who may or may not be able to hear them. Some are weeping into their child’s blankets, others are taking a patient’s hand and, not realizing they’re doing it, shaking it as they dance in place. “The deportation orders have been canceled,” Ify says. The full import of the words that just came out of her mouth sinks in. “The deportation orders have been canceled.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  It amazes Ify how much solving a medical mystery can calm her before the men of the Medical Committee. Where before they had seemed like sphinxlike demigods scrutinizing her from on high, ready to hurl judgments and proclamations like bolts of lightning, now they just look like what they are: old men who’ve modified their bodies, their faces, their hair in order to stroke their vanity while resting comfortably in positions—head of genetics, director of this department, chief of that department—they had inherited more than earned. She looks up at the row of men seated before her and sees nothing but a row of men, none of them extraordinary, none of them more deserving than her of the right to be put in charge of the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people. None of them have done what she has just done. Knowing this, understanding this, she’s able to stand straighter, breathe more easily, relax her posture, and pace her words. She’s able to hear the moods in their tone and adjust hers accordingly.

  The academic from earlier with his false French accent leans forward on his elbows. “So we’ll never truly know whether the solution to your problem was a medical one or a politi
cal one, will we?”

  Ify wants to respond to his calling it your problem but instead says, “The treatment of illnesses must be holistic in my profession, sir. Would you really suggest curing their medical illness, then sending them back to a country of origin whose turmoil would have them coming right back to us, to do it all over again? Nun sind sie halt da.” Now they are here. The German had come out of her before she could stop it, but the look on the academic’s face satisfies her. It was too easy for Ify to see through the man’s persona and uncover a genealogy full of eugenicists and discredited race scientists from what was once Central Europe. Guilt spasms through the man’s face before he retreats into his seat.

  Ify faces the rest of the group. “The recall of deportation orders, we’ve now determined, was the activating ingredient in the cure we devised for the patients.”

  Director Towne, the only man on this committee whose approval she has ever sought, raises an eyebrow at her.

  “Experiences coded in the DNA, Director Towne. They are arranged differently in a particular variant of cyberized brain than in those of natural-born humans or even those cyberized later in life. Their method of bonding mimics altogether different structures. When the base pattern was made clear, it became very easy to extrapolate a pattern of self-replication that would combat the virus that had infected not only those children who came to us with cyberized brains but those with no cyberization as well. Biomechanics is still beholden to biology.”