The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki

  You tell Rob about that. He never really replies, just listens and asks simple questions. He’s past the constant “why?” stage. That was last month, and it was hell. You’ve been chattering to him nonstop, now.

  The pediabotic experts told you to keep doing that, so you tell yourself you’re doing it to be the best caretaker you can.

  You fall to your knees on the sidewalk halfway back to the apartment.

  “Dad!” Rob is scared. He triggers an automated call for medical help, his body strobes emergency blue as he shouts at the people around you to come help. But seeing a nervous robot scares them, and they stay away from you both, not sure what’s happening. “Dad!”

  It’s your heart. You can tell from the pain in your chest.

  You’re not out of breath. You’re out of oxygen.

  * * *

  “He hasn’t left your side,” the nurse says when you wake up after surgery.

  Rob squeezes your hand.

  It hurts to sit up, to cough. They’ve split you in half and pulled out your heart, fixed it as best they could, and put it back in.

  “Dad, I was so scared.”

  And you hug him, because that’s what he seems to need. A robot can’t cry, but it can be worried. Scared to lose the one person it’s known since it was born.

  A robot can’t cry, but it can be worried.

  “It’s OK. Everything is OK.”

  Rob helps you home, and pitches in with some of the chores. Rob’s like an older kid now, able to do basic things around the house in a pinch.

  As you recover, the two of you start working on some home renovation. Holes in the wall from the first few days of Rob showing up. A new coffee table becomes a father-son project.

  Your own father took weeks to get jogging again after his heart transplant. You just need a few days.

  Progress.

  “What was your father like?” Rob asks as you scrape wood with a lathe.

  “Dangerous,” you say. “He was a dangerous man. Particularly with a few drinks in him.”

  You tell him about the door your father threw at you and how it clipped your forehead. It bled for hours. You tell him about the time the cop showed up to your door and your mom stood in front of you and smiled and flirted until he was satisfied nothing was wrong and walked off.

  The longest moment of your life, watching the man in that uniform walk away into the night.

  At least, until the moment that forklift pinned you to the concrete floor.

  Every breath an infinity, every pulse a universe of pain as you faded slowly away.

  * * *

  “I tell him too much,” you say to the Advent rep at the weekly checkup call.

  “There’s no such thing.” He’s gone over the logs, asked about Rob’s behavior, the usual questions about how well Rob is integrating into life at the apartment. You’ve asked questions about whether assuming Rob was male made any sense because he’s a robot. Robot self-identity is complex, they say, but they’re talking to Rob, and he’s OK with the label for now. There’s a documentary on robot identity and human interactions you can watch if you need. “The conversation is good for their development.”

  “I’ve talked to Rob about things I haven’t told anyone else.”

  The rep nods. “We find this common with men in particular. Your records say you’ve been through trauma, and you were raised without cognitive behavioral therapy to help you. I’ll bet you were told as a boy not to cry, to hold those emotions in, right?”

  He looks up at you.

  The direct eye contact makes you swallow. “Uh, sure.”

  “Real men don’t cry. Real men don’t follow safety guidelines. They show strength. Willpower gets you through everything, right, no matter how hard? The fight’s the thing.” The rep is taking notes. “And that does work, until it doesn’t. You can’t fight your way out of trauma, or out of a worldwide economic depression. And then your whole mental model fails to match the world around you.”

  You remember how much worse it got when your father lost his job. His identity. He couldn’t will a new job into existence when there were none.

  You wonder what he’d call his son, living on disability, raising a robot like a bizarre Mary Poppins.

  “There’s a reason getting a dog, or some other living thing, can by extremely therapeutic,” he continues.

  “You’re comparing having a child to getting a dog?” You’re a little shocked, maybe outraged.

  “Not at all, I have a kid, it’s not the same,” the rep says in a reassuring tone. “But the act of raising something isn’t just about what you raise and take care of. It’s about how you change yourself around the space they need within you, as well. You’ll have emotions and vulnerability during that process. We talked about this during intake.”

  Yes, you remember that detail from the parenting class you had to take with Advent. The fostering program comes with free therapy, but you turned it down. You’re tough. You’re the dude who got trapped under a tipped-over forklift and gritted your teeth and got through it.

  Everyone’s complimented you on how strong you were to survive that, how tough you were to get through everything that came afterward.

  How many times were you thanked for your service after doing a full tour?

  You knew that you could do six months of parenting. You were tough enough. Even despite the day of misgivings right before Rob arrived.

  But now you’re wondering if you’re tough enough to handle what comes after Rob leaves.

  * * *

  Rob throws a pamphlet at you. It rustles through the air, then softly lands against your chest, just as he planned.

  “What is that crap?”

  “It’s the medical clinic I’ll be going to,” you say. “I’ve been talking about this forever.”

  They could take your DNA and grow a new heart for you in a nutrient bath. They can regrow whole legs and arms.

  “Have you ever thought about how I feel?” Rob shouts. “Do you even think about anyone else besides yourself?”

  You’re confused as hell. “What does this have to do with you?”

  “You’re a whole person, Dad!” Rob hits the countertop. Hard enough to make a point, make you jump, but not hard enough to break anything.

  “What?”

  “You’re fine just the way you are.” Emotion crackles in Rob’s voice. It’s a warble that flashes you back to that first moment he staggered around the apartment, crying in that electronic voice of his. “Not wanting artificial limbs—how the hell do you think that makes all of me feel?”

  He holds up his arms in front of his face, and you look down at the one arm of yours that looks just like his.

  “Not wanting artificial limbs—how the hell do you think that makes all of me feel?”

  “Rob—”

  You’re stunned at the argument that explodes between you. He’s been holding things in. Things you do that anger him. No, that hurt him.

  Trying to decide if regrowing limbs is somehow an admission that you aren’t whole—that’s been your struggle. Not his.

  But clearly, Rob feels that this is his universe as well. You can no longer make choices just about yourself. They have to include him as well. He even hates his own name.

  “I panicked!” you say, as he tells you people laugh at “Rob the Robot.”

  “My whole life, you’ve talked about walking to that quarry, Dad. You can’t wait until you have just the right leg to go do that. It hurts when you use me as an excuse to avoid things.”

  * * *

  Rob helps you over the last few boulders to get to the quarry’s edge, and then you both sit and look out over the mossy rocks near the edge to the brownish, silty water.

  It’s one of your favorite walks, now.

  The human body is a thing of constant change. Your skin is made out of cells that were just food a few weeks ago. You’re a ghost of an idea that keeps getting passed on down through cell instructions.

&
nbsp; You’re not a mind in a jar. You’re an ecosystem, a community of cells and organisms with a theory of mind bolted onto them. And they’re all involved in a complicated dance that keeps the complexity going until that system of passing on instructions gets disrupted after too many copies and it all falters.

  You think: We’re often so scared of how we’ll be different if we take medicine for our minds, or go to therapy, or make a major life change. How can we be the same person if we change so much over time?

  The physical therapy hurt. It was a real pain in the ass after you’d taken so much time off. You threw up the first time you got back to the gym.

  But Rob was there every day, proud as could be.

  And you started taking walks together. It’s his favorite thing to do with you. Walk and talk about life, whatever comes to your two minds. Rob has odd taste in TV and has even taken up reading. Mostly nonfiction, but he has some interest in mystery novels.

  You have some plans to take a trip and hike a small part of the Appalachian Trail next year, when he gets some vacation after his first year of work.

  That’s something you’ve been terrified of. You’d never thought much about robot rights when you agreed to bring this person into the world. But there have been big advances in how the world treats robots, particularly since robot strikes out west forced people to realize that if you had to raise them to be complete minds, enslavement was horrific. Rob will have free will. He will make less than a human would—there’s still a metal ceiling to break through—but he’ll get vacations, pay, while he does jobs that would be tough for organic people. Deep-sea diving is what he chose.

  Most importantly, you’ll get to see him.

  Because you never just stop being a parent.

  “I want to give you something,” you say. You hand him over the watch your grandfather gave you when you left for college.

  “You know I can tell time internally, right, Dad? Do we need to get you another checkup?”

  “It’s—”

  “I know what it is.” Rob puts it on, metal against metal. “Thank you.”

  When it’s time to leave, he asks several times if you’re OK to walk back to the apartment alone.

  “I’m OK,” you reassure him.

  He slings a duffel bag with everything he owns over his shoulder and heads out.

  * * *

  Charlie’s at the door to the complex when you get back.

  “So you got your freedom back!” He waves a six-pack at you, then does a double take when you raise your arm to wave back. “What the hell?”

  “Oh.” You look at the arm. It’s all burnished metal, then scrimshawed with Rob’s art. You two spent days building the custom arm together, thanks to Rob taking high-end robotics maintenance classes during his charging cycles.

  The leg is even more customized. An object of expression and a personal statement by the both of you. And now that you’re out of physical therapy, the upgraded artificial limbs are kicked up and finely tuned, thanks to Rob tinkering with your neural interface.

  “It was set up for a standard off-the-line synapse reading,” he’d explained while tinkering, making you twitch every time he played with the settings. “Now that you’re getting better at timing and control, I can help you more.”

  A week ago, you went to a tattoo artist and got a sleeve of three-dimensional gears and diesel engine pistons on your other bicep to make the organic match the inorganic.

  People at the park stare at you. Sometimes mothers pull their kids back, in instinct.

  For a second you’re worried that Charlie’s going to do something similar, but he looks closely at it. “That’s fucking sweet, man! I love the engine details!”

  “They’re based on some of the equipment that Rob will be using. Come on in.”

  You put your organic arm around Charlie’s shoulder and pull him along. You’ve invited him over to ask him about his art, to see how things are going for him in his new career as a sculptor.

  There’s better beer in the fridge.

  * * *

  After Charlie leaves, you lie in bed and look at a picture of you and Rob standing by the quarry with big smiles.

  You put a hand to your chest. Under it is a new scar since a second heart surgery. A fresher scar. Under it is a cybernetic heart, a mechanical pump that whirs softly underneath. Faster, better, stronger.

  When you look at the picture of your son, who has just left a home that now feels empty without him in it, that heart surges with love.

  8

  “Ancestries” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  Originally Published in Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future

  (Third Man Books: May 26, 2020)

  In the beginning were the ancestors, gods of earth who breathed the air and walked in flesh. Their backs were straight and their temples tall. We carved the ancestors from the scented wood, before the fire and the poison water took them, too. We rubbed ebony-stained oil on their braided hair and placed them on the altars with the first harvest, the nuts and the fresh fruit. None would eat before the ancestors were fed, for it was through their blood and toil we emerged from the dark sea to be.

  But that was then, and this is now, and we are another tale.

  It begins as all stories must, with an ending. My story begins when my world ended, the day my sister shoved me into the ancestors’ altar. That morning, one sun before Oma Day, my bare heels slipped in bright gold and orange paste. Sorcadia blossoms lay flattened, their juicy red centers already drying on the ground. The air in my lungs disappeared. Struggling to breathe, I pressed my palm over the spoiled flowers, as if I could hide the damage. Before Yera could cover her smile, the younger children came.

  “Fele, Fele,” they cried and backed away, “the ancient ones will claim you!” Their voices were filled with derision but their eyes held something else, something close to fear.

  “Claim her?” Yera threw her head back, the fishtail braid snaking down the hollow of her back, a dark slick eel. “She is not worthy,” she said to the children, and turned her eyes on them. They scattered like chickens. Shrill laughter made the sorcadia plants dance. A dark witness, the fat purple vines and shoots twisted and undulated above me. I bowed my head. Even the plants took part in my shame.

  “And I don’t need you, shadow,” Yera said, turning to me, her face a brighter, crooked reflection of my own. “You are just a spare.” A spare.

  Only a few breaths older than me, Yera, my twin, has hated me since before birth.

  Our oma says even in the womb, my sister fought me, that our mother’s labors were so long because Yera held me fast, her tiny fingers clasped around my throat, as if to stop the breath I had yet to take. The origin of her disdain is a mystery, a blessing unrevealed. All I know is that when I was born, Yera gave me a kick before she was pushed out of our mother’s womb, a kick so strong it left an impression, a mark, like a bright shining star in the middle of my chest.

  This star, the symbol of my mother’s love and my sister’s hate, is another way my story ended.

  I am told that I refused to follow, that I lay inside my mother, after her waters spilled, after my sister abandoned me, gasping like a small fish, gasping for breath. That in her delirium my mother sang to me, calling, begging me to make the journey on, that she made promises to the old gods, to the ancestors who once walked our land, to those of the deep, promises that a mother should never make.

  “You were the bebe one, head so shiny, slick like a ripe green seed,” our oma would say.

  “Ripe,” Yera echoed, her voice sweet for Oma, sweet as the sorcadia tree’s fruit, but her mouth was crooked, slanting at me. Yera had as many faces as the ancestors that once walked our land, but none she hated more than mine.

  While I slept, Yera took the spines our oma collected from the popper fish and sharpened them, pushed the spines deep into the star in my chest. I’d wake to scream, but the paralysis would take hold, and I would lie in my pallet, seeing, kno
wing, feeling but unable to fight or defend.

  When we were lardah, and I had done something to displease her—rise awake, breathe, talk, stand—Yera would dig her nails into my right shoulder and hiss in my ear. “Shadow, spare. Thief of life. You are the reason we have no mother.” It was my sister’s favorite way to steal my joy.

  And then, when she saw my face cloud, as the sky before rain, she would take me into her arms and stroke me. “There, my sister, my second, my own broken one,” she would coo. “When I descend, you can have mother’s comb, and put it in your own hair. Remember me,” she would whisper in my ear, her breath soft and warm as any lover. “Remember me,” and then she would stick her tongue inside my ear and pinch me until I screamed.

  Our oma tried to protect me, but her loyalty was like the suwa wind, inconstant, mercurial. Oma only saw what she wanted. Older age and even older love made her forget the rest.

  “Come!” I could hear the drumbeat echo of her clapping hands. “Yera, Fele,” she sang, her tongue adding more syllables to our names, Yera, Fele, the words for one and two. The high pitch meant it was time to braid Oma’s hair. The multiversal loops meant she wanted the complex spiral pattern. Three hours of labor, if my hands did not cramp first, maybe less if Yera was feeling industrious.

  With our oma calling us back home, I wiped my palms on the inside of my thighs, and ignored the stares. My sister did not reach back to help me. A crowd had gathered, pointing but silent. No words were needed here. The lines in their faces said it all. I trudged behind Yera’s tall, straight back, my eyes focused on the fishtail’s tip.

  “They should have buried you with the afterbirth.”

  * * *