I like Oyin Da, but I can’t commit to staying. I am ashamed to think of Femi and her beauty and the remote possibility that I might have … something. I am young and fickle and do not know my own mind. At this age, sexier is better than anything at all.
‘I am bringing the Lijad here, to stay with Wormwood. It’s safe here and there is food, shelter, and an entire new ecosystem that I want to study.’
‘I can’t,’ I say.
Her mind closes like a shutter, with finality. I wish, at that moment, that I had said something else.
I am not the only one who stays out. The concept is too frightening for dozens of people. We stay all night watching the thin membrane rise and form a dome, then the gaps filling out. Anthony shakes my hand and passes something to me. It’s slimy and difficult to keep in my hand like a slippery version of putty.
‘For when your back is to the wall,’ he says. ‘Put it on your head. Only if you have no other choice.’
‘What is it?’
‘A decoy.’
With that he is gone.
In the morning light the dome grows, becomes less translucent. Flashes of electricity sometimes crackle towards the husks of military vehicles and set them on fire anew. None of the people around me are harmed. Those who have phones record the event. The air smells of freshly tilled earth, cordite, and ozone.
I walk back towards civilisation, hoping to catch a ride to Lagos or steal a car, but I am arrested by some army boys instead. The gift Anthony gave me now looks like a smear of mucus on my palm. While in detention I cannot wipe it off. I wonder if I am going to be left in detention for years before someone from S45 remembers to look for me. I try to ask to speak to Klaus, but they are not interested. After two days I am taken to Femi Alaagomeji.
My father visits me while I’m in detention. I am sitting on the bunk reading the book of “Ezekiel” because the King James Bible is the only book in the cell, when a rookie yells, ‘Get up.’
I am taken to a room and seated. There’s a second empty plastic chair, but that’s it. No windows, camera in one of the corner of the room, a faint smell of quicklime that tells me someone might have died in this room. I can get out of this prison if I want. I can see the route out, but I’m not quite ready yet, and to be fair I haven’t been treated ill. I think Femi’s here to visit but the door opens and my father walks in.
Ebenezer Goodhead. Chief Ebenezer Goodhead. Our real family name was Orire which means ‘good head’ in English if you transliterate. In actuality it means ‘good soul’ but nobody cares. He owns all those Goodhead stores you see in every town centre. Yes, he met two successive presidents and is courted by prospective candidates. Yes, he is richer than God. He looks slight, and he is not muscular or tall, but his voice is surprisingly deep. It resonates through any room and people listen to him. He has grown a beard. His Lodge ring is still in place and he wears an agbada which makes him seem larger than usual. I know he doesn’t like wearing them, but he must have wished to project power when coming here. We do not get along.
Still, I greet him in the traditional Yoruba way, by prostrating myself on the floor in front of him. I’ve never done this and he knows I am in some way mocking him by doing it now.
‘Father.’
‘Son.’
He sits, right opposite me.
‘What do you want?’ I ask. ‘Are you here to say you told me so?’
‘What use would that serve? You’re a thief. I knew you’d end up in jail.’
‘Point of correction, Father, I’ve not been charged with anything.’
‘You will.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Come home, son.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Is it not enough that I am inviting you back? Your mother —’
‘Delivered me to a slavering mob to be killed. Do not speak of her.’
‘But it turned out okay. You’re here now.’
‘Father, that mob murdered Fadeke. They burnt her alive and she had nothing to do with anything.’
Fuck this. I burn into his mind. I am new at this, but I know that it hurts even though I only probe for about three seconds. I know why he wants me home. He is afraid. I see his business interests and his hidden things, the mistress, the affairs. I see that he is afraid I will bring shame on him and he will not have enough money to —
‘Just get out of here,’ I say. ‘I will never use your name. Don’t worry about your precious life. I’m staying out of it.’
‘Kaaro —’
‘Fuck off!’
The first thing I do before basic training in Maiduguri is vandalise a Goodhead supermarket.
INTERLUDE: MISSION 7
American Colony, Lagos, 2066
This America mystery has been going on since I was a child.
Nobody has heard anything from North America for forty-five years. Around the world there are colonies where Americans are granted protected status, but nobody can get into or out of the States. This is because of what other nations have called Drawbridge.
Wormwood is not the first of its kind to arrive on Earth. It’s the third. The first was January 12, 1975 in Lagos, Nigeria. It was reported as a meteor by the CIA station chief at the time. A living, spreading biological organism lived underground for a hundred and six days before dying and decaying. The head of state at the time, Murtala Mohammed, struck a deal with the US asking for help with analysis. The organism was shipped off, but Mohammed was assassinated in 1976 and it is unknown whether the Americans got back to him before death.
In 1998, Hamburg, Germany, a fiery object smashed into a railway line, derailed a train, and sank to a depth of forty-nine meters before NATO allies extracted it and sent it to a research lab in Atlanta where it survived for eighteen months before dying.
In 2012 Wormwood devastated London. Given the size of this specimen, the failure of the British to either tame or terminate the visitor, the inability of their own scientists to come up with a credible counter-measure, America elected to pull the drawbridge up.
At the time there were 294 US embassies and consulates in the world. Within a week they were closed, consular staff recalled with no explanation. The American staff in the ISS were pulled.
All communications to or from the US ceased. Drone fighters turned back commercial flights. Satellite imagery showed a gigantic black patch, an electromagnetic anomaly with full absorption of all spectra. The Middle East ignited and burned with violence for years. The UK’s position on the world stage changed dramatically without the US military might to back their ploys.
No spycraft could reveal what the fuck was up with the Americans. Theories were like assholes: plentiful.
The one I presently favour is that having studied the two previous Wormwood siblings, the Americans know no defence will work and either took off to Lord knows where or pulled a turtle-withdrawn into an impenetrable shell for protection.
Which brings us to these guys. They say they just left America last week.
They’ve been debriefed by regular agents. Femi wants me to see what I can find in their heads. It’s not an interrogation per se. For one thing, they know I’m going to be poking around and they know what I am. They have agreed to this. The thing about Americans is that they want to go home. None of them want to live in the refugee camps that we call American Colonies. If this will help, then they’ll do it.
They both stand up to greet me when I walk into the lounge. They both wear hippyish beards and have long hair. They look skinny and wind-blown. We speak in English.
‘Hello, Mr Kaaro,’ says the first.
‘It’s just Kaaro,’ I say.
‘I’m Chuck O’Reily and this is Ace Johnson.’
‘Ace? That’s a real name?’
‘We’re from —’
‘I don’t really need to know. I mean, I will know because of what I’m about to do. My understanding is that you consent?’
‘Yes,’ they say in unison.
‘All ri
ght then.’
‘Should we close our eyes, hold hands?’ asks Ace.
‘If you want to. Makes no difference to me. Look around the room, read a magazine if you want. I’m going to sit here. Do whatever you want, but don’t disturb me.’
‘Do you need quiet?’ asks Chuck.
‘Nope. You can have a party for all I care. Just don’t leave the room.’
I enter the xenosphere.
I see both of them, but it’s all wrong. Neither of them reads like human. Their self-images are amorphous, protean. I should see outlines that look like Ace and Chuck, but what I see resembles dark miasma. I probe around it, test the edges, see if this is some kind of trained mental camouflage to defend against people like me. It is not. In the xenosphere I can expand what I see to microscopic level. If this were training there would be regular, recurring patterns in the smoke. This is as random as they come.
I stretch a wing and bat the smoky tendrils. They warp around the gust, but reform quickly.
Shit. I know what I have to do, but I don’t like it. It’s risky, especially since I don’t know what I’m dealing with here, but fuck it.
I trot into the area occupied by both these phantasms and I inhale.
Immediately I know this is one of the more difficult excursions I’ve ever made into the psyche of others. My ego becomes unstable. I am both of them, Ace and Chuck, and I am Kaaro, from S45.
This is us on a rubber raft, barely staying afloat on choppy seas. I don’t know what ocean this is. Come back to that. We are lashed to the raft, and are afraid. The inflation isn’t great, and we have no paddles. Ace is asleep, but Chuck worries enough for both of us. It is morning and there is mist MIASMA clinging to the surface of the water. We do not know why we are attached to this. We do not know how we got here, and all we remember is the raft.
No. I am Kaaro and I need more than this, more than you can remember.
I go further back than their memory can take me.
I am here, and here is America. The new America.
I don’t know what state or city I’m in, but the streets are clean. No cracks in the sidewalk, no potholes anywhere, no litter. No cars either. There are blocks of flats everywhere I look arranged in that grid pattern that Americans favour. They stretch into the sky, each one of them. The sky, right. The sky is not our sky. No clouds, no sun, moon, or stars. An artificial darkness broken by strings which are an array of lights lining up from horizon to horizon, crossing each other, reticulate. I know, as does anybody, that when it is the day cycle the lights will brighten enough to read by, but the older folk know that the sun was much brighter. This, in comparison, is sickly. Most younger people don’t mind. I have seen this kind of thing before, albeit on a smaller scale.
At this time of night most everybody is asleep or at least in their flats. There are no longer any suburbs. The price of safety. Spheres patrol the streets, silvery, high sheen, silent flight. One passes close to me, but there is no sound.
The trees lining the boulevard I find myself on have no leaves underneath them. I investigate them, and find plastic bark, synthetic leaves, hallucinatory soil.
There is too much sameness here, too much repetition. The street on both sides goes off into oblivion. I try to enter one of the blocks. I cannot. I imagine the doors work by the same implant recognition security that we use in Nigeria. No, wait, this is where I live. The door should be opening. Am I Ace or Chuck? Ego integrity check.
I am afraid. Why? Something Ace and Chuck have done or are about to do. Ahh, breaking quarantine or segregation. This is City 151. They we are meant to stay within our cities. We went to the borders, to the sixteen portals. We are young, we know there is more to our world, to our universe. We want to see it.
We circumvent security. This plan is two years old. We have done dry runs, we have protective suits. We have the balls.
You also have the stupids. There’s nothing wrong with your lives, dummies.
We have not covered our tracks well enough. I am arrested outside my apartment. I am arrested in my room. We are interrogated by machines. Our rulers and overseers do not make contact in meatspace. In the end we tell them everything, because there is no other option. It is always a matter of when not if.
We are exiled. Exile is usually a euphemism for death. They throw you us we out of portal seven. It opens above the sea.
We are lucky. There has been a plane crash, debris all over the sea. Raft. No paddles. Wait.
Why do you not remember? What happened to your memories?
Maybe something the machines did, the androids who interrogated them? Maybe a side-effect of the portal?
I come back to myself.
We send the Americans to the Lagos colony. They don’t know anything and are not a danger.
I tell Femi what I think. America is in hiding, in a constructed place, with at least 151 cities all kept apart from each other. Ghettoes.
‘One other thing: I don’t think there are any xenoforms in these cities. They’ve found a way to keep themselves uninfected.’
I get no medal, and a hero’s welcome does not wait for me in Rosewater. Femi does not do that thing I wish she would do, and which she always does in my dreams.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Rosewater: 2066
My orders arrive and I am asked to read as much as I can from a politician, covertly. I immediately decide I’m not going to do it. It’s a Sunday so I play football on the field that is about a mile away from my flat. I haven’t done this in a long time and I do not recognise any of the kids, but as soon as I’m allowed to play they recognise my skills and we’re like lifelong friends. The game is brisk and it helps take my mind off the events of the last few days. As I expected, the police try to question me about Clement and the whole wahala that happened. I wave my S45 identification around and they let me go.
The goalie is feeling sick so I do a stint between the posts. I am terrible at this and I let three goals in before I’m swapped out. I don’t know how long we have been playing, but I am out of breath and I ask to be subbed. Someone is at the touchline, a woman. She seems to be waiting for me, staring at me. I walk closer and I can see who it is. She’s older and much thicker around the waist and arms, but she’s unmistakable. It’s Oyin Da. Her eyes are no different from the day we met.
‘I heard you visited us,’ she says.
‘Yes.’ I stop a foot short of her.
‘I was in Virginia.’
‘You can get into America?’
‘Virginia in 1760.’
‘What were you doing in —’
‘Research.’
‘I see. Meet anyone famous on your travels?’
‘I actually met Olaudah Equiano, but I didn’t get to talk him much before returning.’
‘Why are you here, Oyin Da?’
‘To see how you are. To ask you, again, to join us. When I learned you came into Utopicity I was curious.’
I shake my head. ‘Things are different, now. I’m not infatuated with you anymore. I know what the whole thing is about. What percentage of your cells has been replaced by xenoforms?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘That much?’
‘Yes, but by body weight I’m twenty-nine percent machine. That doesn’t make me part of the robot uprising that has been predicted but will never come to pass.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
‘We are all part machine, Kaaro. Your phone is a polymer under the skin of your hand. You have a locator chip in your head.’
‘What do you have?’
‘No apathy.’
‘What?’
‘I have micro-electrodes to regulate my mood. I have a microfiltration system to augment my fluid balance in case there is no water. I have a portable link to the Lijad in my left forearm, backup power supply in my right —’
‘Okay. Enough.’
‘The apathy part is important. The governments of the world gave us entertainment. Nobody cares that an
aggressive alien species is slowly taking over indigenous human cells. It does not matter. Humans don’t care about anything as long as their TVs and microwaves work. We’ve sold ourselves for pay-per-view.’
‘So you zap yourself with your magic electrode and you don’t have apathy. I get it.’
‘No, you don’t. They know, Kaaro. They have known for a long time. They are not resisting it. Did they welcome you when you told your masters about Wormwood?’
‘No, they sent me to perform some shitty political intrigue.’
‘I see.’ She does a half turn to her right, although her feet remain in position. ‘I have a daughter.’
‘I’m pleased for you.’
‘Sarcasm?’
‘No, I really am. What’s her name?’
‘Nike.’ I never told her about Onyemaihe. Strange synchronicity.
‘Lovely name. What is she like?’ I start to walk and she joins me.
‘Stubborn. Brilliant. Unrelenting.’ She smiles as she says it. I cannot bring myself to ask about the father, which makes me feel I might not be completely over her. But there is one thing that has been on my mind for a while which I think she can help with. ‘Come with me.’
‘Oyin Da —’
‘Or stay. I had to try, had to talk to you. I’ll figure something out.’
‘I’m not the world-saving kind, Oyin Da.’
‘No, you’re not.’
Rosewater Page 30
