The Rosewater Insurrection

by Tade Thompson

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I wish you’d be more informal with me. Not too informal, but…”

  Aminat stays silent, feels it is the best option.

  “How’s Kaaro?” asks Femi.

  “He’s private,” says Aminat. The hair on the back of her neck rises.

  “I’m asking professionally,” says Femi.

  “Professionally, he’s private. We don’t speak about work; he has not betrayed any official secrets.”

  Femi laughs. “Scripted response.”

  “Ma’am, what’s this about?”

  “How is your work going, Aminat?”

  “I send weekly progress reports—”

  “Yes, yes, boring, coated in jargon that could be interpreted either way, skilful equivocation that would satisfy a bureaucrat. I am not a bureaucrat, Aminat.”

  “I don’t know how to—”

  “Stop. Don’t waste my time. Give me your honest, blunt opinion of your work. No bullshit.”

  Aminat exhales. “I find people with low xenoform counts and try to see if it can be kept low. I find people with high xenoform counts and I experiment with different chemical compounds delivered in different ways, then I check xenoform counts again, trying to achieve decoupling. My team is good, and I have good resources, but I do not believe decoupling is possible. The work is interesting and I’d like to continue, but I think the xenoforms are embedded fundamentally. They are a part of what it means to be human now. It’s like the best parasite or symbiote. Keep the host alive as long as it’s attached.”

  “Six months ago the physics team came to me with this idea. Complicated higher math that I don’t understand, but they feel they can disrupt the Higgs field around the xenoforms and remove them at a sub-atomic level. That work culminated in this morning’s liquefaction.”

  The wind changes and a sour smell from the Yemaja River displaces the savoury aroma. Femi wrinkles her perfect nose. Aminat suspects surgical enhancement.

  “How would you like to go to space?” asks Femi.

  “What?”

  “Space. The so-called final frontier.”

  “You mean like the Mars colony?”

  “No, just to the space station. Our space station. To the Nautilus.”

  Femi is trying to be casual, but Aminat can see her body language has changed.

  “You knew the experiment would fail this morning, that the man would die. This is the real reason I’m here.”

  “I got a second and third opinion from Beijing and Cambridge months ago. I knew their theory was faulty, but I didn’t know it would prove fatal for the subject,” says Femi. “And yes, this is why you’re here. Space. Geostationary orbit. Do you want to go?”

  “Why? Space is a graveyard. Besides, isn’t the Nautilus decommissioned?”

  “It makes more sense to answer your second question first. The Nautilus was not so much decommissioned as abandoned. It was barely a space station in the first place. An international African conglomerate financed it, but the money ran out and they just let the crew die. A mission to retrieve them would have cost too much. It was cheaper to cut communications, pay hush money to the families and announce a cover story of organised decommissioning complete with CGI showing some stages and labelling the rest Classified.

  “As to the why, we need you to go up there and take tissue samples. If conditions in space can keep humans free of xenoforms that would be an interesting development.”

  “How does that make sense? The xenoforms came from space in the first place.”

  “This comes from on high, Aminat. Ours not to reason why, et cetera.”

  “Okay, who’s paying for it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said the cost of rescuing those poor bastards in the Nautilus was too high. How can they justify the cost of sending me there?”

  “It’s not the same ‘they’ and not the same cost. What I want to know, Aminat, is if you have the ovaries for this. It’s a short mission.”

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Sure.” Femi drank more water. “But don’t take too long. We’re talking about the extinction of the human race here. Fairly important, I’d say.”

  This is 98.5 digital and on your dial. That was “Cartwheel,” the latest single from Dio9. Breaking news for all you alien spotters, a roll-up was spotted breaching not once, but twice, folks, near Kehinde. Rosewater Environmental continues to investigate. Sunny day, no showers, no fog. Just a fantastic weekend for fantastic people.

  With one hand on the wheel, Aminat undoes her top button. It’s fiddly, so she plugs into the grid and engages auto-drive. It has been glitchy for the last week or so, but she feels it should be able to handle a few minutes without taking a wrong turn. She directs all the fans towards herself and blows down her blouse. Hot. The brightness pleases her, though. There is something special about the sunshine on a Saturday morning, and the traffic isn’t too bad. The Opening—and its influx of pilgrims—is six months away, so the road users are bound to be hardcore Rosewater citizens. Her playlist cuts the radio and puts out Bob Marley, “Sun is Shining,” and Aminat sings along, trying to purge the vision of the human shit stain in the lab. She is in love with the day.

  “Manual,” she says, and takes control of the wheel.

  Space. It had to come to this. Aminat is not particularly afraid to go, but this is a government that does not subscribe to leaving no man or woman behind. What if she is left up there to die like the others? Would Femi tell her if that was a risk? Femi’s S45 status is a mystery these days. Kaaro said she had quit or was fired or something, but that may have been a cover story, because she works exclusively on the alien problem and has access to vast resources. Aminat has reported directly to her since last year.

  Space, though. Aminat has always wanted to go, but secretly. She does not believe she has ever told anyone or written it in a diary or anything. Each time some gazillionaire blasts off in a rocket she feels a twinge of envy. Now, it seems, the Naija government wants to send her. Why do they not send a robot?

  “Call Kaaro,” she says.

  “Unavailable,” says the car.

  “Call home landline.”

  What the hell is he doing with the phone off?

  “No response. Would you like me to leave a message or try again?”

  “Negative. Voice message.”

  A single beep.

  “Kaaro, I’m finished, on the way home. I’ve had breakfast. Call me if you can.”

  Most likely Kaaro went off grid because he knew she was going to be at S45 and see Femi. Kaaro used to work for S45 as the last of their quantum extrapolators, xenoform-infested mind-readers. It did not end well, and now Kaaro will not even talk about regular, everyday things to do with the aliens, information available to the entire public. Aminat loves him, but thinks he can be a fucking baby sometimes. He is up to something, spending his retirement studying or plotting, in contact with people he won’t tell Aminat about.

  “It’s not in conflict with you or what you do,” Kaaro would say.

  Aminat is not always sure this is true.

  Outside and to her left, she sees the dome above all other structures. Blue-black now, and slightly reflective. It used to be a simple smooth bubble rising from the ground, but recently it has developed extrusions, spikes with sharp and blunt tips. Nobody knows why, but some of the scientists hypothesise that it has to do with widened reach for information transfer. The general public does not care about this as long as there’s uninterrupted electricity, and every year it opens to heal people. The alien creatures stay in, the humans stay out, all are happy.

  Except that isn’t true. The entire atmosphere is full of xenoforms, has been for centuries. The first deposit arrived in an asteroid and, designed to adapt, multiplied and spread. Air, land, sea, an elegant invasion that did not involve UFOs or battleships, just a gradual replacement of human cells with xenoforms. Then there was Wormwood, what was thought to be an asteroid, but
in fact was an outrider, a massive organism, as large as a village, sentient, subterranean, capable of moving around in the Earth’s crust. Wormwood settled in Nigeria, nesting under the protective biodome which seals off the other organisms that came living inside Wormwood and some humans that chose early on to live with the alien.

  It has not been seamless. Alien animals have contaminated the general ecosystem, and while some are harmless others are predators. Xenobiology is a university specialism now.

  The city of Rosewater grew around the dome from necessity, because of the healing powers. Pilgrims come from far and wide. The road Aminat drives on was based on a footpath, like almost every other road. The only part of the city that makes sense is the orbital rail system—one clockwise, one anticlockwise—that circumnavigates the dome.

  Many of the other nations appear to have withdrawn into themselves, or are trying to weaponise the xenoforms. The only thing standing between the aliens and humans is Aminat’s team. If she fails, humanity becomes extinct.

  She flashes back to the liquefied man in Ubar, shivers from evaporated sweat, or fear, and changes course. She goes to her lab.

  Chapter Three

  Anthony

  He feels the shift immediately. It is subtle, a few cells with depleted neurotransmitters and unstable resting membrane potential, a slight vibration, and a change from Brownian motion to purposeful. He knows something is coming, but no specifics.

  He looks up, and sees the filtering of sunlight through the dome. The light has a blue tinge today. In his mind he queries the xenoforms for conditions outside the dome, in Rosewater and beyond. Nothing unusual. The humans are walking and driving back and forth. Buying food, selling food, fighting, fucking, living, dying. No military build-up, no imminent attack. The religious factions seem calm. The weather is stable, no elevated seismic activity.

  Anthony, this Anthony at any rate, lives in a cone-shaped dwelling within the dome, the apex sliced off as a skylight. He is at the end of a love affair with a human female, although she does not know it yet. She is a negotiator, delicate of both form and manner. She manages conflict as if the interplay between emotions and logic were materials with which to make art. She is highly regarded among the human population within the dome. Anthony finds her voice soothing and his corporal response to her is powerful. They have been together for eighteen months, yet now Anthony knows it is over. The personality of Anthony must at least partially dwell in the DNA template. No matter how many times the body is reconstructed Anthony finds the same character traits, the same tics, makes the same mistakes in relationships.

  The first Anthony lies deep in Wormwood’s bosom, the codebreaker and grand translator between the planet and the alien. Barely alive. Every few months an impulse travels across a few hundred synapses, scattershot, meaningless. Anthony was two decades old, give or take, at the time he was taken in London. Wormwood is over a thousand, but seems childlike in thought.

  I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, as the poet said.

  His lover shifts on the bed beside him. He hears a person singing a mournful song about sailors going to sea in a confident contralto, trained for sure. He rises and walks to the door, looks out. His lodgings are simple, and he does not need furniture, although he keeps some because the humans he lives with do. He does not need sleep, and he draws sustenance from Wormwood, but he grows Anthonys who both sleep and eat because to not do so makes him too alien and unsettles the people with whom he shares the dome.

  He queries Wormwood, that giant blob of organic tissue nestling under the Earth, but it is silent. A man walks by and waves at Anthony.

  Anthony feels a twinge of hunger and he nudges the xenoforms to photosynthesise.

  He is contemplating leaving the dome to see the outside for himself when it hits him. He screams and falls to the ground. He knows what has happened, but that does not make it less painful. He can hear and feel his lover’s panic, but for a time he cannot move the Anthony’s body. He compensates, releasing endorphins to numb the pain and tries to settle into a trance, boosting this with anandamide. He adjusts melanocytes to leave a reassuring tattoo message for his lover, then he slips into the xenosphere, the psychospace created by the linked xenoforms.

  He has received a massive influx of data, information that has travelled light years to reach him.

  Data from the homeworld.

  The information arrives by quantum entanglement. The xenoforms at the edge of space are twinned with sender-receivers on a moon across the galaxy. Anthony knows the information as a memory, as if he has always known.

  The entire surface of this moon and whatever sub-lunar spaces can be found are covered in data storage servers.

  The ringed planet that dominates the sky is called Home by indigenes. To Anthony this makes much more sense than Earth. Who names something that is two-thirds water after miserable clumps of land? Home looks beautiful from this distance as it reflects sunlight. Blue-green oceans broken apart by landmasses, cloud and storm formations, mottled hues all add to its beauty.

  Then Anthony remembers the orbital debris that forms its own ring system around the planet, dust lanes and metal alloy machinery in so many different planes that space travel from the surface is no longer possible. The rings are interrupted by the corpses of space stations. The oceans and continents are contaminated with the effluent of uncontrolled industry, the soil yields no crops, the rain is toxic. There are no living macro-organisms left, but the atmosphere teems with extremophiles, bacteria and fungi that thrive on long-chain hydrocarbons and radiation, that treat fissionable material as culture media, that thrive in low oxygen environments. From these simple organisms given billions of years, a new multicellular elite will evolve and perhaps even intelligent life will blossom.

  Home is uninhabitable, and Anthony is surprised to feel the emotional wrenching of that fact. It has been uninhabitable for many of Earth’s centuries. The dominant sentient lifeform of Home has long since moved to space, first living in multiple space stations. Colonising other planets in the solar system fails, as does any flavour of terraforming. They send out missions beyond the outer rims, looking for Home-like planets, but none ever return.

  The Homians must rethink the definition of survival. Their natural philosophers believe and preach that escaping their biological shackles represents the only solution, and their scientists work on the problem for years. It is not survival that the scientists redefine, but death. Severing the tethers that bind consciousness to the body usually results in exanimation. But what if it does not?

  Then comes the discovery of what Anthony’s human mind calls xenoforms. These are synthetic polyformic microorganisms initially bioengineered when a Homian scientist has the idea of terraforming Home itself by cleaning up the pollution. Xenoforms are designed to render toxic materials harmless. This does not work, but the xenoforms are found to be infinitely versatile, with the ability to mimic any living cell and to be twinned in such a way that information from one is reflected in another by Spooky Action at a Distance.

  Soon the idea to combine the qualities of xenoforms with that of an organism native to Home, the footholders, blossoms. By this time footholders have already been domesticated by Homians. They are organic blobs that can range from a diameter of five hundred feet to the size of a city. They are sentient, but in a limited fashion and require symbiotic psychic bonds with a host being of full sentience. Anthony realises and remembers that Wormwood is a footholder and he, Anthony, is its host.

  Footholders impregnated with xenoforms are launched into the cosmos as a low-risk search for a suitable planet.

  The remaining Homians make imprints of themselves, the memories and consciousness on bio-mechanical storage units. The massive server farm is located on Home’s second moon. The philosophers and the scientists assure them that they will live for ever and can be reintegrated with a new body when the time comes. Theoretically. Homians allow their biological bodies to die and enter an eter
nal sleep on the lunar complex.

  Solar-powered arthropod constructs maintain the servers. The lepidopteran robots maintain data integrity of each of the billions of servers, floating around, bobbing from one server to the other as if pollinating. Who knows what the slumbering Homians dream of?

  There are larger constructs on the moonbase, small adaptable engines with multiple arms that monitor the information sent back from the travelling xenoforms. Earth is the only planet that seems habitable and has accommodated footholders. The xenoforms send information that triggers a silent alarm in a mule-like construct which immediately extends four legs and runs at thirty-six miles per hour to a specific server, dodging asteroid craters, moon rocks and the debris of downed satellites. It carries this server back to base where a smaller, more delicate and polydactylous insect begins a subtle process of connecting the server to the main processing unit.

  Other machines process a small airlock and fill the room from underground gas tanks. The gas is not air and will not support life, but its molecules will vibrate to produce sound.

  It takes six days for the revived scientist to gain interface with the processing unit, and to understand her own environment. She activates speakers which produce words. They are electronic and without cadence, but they are clear.

  “Accept my greetings. I do not know your name, or if you understand my language. There are over a thousand Homian languages and dialects. I will cycle through all of them. I am designated Chief Revival Scientist. My name is Lua and this is uniplex communication so I will not be able to sense any response from you. The fact of my revival means there has been a fault.”

  Hearing the speech is a strange experience, akin to singing along with an old love song. Anthony knows the words and the anticipation of each creates the sonic version of an after-image. He also knows that whatever language the scientist uses is converted into an Earth language and idiom by the human brain.

  “This is what should have happened,” says Lua. “The xenoforms were to send back information about how much of each Earth person has been converted. They did, and earlier in the last solar cycle, the maintenance machines received notification of the first full conversion. This activated a specific protocol designed to test the transmigration of our people. A specific Homian was revived and the consciousness transmitted into this person on Earth.”