The Rosewater Insurrection

by Tade Thompson

  Mark shakes his head as if trying to dislodge something. “It’s like the doctor said. This is a functional problem. I’ll make an appointment.”

  “Don’t bother,” says Alyssa. “I won’t go. The answer isn’t there.” She gets up. “I just wanted to be honest with you.”

  “What’s that?”

  Her wound must have opened because blood drips on the floor.

  “Nothing. I’ll take care of it.” She leaves, shuts the door gently. He does not believe her, but she has been honest. What he does with that information is up to him, and he has to decide whether to tell Pat, but that is not Alyssa’s responsibility.

  She opens a first-aid box.

  Alyssa dreams or fantasises, she is not sure which. Or is she remembering? She walks down a corridor with only occasional windows, rectangular although with rounded edges. Each window is black. Not painted over, but with complete darkness outside. There are arrows on the wall pointing in the direction she walks in. The number 235 denotes a destination. It is not “235” as she knows the Arabic numerals—this is a translation. Alyssa does not have the language to conceive of what she sees. She used to, but it’s gone. In this interpretation, she arrives at 235 and sits. There is one other person waiting. A small device asks her to confirm details. She does, but falters when there is a choice of five genders. The other person goes in. There is a vibration which Alyssa receives through the bolted-down furniture after which she is invited in by a different device. The room is mostly dark, but the procedure is automated, and machines don’t need light and they are saving energy—ha ha, this is funny. The time to save energy was before they fucked up Home. What happened to the other person? Alyssa doesn’t see her leave.

  This will be painless, she has been told. Try to keep your mind blank. The more you think, the longer the process will take. Ghosting. It’s a duplication. You will not be in pain, and you will live for ever as a god because information can never die.

  Lies.

  Information degrades, gets corrupt, misses its target, and it did hurt.

  I did die.

  Wait, what?

  Slave bots respond to the urbot attending to me. There is no Homian in the mix at all.

  Am I dead?

  The pain is from when the device grows into my nerve endings and extracts me from me. I feel it stripping my sensations and killing me from the skin inwards. I/Alyssa. I am sucked into a place—here are people around me, but I cannot see them. I am kept separate by a membrane, but whether it is biological or electronic is unknown to me. I have, Alyssa has, no real sense of place. There is a sense of Homians taking destiny into our own hands after fucking shit up.

  I cannot feel any part of my body any more. It is not weightlessness, it is nothingness. I am supposed to expect this. I have been prepared for it by education and every single news report since my birth and—Alyssa wakes, and is not alone. She is not surrounded by familiar people.

  “What the hell—?”

  “Mrs. Sutcliffe, please remain calm.”

  There are three of them. They are in uniform, nurses’ uniforms. Baby blue, with ID tags, all male.

  “Who are you?” asks Alyssa.

  “We are here to take you to a comfortable place,” says the one in front. A deep, gentle voice from a body poised, coiled for violence.

  “I am quite comfortable where I am,” says Alyssa. “Where is my husband? How did you get in here? Mark will—”

  “Mr. Sutcliffe called us here. He is very worried about you.”

  “We all are,” says another.

  “Thank you for your concern. Now, fuck off.”

  Alyssa is in the studio still. She is on the floor, and judging by the aches, she has been lying here for a long while.

  “Where is Mark?”

  “He is in the house with your daughter. He does not want her to see this.”

  “And what is ‘this’?”

  “Mrs. Sutcliffe, relax.”

  “I am relaxed. Are you?”

  “If you will just come with us to the ambulance—”

  “I don’t need an ambulance. Get out of my house. I’m not sick.”

  The first one nods and they come for Alyssa, all three moving at the same time, coordinated. They have predetermined who grabs what part of her body. In minutes they carry Alyssa into the ambulance, which is really a modified van with a cheap self-drive and some stale after-smell. The last she sees of her house is the face of Mark at the window.

  That and an unfamiliar weed growing under it.

  Excerpt from Kudi, a novel by Walter Tanmola

  The first multinational companies to roll into Camp Rosewater were Chinese. A handful of protesters including Emeka and Kudi pelted the lorry convoys with bottles of paint and tired slogans of resistance. It did not matter to the companies. They did not fear for the safety of their staff because their operations were entirely robot executed at this stage. They worked 24/7, tireless automatons, but at dusk, a few of the protesters took shots at the drones they used to keep track of progress. There were no police in Rosewater so there were no consequences. Legal consequences, at any rate. Private security and armed quadrupeds roamed everywhere and killed anyone caught too close to construction sites.

  Emeka set an automatic cement mixer on fire and kissed Kudi while the flames warmed his skin. When he broke the clinch he saw Christopher a yard away, glaring, but silent.

  “We’re going to fail,” said Kudi.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Look around you. The people don’t want this development stopped. They want indoor plumbing, taps that run, smooth roads, carbon scrubbers, shit like that. This is the weakest demonstration in the history of civil disobedience.”

  That night the lovemaking was fatalistic and all Emeka had in his mind was Christopher.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Anthony

  It is an age of short-shorts. Everywhere he looks, Anthony sees women and girls wearing the same strip of fabric, just in slightly different sizes or colours. More important is how they react to him. They seem disgusted. This means he is not adorned properly, or that he presents an olfactory challenge. He configures his apocrine sweat glands, but then realises it’s the clothes. He thinks of stripping, but doesn’t. In public, humans don’t like to show certain parts of their anatomy. Anthony can’t figure out why. He does six hundred minute colour corrections to his complexion as he approaches the rooming house. He has been criticised in the past for not looking human enough, and he wants to get it right. The humans going about their commerce ignore him, but he catches their glances. They think him a vagrant, and he is.

  Deep within the tight, tiny streets of Ona-oko, most of the buildings professing to be hotels are, in fact, brothels. The real rooming places are cement blocks with at least running water guaranteed. Ona-oko is equidistant between the north and south ganglia so the electricity supply is sporadic. Anthony can sense electric elementals within the overhead wires. He loves them. The Cape of Good Hope Hotel is a two-storey building with a flat roof and only the façade painted. The porch holds up the rest of the structure with trunk-like columns. A woman sits in a chair, smoking a long pipe. She is thin and her eyes are narrow, as if squinting in the smoke. There are hormonal changes that tell Anthony she is aware of his approach. There is tar and scar tissue on the inner surface of her lungs. Anthony clears it all up and replaces it with embryonic pneumocytes. He sets things in motion to reverse the degenerative changes on her spine.

  “That’s close enough,” the woman says. “I have already given to beggars today. You’ll scare away my customers.”

  “Venerated Mother, I am a customer,” says Anthony in Yoruba that he hopes is passable. He waves the cash he took from the reanimate.

  “Stand still a minute,” says the woman.

  Anthony obeys.

  She stands, puts her pipe aside and scans him with an ancient device. “No ID chip. That costs extra.”

  “No problem.”

&
nbsp; Each floor has a toilet and a bathroom at the north end, communal. Women are not allowed, which is to say prostitutes are not allowed, which is to say female prostitutes are not allowed. Rooming houses like these tend to become hotbeds of homosexual liaisons, but they are never raided as long as there is no heterosexual intercourse. Don’t ask, don’t tell. The woman ignores the sounds from the rooms, and cleans up the fluid and latex. Anthony reads her as a person at peace with everything, a rare human. The room is clean, if spare, but Anthony does not mind. He is comfortable anywhere.

  As soon as the lady is gone, Anthony sits on the floor and reaches out to the wider xenosphere. An infinite stream of data collected by the xenoforms washes over him. This he finds comforting and familiar. He relaxes, his body relaxes.

  There are blank spots in the xenosphere around the dome. In and of itself, this is not new or unusual. Weather conditions often create such spots. Rainstorms, floods, hail, intense fires. The difference is these points are fixed whereas natural ones are shifting and ephemeral. Anthony does not know what they are, but he will find out. He does not forget his primary mission, but he does not know how to find whatever Home has asked him to find. He leaves the Cape of Good Hope to find the closest blind spot.

  Anthony is near the dome. It is like staring at a mirror image of himself, but not at the same time. He can still feel all the people and creatures inside it. Out here, life does not seem so friendly. The spikes make the dome seem like a military stronghold, which saddens Anthony because the extrusions started some months ago without explanation from Wormwood. The only thing Anthony can parse from the footholder is that there’s a premonition of threat. They share an odd kind of sameness, although the Catholic residue in Anthony’s brain thinks of the Holy Trinity being Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and yet one. He and Wormwood are one, but not the same, even though they commune.

  A woman walks by with the words “Free Sample” across her bosom. Old men gather together outside cafés, talking about wars they didn’t fight in, and children they didn’t raise well. A number of people cluster around something on the tarmac. Anthony walks towards the crowd, at the same time realising it is the epicentre of the closest fixed blank spot in the xenosphere. The crowd is dynamic and people arrive, stay long enough to take pictures, then drift away. Anthony patiently joins the periphery and waits his turn. The people wall is five deep and he allows the motion of others to carry him along. At the centre he sees what the commotion is about. Someone has sculpted the ground, drilled and shaved the impression of a massive boot print, ten feet in length, five in width, such as might belong to a giant. The depth is about a foot. It is a prank, of course. Human artists do this kind of thing. Why did it affect the xenosphere? Between the ridges a plant shoots skyward. The drilling process has exposed some topsoil and from that the weed emerges. A tacit understanding keeps people from stepping over the artwork, but there are no signs forbidding close examination.

  Anthony actively sends xenoforms on to the print and the plant. They do not return. He breaks free of the crowd and touches the plant. He feels light-headed and the colour leaches out of his visual fields. He boosts his cortisol levels to raise his blood pressure, and feels better. He backs away and the crowd quickly extrudes him. He thinks for a minute. The plant is causing the blank spots. Maybe. He does not know for sure if the plant has caused the dizziness. He ages his body as he walks to the closest café and sits with the old men. He has no money but does not comment when the barista places a cup on the table in front of him. He runs diagnostics on his body. The usual Earth microorganisms are on his skin and trapped in the cilia of his lungs, but there is something else, too. Pollen-like. Unidentified species. It triggered the reaction that led to the dizziness. In fact, it is still causing an immune reaction. Anthony has been increasing his blood pressure to keep up with it. If he were human, he’d be dead by now, although the people of Rosewater seem strangely unaffected. One of the old men is now talking to him. Anthony decides to look for the other blank spots, but first he checks in with Wormwood.

  Power fluctuations in the ganglia. Not sure why. The barrier is thinner close to the boot print. Anthony is perturbed, but does not slow down. He modifies his apocrine sweat glands and pumps out endorphins, resulting in the old men paying for his coffee. He needs to travel, so he stops an okada.

  “I don’t have any money,” says Anthony.

  “Eru?”

  More endorphins. “I don’t have anything to exchange. I have no more than the clothes on my back, however I will owe you a favour. My name is Anthony Salerno.”

  The driver agrees.

  As they make their way to the studio, Anthony muses that he would need money if he is to complete the task. His joints seize up, and he makes adjustments to his body. By the time they arrive at the destination, he is younger again. When he gets off the bike the driver looks at him askance.

  “What?”

  “Your skin. It’s an odd colour, like you used too much make-up. And you look different from when I picked you up. Don’t harm me.”

  “I won’t, younger brother. I won’t.”

  In payment, Anthony reaches into the man’s brain and increases the ability to focus attention and persist, as well as the tolerance of boredom. This will help him in his business and personal life. Anthony smiles, watching him go.

  The studio is a warehouse. For some inexplicable reason Earth does not value artists, especially ones that are still alive. Warehouse space is cheaper than studio space. The entire building, ugly and block-like though it is, looks better than the other warehouses. There is a nameplate with four identified artists. The studio is also a black hole within the xenosphere. Anthony looks about, then picks up a rock, which he hurls through a window. When the crash stops resounding he reaches for his left eye socket and plucks out his eyeball. He hurls this through the window. He immediately starts to grow a new one in the socket. His detached eye cannot move as there are no muscles around it, but it can still capture images. Usually. The eye sends one clear image of a healthier form of the plant he encountered at Oshodi beside the dome, then the image goes black. The eye is deactivated.

  Four artists on the plate: Kola Adedotun, Mark Sutcliffe, Ahmed Ona and Stephanie Sugar. Anthony will have to find them and he bets the other black holes are where these people are. Vitreous humour leaks out of his exposed orbit and wets his shirt. He’ll need an eyepatch if the new eye is going to take this long to grow. Which it ordinarily wouldn’t. This body is malfunctioning. The plant, in addition to making him weak when in direct contact, appears to exert a field effect as well, a proximity attenuation.

  The vegetable is becoming bothersome.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Aminat

  Aminat sucks her teeth. She tags the ambulance, then sets the auto-drive to Link, after which she calls Olalekan up.

  “I know what cats feel like,” she says.

  “Boss? What do you mean?”

  “When you take away their kill.”

  “Were you planning to kill Alyssa Sutcliffe?”

  “Shut up. You see who I’m locked with?”

  “Special Ambulance Service.”

  “Tell me where they’re going and why.”

  “Stand by.”

  The Link function can be glitchy. At best it gives a jerky ride despite both vehicles having synchronised software. The vehicles are different, so a quick turn by one does not guarantee the same torque on the other. And fleeting background electromagnetic radiation surges often break the link, sometimes leading to resync with a completely different vehicle. Worse, the AI of the Rosewater central self-drive tries to break in at random times, thinking the pursuit is a software error.

  The steering wheel moves left and right with the directions of the auto-drive. The dash shows the route on a makeshift digital map. The government-issue processor starts a download from the ID chips of the occupants.

  “Olalekan, requisition some COBs to follow us,” says Aminat.

 
; “Yes, ma’am.”

  Aminat keeps the ambulance in sight, ready for a quick manual override in case it becomes necessary. She has no specific plan, but whatever she does will involve talking to Alyssa Sutcliffe. Street traders rush out of the path of the ambulance, but try to reconverge immediately, so the car, detecting obstructions, blares its horn.

  “Boss,” says Olalekan.

  “Tell me.”

  “They’re off to St. Joseph’s. Each of them is a registered psychiatric nurse.”

  “You’re telling me she’s being committed?”

  “I have the paperwork right here, Boss. One month for observation. I’ve sent the coordinates—”

  “Got ’em. Thanks. Stand by.”

  Aminat breaks off the Link and feeds the coordinates in. The self-drive propels the car towards the shortest route. She examines the documents. Husband Mark requested that Alyssa Sutcliffe be taken into hospital for delusions of identity, whatever that means. Aminat can stop pursuit and just report back to Femi, awaiting instructions, or she can flash a badge and take custody of Alyssa at the hospital. What if she goes berserk? Or is already uncontrollable?

  The car takes a different route from the ambulance, but they arrive at the same time at the hospital gates. With S45 ID it should be easy to get in, but health workers always think they’re special. The gateman scans Aminat’s ID and seems about to ask a question, but thinks better of it. The gate opens and the car parks itself. Aminat checks her sidearm, raking the slide, then holsters it and leaves the vehicle. Three hawks hover in formation, then land on the roof above, obviously cyborgs.

  “Olalekan, keep track of me. Fix on my ID.”

  “Roger that.”

  Aminat puts on field sunglasses. The inner surface is a screen and the blueprints of the entire complex are layered on what she can see with her naked eye. A guy in a suit approaches. He has a hospital photocard—a security person.

  “Ma’am, I’m Lawson, head of security here. How can we help S45?”