Ify sees it now.
Peter is a synth.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
“He’s not human.” Ify has to keep herself from shouting. Still, the projection of Céline hovering by the window overlooking the refugee ward winces.
In her office, Ify has a number of documents glowing at her in the form of holographic projections: Colonial human rights statutes defining enemy combatants and refugees, medical files for several of the most recent cases of patient coma, and the information page for immigration authorities.
“I could call the number right now, Céline. I could tell them where to find Peter, that that’s the name he gave his sponsors, even though it may not be his real name. I could tell them that everything he’s said to them is a lie. Céline, he’s an enemy combatant.”
Céline’s face has none of its usual sly frolic. There’s no joke at the edge of her lips, no mischief twinkling in her eye. She has her arms folded and frowns, an expression somewhere between disapproval and concern. “Ify.”
“He’s a synth.”
“Ify. Mais t’es pas sûre.” Céline swings her arm wide as though to indicate the vast number of questions awaiting Ify if she were to go through with this. “That’s what the deportation authorities will ask. They’ll ask, ‘How do you know this?’”
“It won’t matter.” Desperation forces Ify to pace back and forth in a small orbit behind her desk. “When they see . . . when they see what he is, they’ll be forced to act. Céline, you don’t understand. He was built specifically for war. His body—his organs, his skeleton, his tendons, his muscle—all of it is entirely false. Manufactured. They made him in a lab, Céline. If I were to scan him, I’d see that his memories are nothing more than mnemonic and sensory data taken from other people and inserted into his braincase. Specifically to simulate human feeling!”
“Ify, calme-toi. S’il te plaît.” She pauses. “You saw him plug into a patient. Maybe he’s only a partially cyberized boy—”
“We have to stop him,” Ify cuts her off, lost in thought. Knuckle to chin, she resumes her pacing. “He’s clearly on some mission. Just masquerading as a human.” She looks up at Céline but doesn’t see her, sees only the completion of her own mission. “Maybe he’s even had a hand in the illness affecting the refugees. He was plugged into a refugee. I could pull the security footage from that hospital ward and show him plugged into the refugee in the bed he’s sitting next to. There. Done.” She wipes her hands of invisible blood. “There’s the problem, wrapped up in an airtight package and fired off into space to sit alongside the Refuse Ring circling Alabast.”
“Ify, that’s not what they would do to him.” The tone in Céline’s voice stops Ify where she stands. “They’d send him to the Jungle to suffer until he self-deports back to Nigeria.” Céline takes a step toward Ify, but because it is a hologram projected by her Whistle, it looks only like more of Céline’s body has vanished off-frame. “You see what color he is. You know what they do to les noirs.” And Ify sees in a separate hologram what Céline encounters every day in real life because of her position as a Colonial administrator. Children playing in glass-studded mud, malnourished and with faulty Augments, weaving their way around crudely built zinc trailers and huts that stand no chance against the freezing temperatures when the Alabastrine administrators of the Jungle choose to open the vents and clear the waste that accumulates in the slum. Trailers slashed with yellow or blue or purple paint depending on which aid agency they represent, refugees waiting in lines that go on forever for a vaccination or treatment for whatever disease is rampaging through the population at any given time. Families wrapped in bubble coats; when they speak, their breath clouds before their faces and frost tips their eyebrows. Large pools of wastewater dotting the landscape. Drones ever circling, looking for crimes, whether committed out of malice or desperation, they don’t care. They swoop in and fire electric bolts at the target, then their claws retract and they drag the victim away, on the ground and through the wastewater, then into the air, where a jail transport van hovers. Or Augmented police, towering twice as tall as any human and muscled with steroids and gear oil, stomping through the tent cities, crushing homes, beating men and women. Hammering, always hammering, as people try to build their makeshift homes or legal aid clinics or mosques or churches or art therapy centers. Discarded sleeping bags, rotten food, broken shoes half-buried in faulty, recently re-poured concrete.
The place Céline tries to rescue refugees from. The place too many of them don’t escape. The Jungle.
“You would send him to this place?” Céline asks.
Ify clenches her fists at her side, fighting the guilt that rises like bile in her throat. “But Paige and Amy. He could hurt them. I could have him sent away, and they would be none the wiser. They’d think it was simply the luck of the draw.” She waves away the concern. “Besides, Nigeria is safe now. It’s not like Vanuatu. It hasn’t been swallowed by waters. It is still there.” And she realizes then that she’s thinking of the deportation Grace had shown her, the child who had fallen into a coma, the family weeping in the aftermath of receiving their deportation orders, the unconscious child wheeled onto that aircraft to be spirited to a home that no longer existed. “The economy is rebounding,” she says, her voice faltering. “There’s peace. It’s a familiar place for him.” As she speaks, her voice loses conviction. “The rebel groups have been put down.” When she says, “There is peace,” one last time, she can’t bring herself to believe it.
“They all deserve your help.” Then Céline ends the call.
Ify tries to speak, but a sob catches in her throat. She remembers when she and Céline would walk to school and get stopped by the Alabastrine immigration authorities, and they would have to wait on the sidewalk, standing by the large, intimidating police vans while their classmates walked by and snickered. She remembers the aid workers who fed her in the dorm and those moments she would spend with Céline at the Viewer, looking out at the stars and seeing their futures plotted in them. She fights and fights for the resolve to move against Peter. To condemn him.
Until she gives up, closes all the tabs, and powers down her devices.
“What am I going to do?” Ify asks, not knowing if she means the unknown medical condition that has afflicted an entire hospital ward or the fifteen-year-old child soldier named Peter.
CHAPTER
12
Like this, we are bringing rememberings to people.
I am uploading copy of rememberings from hard drives into my brain and carrying them with me while I am walking with Xifeng and Enyemakas through streets of Lagos and down small small alleys, and sometimes we are walking up to the second level or third level of some houses and Xifeng is pulling out second drive and I am downloading rememberings into it. Sometimes we are carrying small projector with us and sometimes house is having own projector. We are connecting drive to projector, and family or sometimes man or sometimes woman or sometimes person who is not calling themself man or woman is watching. Sometimes there is water in their eyes because they are watching remembering of someone who is dead, someone who we are burying in desert. So they are sadding because they will never see this person again. And sometimes they are thanking me and Xifeng, and sometimes they are quiet and not saying any thing, and sometimes they are angry and breaking many thing.