It’s against all protocol to perform an invasive procedure without the patient’s consent. But curiosity has taken hold of Ify like never before. She must know the answer to the questions stirring inside her: What happened between her and Peter? Is there something in there that can help Ify figure out what’s been going on with these children?
When she’s certain she’s in the clear, she takes a seat next to the child she’d seen Peter with earlier, the one she now knows for certain is cyberized. She pulls her Bonder out of her pocket and checks to make sure it’s in working order. She dares not put it on, but she calibrates it to download instead of stream. And like that, she plugs her cord into the outlet at the base of the child’s neck. There’s no way to know what memories she’s downloading, whether they’re peaceful or painful, whether they’re of family or torturers, whether they’ll provide coherent snapshots of an episode or whether they’ll be a chaos of disparate puzzle pieces.
Satisfied with the data she’s downloaded, she disconnects and stands up. Just before she leaves, she smooths out a wrinkle in the motionless child’s bedsheet.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
She knows, even as she’s cleaning her room, that she’s avoiding her device. The Bonder sits like an accusation on her desk. It’s even connected to a projector so she won’t have to actually live through the recorded moments. If she closes her eyes, she can still imagine, in her entire body, the suffering that Peter remembers. Whether or not the memory was false, it still rattles her bones.
For several minutes, she stands in the center of her now-pristine workroom, staring at the device. Finally, before the urge leaves her, she rushes to her desk and inputs the set of keys on her tablet to fire up the Bonder.
It hums, then prepares to send the data to the projector when, suddenly, sparks pop out of it. The projector shuts down and the Bonder goes dark. Ify frowns, then tries to turn the projector back on, but nothing changes. She disconnects the Bonder, and nothing she does will bring it back to life. She turns the thing over in her hands, and, before she knows it, she’s got her tools out to repair it. Her desk is festooned with all shapes of pins and chips and pliers and scalpels, pruning shears and tiny torches. And above it all hovers a small group of nanobots to help hold parts of the metal open while she works.
By the time she looks back up, the false light from the Colony’s lighting system has started to spill through her windows. Wisps of smoke still curl from the device. Her rotation starts in two hours. She’s close—she can taste it like the beginnings of blood on her tongue from chewing through her cheek.
Finally, she’s got it. She lets out a sigh. The next instant, her fingers blaze over the table to put the thing back together.
With her Bonder reassembled, she takes a moment. Then she plugs it into her tablet to read its data and perform a system diagnosis.
Her tablet registers the device. Victory.
Its internal data unfurls down the system monitor. The scroll continues, down and down and down, until it stops. The cursor blinks, then starts to move in the opposite direction, gobbling line after line of code.
It’s erasing its own data, eating its own organs. Frantic, Ify inputs recovery protocols, trying to revert the Bonder to an earlier version of itself and regain what was lost. But nothing. The massacre continues.
She pulls the cord out and forces closed both the tablet and the Bonder. But the damage is done. Almost all of that data, gone.
What just happened?
CHAPTER
16
Surveillance drone that is having police markings is passing under broken stone bridge, but people who are living here are sending their own drones that they are making, and they are attacking the surveillance drone and beating it into pieces then picking at its corpse like they are vultures. While the people are laughing and cheering at this, I am pretending to be sleeping. But I am always sensing thing that is happening, even if my eye is not being open. I am knowing how people are coming together to protect themself from enemies like the police or bandits. I am knowing that this is being called community.
When I am pretending to be sleeping, I am leaning against pillar like someone who is sleeping or doing drug or both, but I am not sleeping. I am watching. When I am watching, I am seeing what people are bringing into this home where we are living under the bridge. One night after water is coming in from lagoon and washing over everything like big big flood and breaking tent and sometime grabbing people and pulling them back out, we are bringing up sandbag and people are digging and building wall to keep lagoon out when it is rising and becoming big big and trying to eat us. Sometime they are bringing stick, but sometime they are bringing metal. Small piece of metal to help making stronger the wall but also bigger piece of metal like shield. One night I am recognizing piece. It is like chestpiece of Enyemaka. It is chestpiece of Enyemaka.
Man with chestpiece is bringing it into shadow under bridge, and I am walking fast to him.
“Sah, what are you using this for?” I ask him, pointing at the chestpiece.
“Child, how you dey?” the man asks, smiling.
“I dey fine, sah.” And I am trying to be nice and polite and learning that it is not good to be speaking like robot to people. They are liking when you are speaking like human, and when they are liking you, they are doing what you want. “Wetin dey?” I am asking him and pointing to the chestpiece.
He is looking at it and scratching his chin and looking at me like he is trying to decide how much to tell me. “Ah make boat am.” He is nodding his head, and his afro is bouncing when he is doing this. “Part of my boat. For when water fi eat us again.” And this time, he point to the lagoon, and I know he is talking about flooding and how every time the lagoon comes in, it is coming closer and closer, and the water is rising even though we are building wall for protection. Eventually, the water will eat us.
“Where de rest of de boat, sah?”
He is quiet one moment, then he is looking at me different. He is looking at me like I am no longer little girl or friend but like I am stranger or wild animal. “You be wayo?”
“No wahala,” I am telling him, and I am holding my hands out, palm up like saying, Please, sah, my hands are empty, I have no weapon. “I wan no vex you. Just where are you getting metal from. I no wan take it, I just wan know where it is coming from.”
He is looking at me with wild eye, then he is calming and he is pointing to Lagos proper. My heart is thumping in my chest and I am feeling blood rise in my face because I am not wanting to go to Lagos even though I am going every day and looking for Xifeng and not finding her. But I am thinking, then I am asking him, “Where in Lagos?” because Lagos is big big city as big as many jungles.
He is looking at me like man with secret, and then he is dropping to ground and he is drawing map in the sand and moving stone to make building. And like this he is making noise and moving thing without speaking. Then he is looking at me and pointing and saying that this is Falomo Bridge. He is saying Falomo Bridge again and pointing above our head, and I am seeing what he is saying: that we are eating and sleeping and making bathroom under Falomo Bridge. And he is drawing Falomo Bridge long and long then he is stopping, and I am asking him why he stop and he is saying that there is nothing but water.