I’m walking until the guilt goes away, she wants to tell Grace, but can’t.
Ify cranes her neck and does not see a sky festooned with digitized Nigerian flags like she expected. Maybe her memory of that is false. Nor does she see the Nigerian president’s face projected onto the giant façades of glass-and-steel business centers. There are no soldiers patrolling the streets. When they arrive at Aso Rock and Ify sees the outcrop of granite rock, almost one thousand meters high, on the city’s outskirts, she expects to see a parade of military vehicles and parliamentarians surrounded by their bodyguards. She expects to see soldiers acting as leaders, generals assuming their places in government, but everyone wears suits, some of them more slim-fitting than others. They all look like businessmen. They all look alike.
Using the Augment embedded in her neck, Ify scans them and notes on her holographic retinal display what districts they represent. This one represents Abia State and this one Bayelsa. Those three there are from Katsina State, and the two standing next to them are from Oyo and Delta. But were she looking at them with an unaided eye, she would see clones. Nothing but clones. Perhaps they are all cyberized and all outfitted with similar facial features and similar body structures. Maybe this is simply what is fashionable. And they are all shaking hands and joking. Some of the legislators who do not look older but talk as though their insides are older than their outsides speak in patronizing whimsy to the younger ones. But there is no military. Not a single bar denoting rank. Not a single soldier stiff at attention. She adjusts her scanner to see if perhaps the vehicles are cloaked. It could be that the air is swarming with drones, clouds of them thick enough to blot out the sun. All it would take is the right calibration for the massive ground mechs she’s sure are there to materialize out of thin air. To have the sky shimmer around them, then to have them revealed in all their violent, militaristic glory. If she squints hard enough, maybe she can even detect the outline of high-powered minimechs hiding in the shadows or strapped to the bottom of the maglev Land Rovers, ready to detach and fire at whatever needs killing.
But nothing. The air is still. The chatter is soft; then, as the parliamentarians walk into the halls of the National Assembly to begin the session, the chatter is gone. And nowhere in this area is there a statue or monument or plaque—anything—to indicate that she had once been here, that Daren had once fought a war for this place, that millions had died. At the very hall of government, no markers of sacrifice. No sign of the vanquishing of villains.
No indication, even, that there had been heroes.
“Were there this many Chinese during the war?” Grace asks.
Ify turns to consider Grace for a moment before leading them back the way they had come. Enough walking for today. “No,” she says quietly, too harshly.
There is no more war, Ify tells herself. Even as she can’t quite bring herself to believe it.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Ify finds an isolated stretch of gilded fencing along Jabi Lake and rests on her forearms. Jabi Lake Commercial Center is a hive of activity, and Ify turns and leans back on the railing to watch all the life happening in front of her. So much of her experience of the world can be filtered: by way of her external Augments, she can lower the murmur of voices and raise the volume of the lake lapping against stone behind her; she can increase the intensity of the new-grass smell, even as she knows how false this grass is beneath her feet. She can watch the setting sun splash colors like oil paint across the sky and twist the dialings on her settings to filter the colors, making them sickly or blurring the lines between the golds and the blues and the purples.
It’s as she’s playing with the colors in the sky and as couples glide by with small silver balls strapped to their ankles, allowing them to hover above the ground, that Ify hears Céline’s reply.
“You sound disappointed,” she says in her Francophone accent. “‘It’s not completely destroyed,’ so il doit y avoir un problème.” She clicks her tongue. “Something must be wrong, that is what you’re thinking.”
“It doesn’t feel right.” Ify is grateful she doesn’t have to move her mouth to have her words beamed straight through space off three satellites and directly into Céline’s Whistle. Still, paranoia expands and contracts like a second set of lungs inside her chest. Something’s not right. And others could be listening. Her very next thought is that this is precisely what she used to do to others. During the war.
“Maybe this is you adopting the colonizer mentality. You expect Nigeria to be a”—Céline chuckles—“what is that old phrase . . . ‘shithole country’?” Her chuckle turns into a full-throated laugh. “Even when you lived there, the technology far surpassed much of what was in the Colonies. You said it yourself. Those few times you did speak about where you came from, you showed me pieces of what was maybe the most advanced country on the planet. I mean, you were developing technology to simulate regional spacetime phenomena with the gravitational pull of a black hole and using that to combat forest fires! Your country is in the process of terraforming land that les blancs had said would be uninhabitable for at least another century. And you come back now, after four, five years away and expect to see bullet holes in the buildings and craters from shelling in the roads. There can be such a thing as peace, Ifeoma.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re going to be a colonial administrator and you want your job to be easy.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I am right because I am right.” There’s an edge of fatigue to Céline’s voice that wasn’t there before.
Ify smirks, then turns her back to the youth outside the mall and stares out over the darkening water. Fireflies dance over it, winking in and out of sight. Ify resists the temptation to light up their entire trajectories and track their movements. Let this natural wonder, at least, be preserved. “Is that what I am supposed to tell the committee, then? When they ask me how to cure these refugee children of their mysterious disease, I will tell them I couldn’t find a cure because there was too much peace?”
“Well, where are they coming from? The children.”
Ify squints. Although many state functions happen in Abuja, this isn’t where most refugee applications are processed. Preliminary research told Ify that. No, that happens further south. She walks herself through the intake process at the hospital. First, she receives the refugees from the shuttle, then she records their background information—as much as they can bear to remember—then she sets them up with treatment. Some of the cyberized will have been damaged either prior to or during their travel, some of the Augments as well. As a result, extracting information from them by way of download is difficult—in some instances, impossible. So they had developed the consent protocol to allow for a deeper dive into the braincases of cyberized refugees and those with Augments. Once permission is given, then technicians and doctors can get all the information they need, create a record in the government database, and move on to the next. For those red-bloods among them who had managed, against all odds, to flee war and devastation and make their way to the Space Colonies in one piece, bureaucracy and mystery await them. No matter how pressing their needs, they don’t have an outlet anywhere on their person, nor do they have a router in their brain that outside devices can connect to. There is no easy way to know them. So they have to wait.