The question is like nothing Ify has ever heard before. Faced with it now, she can’t say what she would choose. So much of what and who she is now is not only because of what happened to her but what she remembers. And she knows for a fact that were her mind to be scraped of all those memories, her body would remember. She would carry those episodes, those experiences, in her ribs, in her heart, in her legs. In her eyes. Unless . . .
“Forced cyberization,” Ify says in an awed whisper. “The government forced cyberization on . . . on everyone.” The horror begins to sink in. When Ify looks up, Xifeng is facing her and only nods her head before passing through the beaded curtain that leads to the next room.
Ify can only stare, mouth open in shock. The government forced hundreds of millions of people to undergo cyberization. So it could catalog then delete their memories.
She pushes herself to move forward, and when she enters the next room, she’s confronted by wall after wall of what appear to be, when she squints, hard drives. Piled from the floor to the ceiling. “What are these?”
Xifeng walks back to Ify and puts a hand to her shoulder. “Memories. Every memory I could find and download about the Biafran War. It’s all here.”
So much life, so much death. And to think, it can all fit in one room.
“Is this a library?” Ify asks. “What are you going to do with these?”
That hardness returns to Xifeng’s face. “We’re going to restore them. My team has already been delivering these to select households throughout the country. When people get enough clues, they realize where the holes are in their memory, and it is our job to fill them. People will remember.”
Ify walks to one of the walls but feels as though she’s outside of her body. “But doesn’t it feel wrong?” She reaches up a hand to touch the ridged edges of the small devices, so many of them stacked together. “Making them relive their trauma?”
Xifeng watches her, hands clasped behind her back. “And yet you remain. You persist. You poke your head and your shoulders through the broken seam of the chrysalis, unsure even of your new form, having not yet seen it in its entirety. That was you when you first arrived in space, yes? You couldn’t have had any idea what you would become. But what you went through. That breaking, that rending—that’s where the pain is concentrated. Sometimes, what we are experiencing is simply our effort to reach forward. It’s a protracted stretching, Ify. One reaches toward something, one stretches a bit farther and is freed, having left behind some rusted-over part of one’s self, some shell that had clung to a familiar, safe tree but that is now an evacuated husk for which the butterfly has no more use.” She arrives at Ify’s side. “That’s what I am going to do for this country. Will you join me?”
CHAPTER
34
War is raging inside of me.
When I watch Xifeng and Ify move through cave headquarters, a part of me is feeling joy that they are seeing each other after so long apart and that they are knowing that the other is alive after passing much time not knowing. But another part of me is jealousing because Xifeng is looking at Ify like she is special, almost like she is wanting to call her daughter, and I am wanting Xifeng all to myself. I am not wanting to share her. Then I am jealousing again because Xifeng is looking at Ify like Ify is having answer to question she is asking, even though I am not knowing what these question is. And I am wanting to be able to look at Ify and see the mystery of myself being solved, and it is not happening.
I walk into the medical chamber, and I see Grace Leung who I am beating before and then I am sadding when I am seeing her face, even though it is already healing from the chemicals and the small small surgery they are doing. But Grace is seeing me out of the corner of her eye, and her whole body is clenching like fist or like something preparing for blow. And it is making me to be hating myself that someone is looking at me and thinking this thing instantly. So I am running away and looking for empty room and finding small room that is branching off of one of the main pathways, and it is filled with cleaning products on the shelves and wiring that is bunching up in the corner. I am sitting on the floor and pulling my knees to my chest and hugging them there like this, because doing this is the only thing that is making me to be not crying, and I am wishing now that I never discovered feeling thing, never developing capacity for emotions or ability to do useless human thing like love and be jealousing.
Beaded curtain is rustling, and when I am looking up, girl is searching shelves on opposite wall for something. It is Binye, who is running with me during mission and shooting and patting my head like I am being her little sister. “Where is it?” And I am hearing thing rattling around until she says, “Aha!” and is turning around and seeing me and almost jumping into the air from shock. “You scared me. What are you doing here?”
But I am not knowing what I should be telling her.
She is seeing the look on my face, and I am not knowing what face I am making, but it is causing her to crouch down and touch my face. “Oh,” she is saying like mother or elder sister. Then she says, “Oof,” and opens bottle of painkillers in her hand, dumps a few out onto her palm, then swallows them. She makes a move to put the pill bottle back where she found it, but then puts it in her vest pocket instead. “Cramps,” she tells me, and I am knowing she is talking about a thing that is happening with her body that is never happening with mine.
“May I ask you a question?” I say in small small voice.
Binye raises an eyebrow, then slides down the wall until she’s sitting like I’m sitting but with her legs spread out and not hugging them to her chest. “Go ahead.”
“When you are first cyberizing, what is it feeling like? Do you remember?”
Binye is considering the ceiling before she answers. “In the beginning? I felt . . . new. Like I’d been born a second time. There’s darkness, then for a few moments, I see myself. My body. I’m lying in a hospital bed, not moving. My eyes are closed, and I think I’m asleep. Or dead. Then I wake up. But not like waking up from a dream. It’s like waking up into the world for the very first time. And the lights are so bright it hurts. And the blankets are rough, and the noise makes my head feel like it’s going to explode. And all I smell is antiseptic. It was as though I were a child experiencing all of this for the first time.”
What she is saying is reminding me of thing, but the remembering is like sand that is running through my fingers. I am trying to make the remembering come, to be pulling it from Binye’s words, but when I grab a piece of it—the smell of rain-wet soil, the sound of water lapping against shoreline—it is vanishing.
“Why do you ask?” Binye’s voice is taking me out of my thoughts. Then she is squinting at me and saying, “Oh. You’re a synth. I am not insulting you. I am just realizing why you must be wanting to know.” She moves closer to me. “I see the way you all are. Like children. And you’re different. If you were all the same child, it would be easier to think you’re all machines, but . . .” She does not finish.