I am smiling, and then I am waking up on recliner chair that is also lowering itself to being bed or table. Cushion beneath me is blue and plastic and torn. Wall is hissing around me, fans whirring, spraying mist on me, cleaning radioactive dust from everywhere in here.
Around me, monitor is hanging at angles from the ceiling. A robot torso in the shape of a human leans forward from a wall, its arms limp in front of it, head bowed. Other Augmented parts is lying in neat rows arrayed by limb on counters opposite me, all the forearms in a row and, next to them, hands with their fingers separated and positioned in front of them.
On almost all of the tables lie blueprints. Random bits of gear litter the floor at the base of reclining chairs. Hornets buzz out from beneath the table I am on and spray misty alcohol onto me and I am wanting to be waving my arms, but I am seeing why I cannot.
I am having no legs and am having only one arm. But I am not being nervous, for some reason. This memory is in full colors. It has my colors, but it is sometime having blue-green on the edges. And it is having these edges when Chinese man with silver beard and doctor’s cap is smiling in my face. The colored edges fade in and out, in and out when I say, “Am I alive,” and he is chuckling.
“Yes, quite,” he is telling me. “Though dinner won’t be ready for a few hours. I don’t think hunger will be an issue for you yet, however.” He is looking at me like he is remembering something or reminding himself of something, like how to have proper manners, but I am reading the way his body is speaking and I am knowing that he is looking at me and he is seeing the rememberings I am holding in my head before I am winding up with one arm left on this table. He is seeing that I am inside mech that is being shot down because I am in battle, then mech is plummeting into lagoon. He is seeing that I had been a pilot in the war, and when he is first seeing my body in the lagoon, I am just a mangled mess of flesh and metal. But he is saving me somehow.
“Your name is Onyii, right?”
“How do you know my name?”
He smiles. “I’m your doctor. When we’re finished, you can meet some of the boys.” He looks at his hands, then up at me again. “I think they’ll be happy to have a big sister.”
CHAPTER
35
Ify’s hand hovers over one of the drives. Small enough to fit into the palm of her hand. Large enough to contain most of the memories of an entire cyberized human being. Ify remembers once hearing in a lecture hall that all words ever spoken by human beings could be contained in forty-two zettabytes of data if recorded as ancient sixteen-kilohertz sixteen-bit audio. Of course, increasing the quality of that audio to today’s standards would entail an order of magnitude in the thousands, but, looking at the drives before her, Ify marvels. Hundreds of zettabytes of storage in each one. And thousands of them lining the walls of this cave.
Xifeng’s question rings in Ify’s ears, the loudest echo she has ever heard. Will you join me?
Ify touches one of the drives, runs a finger along a ridged edge, then slowly pulls away. She turns to Xifeng and sees the look of expectant joy on her face, the look of someone already having made her plans. A pang of guilt stabs Ify’s heart, but she smothers the hurt. This is bigger than them.
“No.”
Disappointment pulls down Xifeng’s features like Ify’s words have deflated her. Then, for the briefest of moments, it curls her lips into a snarl before she schools her face into an aspect of calm and acceptance. “Why not?”
“You’re forcing trauma on these people.” Ify feels serenity radiate through her. She is right, and she knows it. Amid all the uncertainty and chaos surrounding her, all the things that have happened and been said to her to throw her mind into tumult, there is this certainty. She clings to it.
“I am showing them the truth. These piecemeal revelations are part of the solution, but they are not enough. You don’t understand, Ify. I have the tools to reverse the virus the government has injected into the minds of its citizens. This virus of forgetting.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A central data processing center. Everyone in Nigeria is connected. Everyone we will help is connected. Once I inject the right code into that center, it will flood the net with every forbidden memory. Everyone will remember. Only then will the country move forward.”
“The country.” That familiar contempt returns to Ify. She keeps her anger at bay. But she allows herself to feel pity. “The country that you know so well. You’ve lived here for less than a decade, and you know what is good for this country? You were not born here. You were not made here. You never knew this place before war. How could you possibly understand it after war?” She draws closer to Xifeng. “What you’re doing is wrong.” With a wide sweep of her arm, she indicates the walls of hard drives. “This will only bring war back.”
“So the government is right? The only way to bring warring tribes back together, living side by side as neighbors, is to make them forget what they did to each other?” Venom drips from Xifeng’s words.
“Warring tribes.” This time, Ify lets a touch of anger infect her voice. “That’s what we are to you. Just warring tribes who can’t think for themselves. Who can’t make decisions and govern their own lives. Just warring tribes who have no business running their own country.”
Xifeng sneers.
“You’re no different from the rest of the oyinbo. All throughout history, these people come in and try to tell us how to live, and all they do is create conflict. All they leave behind is death and destruction and dysfunction. What you’re proposing will rip this country apart. Millions will die.”
“And the country will move forward. Just like you did.”
“I am not a country!” The exclamation rings throughout the room. Ify is sure it can be heard in every corridor and every chamber in this sequence of tunnels. She takes a moment to settle herself, to slow her heart’s racing, to still her nerves. “I am a human being,” she says with a lower voice, a kinder one. “I am one human being. I was lucky.” As she speaks, she thinks of her patients. Their experiences fill her voice. “I’ve seen people who witnessed the torture of their family go blind. I’ve seen people so traumatized by their nightmares that they die in their sleep. Scared to death, Xifeng. Sacred. To. Death. So many others—deafness, impotence, suicidal ideations, children who take their own lives because they think it is the only relief from the trauma that haunts them every second of their day. That is not happening because people are holding it in. These people were seeking treatment. They were speaking to professionals. They were sharing their experiences. They were doing everything right, and they still didn’t survive. Xifeng, you’re going to kill these people.”
“Would you sacrifice your memories of Onyii for peace?”