It’s Onyii.
When Ify freezes, she realizes too late that she’s off balance, and she pitches forward right into the petrified waves, which shatter like crystals and surround her, then melt away pixel by pixel until—
Ify slams back into her body.
At first, there’s only darkness, then Ify realizes it’s because she’s still wearing her helmet. From its top, thick cables extend and plug into her workspace as well as the MRI scanner holding Uzo’s body. The only sound she hears aside from the hammering of her own heart is the ever-present hum of Uzo’s body scanner and the readers, processors, and tablet computers neatly arrayed on Ify’s desk. That Ify can hear them at all speaks to how hard she’s been working them. The touchboards have been left on for far too long. Without warning, moisture pools in Ify’s eyes, the world dissolving into a blur of gray and black before she slides out of the helmet and wipes the tears away.
Slowly, she sits up. The chair adjusts to her posture, and soon, she’s leaning forward, struggling for breath. She stares at her hands and her forearms. Smooth, unlined, and brown. Yet she can feel her veins pulsing beneath her flesh. Her bodysuit compresses her chest to prevent a cough.
Reentry into the real world never seems to get easier. Sometimes, it feels as though it’s only growing more difficult. Each time, the feeling of being ripped from a reality so luscious and vivid as Uzo’s rememberings, being thrown back into this world of perpetual white, jars her bones a little harder. Sets her blood rushing a little faster. Pushes her heart just a little too close to the edge of what’s healthy.
The MRI scanner hisses, then slowly ejects Uzo’s bed. The girl knows to remain still while the bed is moving and while she’s being scanned. As soon as the bed is fully removed from the circular container, Uzo rises, leaning back on her hands. In that pose she looks every inch the carefree, comfortable teenager, growing into her limbs, learning the limits of her body as well as what new things it can do at this age. Then Ify remembers the cord extended from the outlet at the base of her neck.
“Are you okay?” Uzo asks her.
Ify nods, then slides from her chair, landing softly on the ground. Without sparing Uzo another glance, she hurries into the next room, where wireless printers spill reams of paper onto the floor. Outdated technology, but Ify finds special comfort in feeling the data between her thumb and forefinger when she picks up a length of printout. The memories.
The feel of Onyii still hangs like fog in her brain. She flexes her fingers to remind herself of who she is, then she takes the paper in her hands.
On one side of the paper is binary code, and on its reverse is mIRC scripting. Gibberish to most people Ify knows, even much of the medical staff, but for Ify, her first language. She can see in a sequence of coding a computer’s attempt to describe a moment. A series of hashtags and backslashes attempting, like a camera figuring out how it works, to describe the angle of sunlight on a small field filled with dancing schoolchildren, or the taste of fried plantains mixed with a mouthful of jollof rice, or the feeling of something smooth and feathery and small held in the cup made of two hands joined together. This was what Xifeng’s hard drives held.
It would be easy enough to look at these markings on a pair of screens. But this way makes it easier to see the coding. If she’s given image after image, sensation after sensation, immersive memory after immersive memory, she knows what will happen. It nearly happened just now.
She will abandon everything else to look for Onyii.
From time to time, she looks up from the printouts and into the room in which Uzo sits, and she wonders just how much of Onyii is there for the finding. What parts are there of her sister’s life that Ify had no idea about? Did she ever love anyone? What was she like as a child? What were her moments of grace? Of happiness? Were there smells that transported her? Food? The odor that hangs over certain cities? The sea?
She lives, Xifeng had told her before plummeting to her death.
Ify wishes she could download the memories onto an external drive and tinker with them from there, rummage through them looking for signs of Onyii, chase her sister through these acts of remembering. But as soon as the data leaves Uzo’s head, it will begin to deteriorate, perhaps falling prey to the same virus that is plaguing the children filling the ward.
When Ify gets back to her office, a box of printouts in her arms, Céline is waiting for her.
For a moment, they stand there, frozen, Ify with the box in her hands and Céline pitched nervously against the wall, trying to affect a pose of nonchalance. But an apology swims behind her lips. Ify can feel it.
The whole journey through Centrafrique’s transport station, haggard and exhausted, she had looked for Céline, waited anxiously for her to show up and hold her, reassure her, bring her back to the life, the security, she’d felt in space. But Céline had never shown her face, and now here she stands.
“Don’t you have a Colony to administrate?” Ify asks, the venom thick in her voice.
“Is that even the word for what I do?” Céline replies, waving the question away with her smile. She walks over to Ify’s desk and shifts around some tablets and microprocessors. “Do you have a graph of her?”
“Who?”
“Your secret weapon. Your pièce de résistance.”
Ify puts the box down and walks past Céline. “Where were you?”
She can feel Céline move behind her, reach for her. “Ify, I—”
“Where. Were you.”
“Ify.” Céline’s voice softens. “What happened down there?”
Ify wants to tell her friend that she was forced to confront her past. Memories rock Ify. An earthquake telling the story of war and betrayal and children held in cages and a riot in Abuja. She waits for it to pass. How does she tell Céline all of what happened? That she was responsible for the capture and torture of children, that she was the reason war continued for as long as it did, that people she thought would once help in peacetime turned out to be villains. That she had once been a villain herself. “I had a sister,” she says without warning.
“What? You’ve never mentioned her before.”
“We were from different tribes, but she raised me. It was several years into the war when she found me. My family had been murdered, and I was all alone. We lived in a camp in Delta State by the water. When I wasn’t in school, she would take me to the edge of this small cliff and we would watch the sun set, and then she would stay with me as I traced constellations in the stars and told her about how much I wanted to go to space. Because of a mistake I made one day, our camp was raided and we were separated. She became a Biafran soldier, and I was brought to Abuja, where I was taught how glorious it was to be a Nigerian. Suddenly, Onyii and I were enemies. Just like that. Because people told us we were. I was told that we Nigerians were in the right and that we were doing what we had to do to bring about peace. I was told that the people we captured and the people we killed were beyond saving. Many of them could never be convinced that peace was the way. When I found my chance to see my sister again, Nigerian society rejected me and cast me out. So I went to find my sister and kill her. Because she was the one who had murdered my family.”