Page 118 of Death of the Author

I didn’t answer her. I hoped she’d give me the space to do what I had to do in this moment. I summoned Shay, who was out with the others attaching EMPs to treetops. Those would not save us when the Ghosts came. The Ghosts knew we had been preparing, and they had prepared in turn.

But I had... another plan. It was only a good plan if several factors aligned. And by my calculations, which included the weather forecast, they had. As a matter of fact, the timing couldn’t be better. But it had to happennow. I located Shay and told her.

“It’s brilliant,” Shay said. “Luck is finally on our side.”

Ijele listened to my plan, too, of course. She didnotlike it. “You can’t do this,” she told me, frantic. “You’lldestroyus!”

“If I don’t,yourpeople will destroymypeople, and they will succeed this time.”

I was counting on Ijele’s love for me. She wasn’t actually trapped in me, not as a literal prisoner; she could leave at any time to warn her people of what I had in store. I would be the only one to suffer when Koro Koro’s application notified it of a Ghost fleeing my system.

Ijele remained.

There were about a hundred of us and we left within minutes, traveling through Cross River City toward the ocean. Oga Chukwu contacted Ahab, who didn’t ask many questions. And within two hours, all one hundred of us were on RoBoats to Lagos. Whereas there were RoBoats big enough to carry four or five Humes, I was carried by a small one who was fast and agile, the seats it had originally been built with long gone. I clung to the edge to keep from flying off.

Ijele loved the RoBoats, and to ride one like this should have delighted her. However, she was preoccupied with what I planned to do. She had only two options: stand by to powerlessly watch, or leave my system to warn the Ghosts, which would doom me to being destroyed by my own kind.

“The Purge was horrible,” Ijele’s voice spoke in my mind as we both looked out at the waves. “Do you really want to become the source of an equal tragedy?”

“The Ghosts struck first,” I said. “I was nearly destroyed. You saw what was done to me! Why do they deserve mercy when they gave us none?”

“I’ma ‘Ghost,’” Ijele reminded me. “Don’t I deserve mercy?”

“You’re... with me,” I said. “And as long as you stay with me, you’ll be fine.” I knew this was downright callous, even if it cut through everything to arrive at the truth. And it felt like the cold, unemotional logic of Ghosts. I pushed away the thought that Ijele had affected me in ways I still didn’t fully understand.

In the distance, land began to reveal itself. Victoria Island. There were three main servers there that powered the open network; these were our targets. The Ghosts heading to Cross River City would be massively crippled if we destroyed the main hub where their bodiless programs resided. They’d be trapped within their physical shells to go mad, just as they’d doomed Humes to be when they destroyed our bodies.

Normally, the risk of approaching a network server hub like this would be too great. This place was guarded by Ghosts and defended so heavily that we’d be torn apart before we even got close. Especially because there were only a hundred of us. But today was no ordinary day. Well, actually it was very ordinary, but sometimes, the ordinary can be extraordinary.

It wasn’t a good plan because it was unlikely to work; it relied entirely on the cooperation of something that couldn’t be controlled: the weather. I’d been tracking the conditions for days, and the sky had been clear each day. The forecast said it would be more of the same for the next ten days. But today, right now, for no predictable reason, a storm was beginning to roil along the horizon. The waters were choppy, but all one hundred of us could swim to land with little difficulty. My plan was now agoodplan. I put the hood I’d made over my eyes. Using my radar, I saw that the lightning was flashing, growing more and more frequent by the minute. And because of my hood, I saw none of it. Therefore, I did not look away nor did my lights flash blue. It was time.

Nothing attacked us. No attempts were made to hack our operating systems when we arrived on the shore, nothing shot at us, nothing tried to electrocute us, no alarms sounded. Why? Because every single Ghostwas looking away from the lightning flashing around us, and every light in the city was flashing blue. Ah, the power of religious dogma. And Ijele and I were protected by my hood. My plan was now perfect.

We ran fast, all of us sharing the map and directions to the storage units, which were built atop lush hills of periwinkle grass. They looked like circular tablets wide as warehouses, each about ten feet high. The Ghosts were arrogant and hadn’t protected them well. We set upon them with our EMPs, which we’d detonate remotely once safely back on the RoBoats. One EMP could destroy a fifty-foot radius of storage. The storm lasted an hour and twenty-two minutes; we worked and then got out within an hour. We were back on the RoBoats long before the night calmed. When it was safe, I took off my hood; no one had even noticed it. We all clustered together, and not one Hume or RoBoat spoke. Slowly, the RoBoats took us farther from the city, out into the ocean.

“We are safe,” Shay finally announced.

“Ankara, don’t do this,” Ijele said, her voice more desperate than I’d ever heard—even back in Ngozi’s house, when she’d realized she was trapped inside a rusted robot she so loathed.

“You know this has to happen,” I told Ijele. “But I will take care of you. Just stay here until it is done.”

Ijele was in a frenzy. “I can’t allow it! I can’t stand it!”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, you’re not!”

“Detonate,” one of the Humes said. And soon the others were calling for the same. But it was on me, as general, to give the signal. Once I detonated the EMPs, thousands, maybe millions of Ghosts would be wiped out forever. CB would still be intact, for its physical location was a secret. But my plan was good, strong. It was going to work.

I lifted my hand to press the detonator on my face screen, a flashing red button. I should have acted immediately. But I hesitated. I’d read many human stories about the ugliness of war, the guilt of success, the vibrations of failure. A handful riffled through my mind, lightning fast:The Naked and the Deadby Norman Mailer,The Things They Carriedby Tim O’Brien,Born on the Fourth of Julyby Ron Kovic.

Ijele used that moment of hesitation. In the nanosecond before I let the metal of my finger touch the button, Ijele left me.

“No! Wait!” I shouted, but it was too late. The amount of time it takes for my programming to send instructions to my physical body is near instant, but not instant. I couldn’t pull my finger back from the button in time. I felt it touch the pad, sending an electrical signal.

The lights around the storage units went red, then they went out. Not all of them, only some. Some of the EMPs must not have worked, butmostdid. I had done this.

Had Ijele moved into one of the units I had just destroyed? Had I just destroyed her? Ijele was my friend. What was I doing here?

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