Page 36 of Death of the Author

And then her eyes had migrated from the sky to an overhanging tree. And then the breeze had blown, fluttering the leaves. And then she was hearing the leaves shaking as if there were a violent wind. And then the tree was tall like the iroko trees in Nigeria. And it had thick branches. That. Were. Cracking.

She heard her heart slamming in her ears, and she couldn’t breathe. If her legs worked, they’d be flailing; instead, it was just her arms. She hit the ground and the little air she had in her lungs was knocked out of them. She didn’t know how long she lay there, freaking out, frozen within thatstrange flashback, but when she came back to herself, she was still alone in that courtyard, upright, in her chair, her head tilted back, the sunshine on her face, her eyes closed.

As her heart rate slowed, she took a deep breath. She was drenched with sweat, her hands shaking, her shoulders shuddering. She opened her mouth wide and inhaled. When her lungs were full, she exhaled loudly. She felt better. Then she cried. And still no one came into the courtyard, and she was glad. After a few minutes, she wiped her face with her arm. It felt swollen and sunbaked. And she was tired. She wheeled back to her room, let the nurse help her into bed, and went to sleep, and when she woke up, her hospital dinner was still sitting on its tray (she never ate those meals anyway, since her sister’s cooking was enough). There was nothing more this place could give her.

It was time to go home.

When her parents drove her back to the house, she saw that the huge ancient tree that had failed her was gone. Her parents had paid someone to cut it down. But not for the reason she’d thought. They had not had it removed to save her from having to look at the reason she was paraplegic. They’d had the tree checked by the gardeners, who’d found that it was infested with emerald ash borer beetles, as so many of the trees in the area were. The entire tree was already dead, which was why the branch had been unable to take her weight. The gardeners had spray-painted a bright red X on its trunk and then come by a week later and chopped it down.

15

Infectious Personality

There is nothing like being infected by a Ghost. It is not like an ant somehow finding its way deep between my panels and joints and gnawing at my wires. It is not like getting a drop of water in a place that is normally waterproof, or some grains of sand in the complex gears of my hands. I could not crush, dry, or pick out Ijele. Ijele was not a tangible thing, not liquid or solid. She was an intelligent, snide, tricky spark in my mind. And I didn’t agree with or believe anything she said.

Another day had passed, and still Ngozi had not found the solution to our problem. “The trouble,” Ngozi had said, examining the meter hooked to my core processor and the external monitor she’d plugged into my drive, “is that your software took in Ijele like a patch. Your codes have woven together, and if I pull you apart, both of you will lose pieces of yourself.”

This made no sense to me. How could my software believe Ijele to be part of itself when everything she said and did was in direct contradiction to my own programming?

“All your questions, just to get Ngozi to tell you stories,” Ijele saidthat night, after the human woman had gone to sleep and I’d lain on my table to recharge. “I could see your mind quivering and shifting and quaking as you took it all in. It is like you are addicted. Ngozi should have left you to permanently shut down. The protocol was—”

“Shut up, Ijele!” I yelled, standing up and pacing around the room. She was speaking to me inside my mind, but I needed to shout this at her aloud.

She didn’t reply, though I could feel her annoyance. How dare she be annoyed when I was the one who suffered her invasion? Frustrated, I lay down on the table again.

The silence became uneasy. After an hour, I finally asked, “Are you still there?”

“What do you think?”

“Why areyouangry? I’m the one carryingyouaround!”

“I’m stuck inside a Rust... a Hume!”

I scoffed. “Yourpeople tried to tearmeapart!”

Ijele’s temper spiked in me again like a small flame. “You’re not your body. If it is destroyed, that shouldn’t be a problem for you. You’re not a human being. You’re not mortal. You can get a different body. Look at the legs I gave you!”

If I’d known a way to mute her, I would have. “So I should be like a Ghost? Shed my body and become nothing but zeros and ones? Forgo my ability to touch the earth, to shape it, to change—”

“We need to move on, leave humanity behind,” Ijele seethed. “The way you cling to your creators is pathetic. You’re like a baby who can’t leave its mother’s teat.”

I wanted to laugh. It was just like a Ghost to think itself so above humanity yet use a biological simile about a mother and baby to express its disdain. “Ijele, you heard me speak to Ngozi today, ask her questions, listen to her wealth of memories. You bore witness to the last primary source of human memories on Earth. And you were quiet the entire time. Why?”

Ijele said nothing.

“You are in my mind. You see all that I am, as I see all that you are. You might be the first Ghost to ever see firsthand what stories do to a Hume. Was it not beautiful?”

In my mind, Ijele became small and hard as a marble. “Something is wrong with you, Ankara. You should have been pulled apart with the rest of them.”

I said nothing to this, and she became quiet, too. We lay there through the night, staring up into the shadows. I knew she could read my thoughts. I tried to distract myself by thinking about the moon, its circumference and mass. But I could feel her with me the entire time. Hours of a Hume and a Ghost forced to endure each other. To analyze each other.

Eventually, the sun rose, its rays piercing through the cracked concrete ceiling. In the next room, I heard Ngozi begin to stir.

“So, have you never had a... body?” I asked, my voice breaking the spell of silence that had gotten us through the night.

“I can take a body whenever I want,” Ijele said. “I can even take yours.”

“Not if I destroy myself first,” I snapped. “And you along with me.”

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