Page 43 of Death of the Author

She rolled up to the edge and grabbed one of the side bars, starting to pull and drag herself on. “Can I help?” Hugo asked.

Zelu smiled, annoyed but relieved. “Yes.”

He gently lifted her legs at the calves. She balanced on her arms, and not for the first or second or millionth time, she thanked the stars for their strength. Her arms might have brought her into that tree that fateful day, but they had also wheeled, pulled, and lifted her everywhere she needed to go ever since. She lay back on the table, and Hugo placed the exos on her legs, lining each side up from hip to toe.

He handed her a cyan-colored rod the size of her hand. “Okay, voice recognition,” he said. “Say ‘On.’ And say it with confidence.”

“On.” The rod began to vibrate in her hand. But it was more than vibration. It emitted a low-level electrical charge that made the muscles in her hand tense up.

A voice that was both male and female and yet neither asked her, “Name?”

Her heart was pounding. “Zelunjo Ngozi Onyenezi-Onyedele.”

“Please press your fingers to the remote,” the voice responded.

“Fingerprints,” Hugo explained beside her.

She pressed her fingers to the rod’s smooth surface.

“Please hold the remote to your eyes,” the voice said.

“Retinal scan,” Hugo said.

Zelu held it in front of her face.

“Ready,” the voice said. “Twenty seconds.”

“Hold still,” Hugo said. “It won’t need to do this again.”

The rod pulled itself from her hand as if a magnet had been activated. It tumbled toward her right hip and then locked onto the other parts. She wanted to ask questions, but she stayed still and quiet. Like swimming in the ocean. Relax, let it all go, move with it...

They moved. The parts that were her exos. The slivers of metal expanded and built themselves around her legs in ways that were utterly creepy. Like they were alive, like they knew precisely what they were doing. They gently but firmly shoved themselves beneath her nonfunctioning legs and knit together underneath. In less than a minute, they had molded around her legs like a malleable, gentle yet strong second skin. She laughed. “What’s next?”

For the next few hours, Hugo taught her about every part of her exos, and the exos learned every part of her. They scanned her body while she lay there, monitoring her heart rate and blood pressure. That voice spoke aloud again, asking her to report sensations or identify where certain parts sat on her body.

She wanted to stand with them. Desperately. But Hugo said they wouldn’t try walking just yet; first, she needed to get used to simply having them on. He helped her into her wheelchair again, and she wheeled around campus with him for an hour while the disembodied voice of the exos asked an array of questions about her lifestyle and leisure activities. When she told it she swam, it even asked herwhereshe liked to swim and what her strongest style of swimming was.

“Your legs are disconnected from your brain, so the machines need to construct a brain of their own,” Hugo said. “The more specifics they learn about you, the better a job they can do. And they’ll keep learning.”

He sounded so confident that they would work for her, but she knew better than to take it for granted. She’d read thoroughly about this process online. Some patients just couldn’t take to the exos. They found them impossible to adjust to, or they changed their minds for whatever reason. There were more than a few instances of this, and it bothered her that Hugo hadn’t mentioned it even once. Maybe he didn’t want to scare or discourage her. Regardless, the internet existed, she’d used it, and now she was fighting off all that fear and discouragement. The moment of truth would be tomorrow, when Hugo said she could try standing for the first time. According to all she’d read, that was the moment when peoplealways either said, “I love these!” or “Fuck this shit, my chair is perfectly fine.”

She was glad to get back to her hotel room that night. The prepping with the exos had been tiring, and afterward, Hugo had invited her to dinner with several MIT professors and grad students. There had been no easy way to say no. After the dinner, a mechanical engineering grad student named David had quietly stepped toward her while she was waiting for her ride back to the hotel and asked her if she’d go out to dinner with just him at some point. She’d looked at the confident smirk on his thick, luscious lips and said she might give him a call if he gave her his phone number. Smart and hot was her favorite combination.

She showered, laid out her clothes for tomorrow, and lay down on the bed. She checked her phone. More messages from her family had queued up. Chinyere’s texts were cold and short, passive-aggressive and shaming. Amarachi’s were also full of guilt trips. How dare Zelu be so selfish to make her mother cry and her father unable to sleep? Tolu was less aggressive, begging her to just call him, claiming that he’d listen to whatever she wanted to say. Msizi hadn’t called at all. He also hadn’t posted a thing on any of his moderately active social media accounts since she’d left. Or maybe he’d just blocked her.

She’d only posted to her social media once today, a photo she’d taken from her point of view going into the physical therapy gym with the caption:

The next level. #RustedRobots.

It had been Liked nearly 200,000 times, and the comments were mainly questions and theories about what the heck the photo meant. Several thought she was on the set of theRusted Robotsfilm. These made her chuckle. Authors rarely had anything to do with a film adaptation... well, nothing more than having written the novel the film was based on.

She considered opening her laptop but picked up her journal and peninstead. After the day she’d had, writing by hand, the old-school way, felt rebellious.

Tomorrow’s the big day. I’m ready for it. Do I have expectations? Yes. No. When Hugo first approached me, I was intrigued, but it’s not like I’ve been sitting here hoping for a fucking miracle. I don’t believe in all that. I fell out of a tree that had already been hollowed out by ravenous insects. It was a shell and I didn’t even know it. From the outside, it looked like something that would outlive me by centuries. That dead thing dropped me like something offended and now I’m paralyzed. I don’t believe in miracles. I’m okay with it. I’m alive. I have a strange present and a strange future. And I’m curious. I’m ready to spin the wheel. I want to see. I’d have been a fool if I didn’t go to see. But my family has expectations and their blood runs through me, too. They expect a lot. They expect me to live. To not embarrass them too much. To stay in my place in the family. Sometimes they expect me to stay invisible. I know my parents do. Invisible enough that no one will start asking questions and look at me so closely that they remember that an Onyenezi-Onyedele is “crippled.” My coming here, my using exos will draw attention to ALL this.

Maybe I want to bring attention to it, though. And I think that if I could do everything on my own, including walk—well, “walk” (I’ll never be able towalkwalk)—they couldn’t keep me in the sad place they’ve unintentionally made for me. I’ve already started to move out of it; I will continue. I’m afraid. I don’t have their support. But I will continue. Even if tomorrow is a fail. Tomorrow might be a fail. Maybe I’ll break all the bones in my legs. It will be my fault. But I will continue. I’ve allowed myself to dream. Not of reality. I will never be able to walk. I know. But I want to see. I don’t expect, but maybe I am hoping.

Tomorrow is where my hope lives.

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