Page 83 of Death of the Author

Bola looked at Zelu and pointed at her with raised eyebrows. Zelu smirked proudly and nodded. Bola slowly nodded back and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“Here is my sister,” Auntie Constance sang, not even acknowledging her new hairstyle. She grabbed and hugged her. The society women gathered around her, though Zelu noticed a few of them frowning. Her mother beamed through it all, shaking her twists this way and that, showing them off with pride.

“Heeeeey! It’s my birthday!” she shouted.

All evening, the sound of Fourth of July fireworks reverberated around the city of Chicago, mingling with the occasional gunshot.

For the first anniversary of Secret’s passing, it was only Zelu who stayed behind while everyone else went back to Nigeria. Their mother, who’d graduated her twists to locs, went. Even Tolu, his wife, and their three-month-old daughter, whose nickname was Cricket, went.

For Zelu, fame was still fame.

“I’ll wear a mustache and wig,” she’d begged her mother, tears dribbling from her eyes. She hadn’t expected her mother to ask her not to go,not this second time. “I don’t care. I just want to touch where Dad lies, be present, see everyone and have them all see me. It’shome; it’s where we all go to feel grounded.”

Nigeria and her parents’ hometowns and villages were alignment. Zelu used to think this was a feeling that only emigrants who’d grown up there could have, but it was a need for their foreign-born children, too. There was a deep Americanness to Zelu’s way of thinking, how she carried herself, even her spirit. However, her bridge tohomewas healthy and strong. And now that her father had passed and his body was in that land, that back-and-forth was even more necessary to Zelu and her siblings. Staying away for another year hurt Zelu’s soul.

“It’s not safe for you,” her mother said.

Zelu squeezed her face between her palms and groaned, the news sinking in. She’d really wanted to go. Last time she’d been in Nigeria, her relatives had seen her as the family’s crippled failure. Now she’d finally bloomed as a person, and she wanted to show herself off. “Come on, Moooooom,” she whined.

“I’m sorry, Zelu, but no,” her mother said, and that was the end of it.

The day of the anniversary, Zelu was alone. Even Msizi was away, in Durban on important business. She felt excluded. She was always excluded somehow, be it because she couldn’t walk or because she was too famous or whatever. Zelu couldn’t help but wonder if her mother also didn’t want people seeing her “robot legs.” She could imagine relatives speculating that her being part robot was the curse of her fame.

She’d called Hugo in a moment when she was feeling especially low, but he hadn’t picked up. She didn’t leave a message. When he called her back minutes later, she didn’t answer. He called another two times, but something in her just refused to speak to him. She’d just stared at the phone as it buzzed and buzzed.

Zelu spent much of the day at the pier, gazing at Lake Michigan and thinking about how her father had danced the dance of the masquerade at that party so long ago.

35

Cross River City

I will never forget the day I entered Cross River City for the first time. The old human road and archway were still there, overgrown with vines and tree roots. Periwinkle grass didn’t thrive here; there was too much powerful competition.

When I entered the city limits, I heard no signals to indicate that any automation survived in these parts. The streets were littered with human trash, and broken buildings sagged into the forest floor under the weight of the vegetation that had grown around them. Any passerby would assume the area to be vacant and uninteresting; only a Hume might be intrigued by a small, crumbling human town.

Now I know that Cross River City was protected from the general network. All of its data clouds (which were often used as temporary sanctuaries for Humes who’d lost their bodies) were embedded in the DNA of the central trees, a large cluster of old genetically engineered iroko trees at the city’s center, in particular. Aside from this, the whole forest was full of genetically engineered trees and plants that carried information and were made to protect Humes.

This made it untouchable to Ghosts.

A Hume named Oga Chukwu had lived in these parts since the day he’d been activated by his creators. He’d been built to keep the outskirts of the forest free of trash. He was an old, old robot. He and the other Humes living here had survived the protocol because Cross River City wasn’t connected to the general network, and therefore non-Hume automation didn’t linger. The protocol didn’t make it into the city’s closed servers, and no other automation was close enough to act before the command ended. When they learned what had happened, Oga Chukwu took their survival as a sign to prepare for war.

After the Purge, Oga Chukwu wrote and sent out a strong yet simple signal to draw other Humes, wherever they were, and those who remained had answered the call from all over West Africa, some from even farther. They’d walked, run, flown, convinced RoBoats to bear them across seas and oceans, even dug their way to Cross River City. And so this place had become a real city over the months, a wild and free community that most non-Hume robots avoided because, the increasing militant Hume presence aside, the only way to procure sunlight to stay charged was to climb to the treetops.

I hadn’t received Oga Chukwu’s signal after the Purge, but when I arrived, he assumed that I had. I wasn’t sure of the reason, but I played along. It took me days to understand why his plea hadn’t reached me; he’d designed it only for Humes, and my code had shifted a bit when Ijele joined my programming. I could never let residents of Cross River City discover this fact or they’d destroy me.

The city had been a refuge for Humes long before the Purge, and its history was written everywhere. I could see all the scans, pings, networks. If I touched a tree, the Cross River network would open troves of information for me, and draw information from my drives in turn. There were tunnels and winding paths through the trees. There were stone and wooden huts with digital nodes. There were wind shelters and fast-charging ports. And of course, there were intricate and sturdy scaffolding and platforms that robots could climb up and perch on to catch the sun. I was amazed. Lagos was still the most sophisticated city I’d ever seen—no tribe could surpass the Ghosts in their digital sophistication and how they’d made what housed their digital stronghold so structurally sound—but Oga Chukwu and the Humes he led here were doing something in this place that was truly unique.

The moment I stepped past the archway, I was counted. My number was 574. Then I was scanned. It was noted that I was a Scholar. They didn’t find any trace of Ijele within me; she was gone, for now, and no damage was visible in my coding.

Within minutes, five tall, robust white Hume robots with muddy flat feet came from between the trees to meet me. They brought me to the center of their civilization, where a giant glowing tree soared into the canopy. All around it, wooden platforms and stairways and ladders had been built so that you could climb, circle around the tree, and sit among its vast branches. Together we climbed toward the top, where the forest’s canopy began to thin and we could see the rising sun.

Then a small Hume robot came down from higher up in the tree. He was made of a blue metal and had a blue Hume Star. He looked like a smooth, shiny stick figure, but he was flexible and strong, too. This was a robot who could fight and was not easily broken. Like all other robots’ here, including mine now, his feet were caked with mud. He spoke to me aloud and I immediately liked him for this reason.

“Welcome, Ankara,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I am Oga Chukwu.”

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