Page 37 of Death of the Author

We were quiet. In the next room, Ngozi’s feet shuffled across the floor. Water began to trickle, like it was being poured from a pot.

“I feel no love for bodies,” Ijele finally said. “I have experienced the physical world, and it is nothing special. This is nothing to cherish. Body is not a god. That is flawed human thinking. The experience of the world is much deeper and wider than any one body can hold.”

“I will never understand your kind,” I said.

“I will never understand yours,” Ijele retorted.

Ngozi’s door opened, and the woman came out, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. And the day began.

Three days passed, and still the infection remained.

While Ngozi puzzled with an isolated strand of our code on her computer, she tasked me with collecting more of the sweet, ripe fruitsfrom the trees behind her home. The sun was setting, and through the wash of oranges and purples, pricks of starlight had begun to show themselves.

“Think of the stars,” I said to Ijele.

“What about them?”

“Well, you rely on infrastructure, cyberspace, the network. It allows you to ‘fly,’ fine, but only where automation has been first. You can’t explore the stars without a body. You can only go as far as the satellites.”

Ijele was quiet.

“Imagine being a Charger,” I continued. “A robot who can leave the planet. Touching parts of space nothing Earthly has ever touched. You ever wonder what that would be like?”

“We NoBodies don’t care for outer travel,” Ijele finally said. “We prefer to travel through the network, which is just as infinite as the universe.”

This was something I had never considered. When a NoBody explored the network, they didn’t leave a body behind somewhere else. They could keep going and going, for distance meant nothing when you had nothing to return to. To be without a body made the network something else. To live like that diminished the physical world.

The sky fully darkened, and the Milky Way came into view, hazy and mysterious. I could feel Ijele gazing at it through my eyes, just as I did.

“We move through the network half-aware, half on autopilot,” Ijele mused. “We know what we want to do, and the network brings up where we must go. It’s like a body, but better.”

I hadn’t known this before. I’d learned it from the Ghost infecting my mind. What a surprising feeling.

On the eighth day, Ngozi believed she’d found the solution to our predicament. She laid me down on the table and connected wires to my core. She ran a program from her computer and then, in silence, we waited.

Her program downloaded and washed through my system. My operating system opened to greet it, rearranging my code to make space. We waited some more.

Eventually, Ngozi’s computer chirped. “Update complete.”

“Ijele?” I said, probing my mind for a sign of her.

Silence. Blessed silence. Maybe she had taken her opportunity and flitted into the network like a fish from a net back into the sea.

But then I felt it. The flare of irritation that was not my own and yet was. “I still can’t get out,” Ijele said to Ngozi through my speakers.

Ngozi mumbled to herself, rubbing her chin. “We will find a way,” she said, reaching down to disconnect the wires from me.

Later that night, we lay on the table and stared into the cracks in the ceiling.

“Do you think this human can really undo what she’s done?” I asked.

“What choice do we have?” Ijele replied.

The hours passed. Outside, crickets chirped, owls hooted, mice scurried through the grass. In the next room, Ngozi breathed deeply, in and out, in and out.

“Sometimes, I actually do look through a body toward the stars,” Ijele said, so soft within my mind. “I perceive them, and they make me wonder, ‘How did I get here?’”

“Humankind,” I said simply.

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