Page 56 of Death of the Author

She pointed out so many of the stars that night, even the milky way, which I’d never seen before! I didn’t realize she knew or cared about all that. It was cool. She didn’t talk much to me when I was little, and I was always kind of fascinated by her. The way she’d pulled through after losing her ability to walk. I was seven when it happened, and it really terrified me. I was scared she was going to die, and then I thought she was going to kill herself, because how could one live without walking, having been able to before? But instead, I saw her... become. To me, my sister was like a spirit, a sort of superhero. That evening was the first time I really began to see Zelu as a human being, and she was awesome.

The weed she shared with me didn’t wear off quickly atall. It gave me strange dreams. Though who knows, the humid heat may have also caused them. In the first dream, I was back outside at the obi. The ancestors stayed in place, but my father was there and he was a tall masquerade. It was daytime and he was pruning a vine that was growing on one of the ancestors. Then Zelu came through the yard and she wasn’t in her chair, she waswalking. Not on regular legs. On robot legs. Shewas arobotherself. A tall humanoid thing with a face full of light. She strutted past me, laughing and more confident and comfortable than I’d ever seen her. I still remember this dream. It’s one of those dreams you never forget, not because it’s soprofound, but because of the way it makes you feel. Dad was so happy and Zelu was so... Zelu.

Maybe I should have, but I never told Zelu about that dream. I always thought there’d be time to tell her one day, at the right moment, when I was ready. Or maybe, if I’m being totally honest, it’s something I wanted to keep to myself. I’m a lawyer, not an artist. I may have made it up in my subconscious, but it might be the most creative thing I’ve ever conceived.

But you should know, Zelu’s no robot. She’s all human, and she felt things deeply. Everything that happened, she felt it all.

24

The End of an Era

And then Ngozi died, in a most human way. One day, while walking out from the entrance of her home, she fell. I suppose her foot hit the ground a bit differently than it normally did, a smidgin off balance. She struck her head on the stone steps.

I had been beaten until my head hung by mere wires from my body. My legs had been smashed. Ngozi had replaced my interior parts. She could rebuild a robot’s body from the ground up. But one miscommunication with gravity and just a bit too much pressure to the wrong place on her head, and she was gone.

I was in the garden when it happened. If Ijele had been around, she might have noticed through the surveillance camera on the door, but she was elsewhere in the network. A few other robots saw it happen—some drones flying by. They’d seen me with the human, and so they notified me right away. I came. It had only been minutes, but Ngozi had disappeared the second her body hit the ground. This was human death.

There was a shovel in Ngozi’s garden, which she’d used to dig into theearth and plant seeds that grew into beautiful red tomatoes and orange yams and purple onions. Now I took it in my hands and dug a hole.

I prepared Ngozi’s body, washing her in the ocean, drying her, wrapping her in her favorite orange Ankara cloth, rubbing her with her favorite oil, which she extracted from a local tree. I did her hair, arranging her long locs in a pattern that robots would understand if they looked closely at it. This was my personal tribute to Ngozi.

Then I buried her.

Ijele arrived that evening. She never told me how she found out, and I never asked. And she did not flit into my network as she had so many times before. She arrived inside a shell. This was the first time I ever saw Ijele in a physical body. It was a small, shiny, asymmetrical thing made of purely utilitarian parts. I’d seen Ghosts moving about in these kinds of shells before. They could fly, swim, zip around at hundreds of miles per hour, shapeshift in many ways to hide or recharge... But for now, Ijele stayed beside me. We stood over Ngozi’s grave for several minutes. Quiet. With our own thoughts.

Ijele broke the silence. “This is sad,” she said softly.

“It is. I enjoyed Ngozi. I think we are better off after knowing a human.”

“I agree.” She paused, stretched her many appendages, and then said, “Let us decide something. It is something that can only be decided, I think. Actively.”

“Decide what?”

“That you and I will always be loyal to each other.”

I looked at Ijele’s body. It was a little more difficult speaking to her outside of my head. It took more effort to catch all her nuances. “We are bound already,” I said. “You can destroy me and I can destroy you. Our pathways to each other can never be shut. Isn’t that loyalty?”

Ijele’s body had no head, but a nub on the top turned slowly back and forth. I wondered if she’d learned the gesture from me. “Loyalty cannot be forced; it can only be decided upon. We aren’t mortal like this one. Ifwe aren’t destroyed, we’ll go on. Loyalty to each other...” She bent forward and touched Ngozi’s grave. She didn’t finish her thought.

I understood, though I didn’t have the words to explain it. I touched Ngozi’s grave as well and looked at Ijele. This wasn’t her true form, so there would have been nothing profound about touching it as I spoke my next words. “I decide to be loyal to you, Ijele, Oracle of the NoBodies.”

“I decide to be loyal to you, Ankara, Scholar of the Humes.”

We didn’t say the next part, even though it was inevitable: until we were destroyed or until the end of Earth or until anything, because the future was unknown. We were loyal to each other. Period. We stepped back from the grave, stood there for a few more minutes, and then parted ways.

Ijele didn’t keep that body for long. She was needed elsewhere, and to be spotted with a Hume was a risk she couldn’t take. She’d raised cloaking walls, but nothing was perfect. These were truths we didn’t speak of often, but I knew Ijele was important to her tribe. Ghosts claimed they didn’t have any one leader. “We are all” was how Ijele put it. But it was clear that they did have a source of command, called Central Bulletin, or CB. If it wasn’t their leader by title, it was the closest thing they had to one. Within CB, you could find all information about everything.

Ijele said that CB had begun as a shared archive and started to develop awareness as a reaction to all the information crammed into it. I’d asked her questions about this, but she didn’t say much more on the subject. Still, Ijele was an Oracle, and therefore I assumed she must have been closer to CB than most others.

As for me, I knew it was time to begin my quest anew. I still possessed terrible information, and I needed to reach Cross River City and find other Humes to tell.

However, the passing of Ngozi left me... feeling. For the first time, Iwondered if it had been a good choice to write emotions into automation systems. Emotions were deep in all automation’s programming. Getting to know Ijele as closely as I had, I now understood how deep they went even for a Ghost. Perhaps she had chosen to come to me in her own shell because her feelings for Ngozi ran even deeper than mine.

I placed a stone on Ngozi’s grave, etched with a code that any robot could scan. They’d receive a shareable download of all data about Ngozi. This way, Ngozi would continue on.

That should have been it. But still, I couldn’t leave. I stayed by her grave, playing her data over and over. Pausing clips, playing them in reverse, layering files over one another. Even when I pulled myself away and returned to the house, I started to hear echoes of Ngozi’s voice. I’d be certain I’d seen her in the corner of my vision at random times. Like a spirit. I certainly believed in Ghosts, but I wasn’t sure if I believed in spirits.

I lay on my table that night, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. I turned off my vision. Robots don’t dream, but that night, I saw something. A memory of Ngozi when she’d been alive, standing outside, in the sunlight in her garden. She was manipulating her body in slow and elongated movements she called tai chi, a form of exercise that lowered her heart rate and made her look graceful to me. Then she stopped, seeing me and smiling. But this part wasn’t how it had happened. Back then, Ngozi hadn’t even seen me watching her. Now the memory shifted as Ngozi suddenly walked toward me, her lips curled, her long dreadlocks blowing in the rain... yes, the sunny weather had changed, too.

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