Rebel Sisters Page 24

  “Look at you now.”

  Ify looks up from her hands.

  “Look at you now.” There’s no scorn in Xifeng’s voice. In fact, there’s wonder. And admiration. “You’ve grown and become successful and built an extraordinary life for yourself. All the while, you have been carrying these horrible memories inside you.” She comes down to one knee before Ify. “Ify. Listen to me,” she says as she undoes Ify’s restraints and unhooks her ankle clasps from the chair legs. Her voice has grown soft. Recognizably soft. This is how she used to talk to that child soldier who played the touchboard when she was teaching that synth how to be a boy. “We have to keep these memories inside us. Or else there is nothing to push us forward. There’s nothing to learn from. You grow nothing in a barren field.”

  Ify holds Xifeng’s gaze and sniffles.

  “Intentionally wiping away memories of our most important experiences is no way to live.”

  “It’s so hard,” Ify whimpers softly through her tears.

  Xifeng brings her into an embrace that Ify is too weak to resist. “But we must, child,” Xifeng whispers into her hair. “We must.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Ify watches several of the girls lay Grace on a stretcher and bring her to a medical tent.

  “No harm will come to her.”

  Ify frowns at Xifeng.

  “No more harm.”

  Xifeng walks on ahead and it’s not until Grace disappears from Ify’s view entirely that Ify follows Xifeng into the maze of caverns. Already, this place feels familiar. She no longer fears she’ll fall into whatever puddle she steps into, not like when Ngozi had first brought her here. The guards have fully reactivated the bodysuit that had been damaged in the attack on the police station, and it feels good and secure to have it on again. Surrounded by so much strangeness, this is one familiar thing. Still, a part of her misses the mental and physical quiet that came with not being connected to anything.

  “It wasn’t this way in the beginning,” Xifeng tells her as they walk. “The war ended, but there were still attacks. Militia that refused to give up, paramilitary still addicted to the high of war. I remember seeing it when I was running the caravans. Children with machetes at their waists and deadness in their eyes. There were still people who thought they could make their fortune off the illegal trade in certain goods, but for that to work, there needed to be a certain level of violence. But that?” Xifeng shrugs ahead of Ify. “That’s easy enough to stop. It was when people started getting sick that the government began to think something was truly wrong.”

  “Sick?” Ify’s thoughts race to the refugee children held in Alabast.

  “The war was an open wound, but no one wanted to treat it. No one wanted to speak of it or deal with it. People went about their lives, living next to the people who had murdered their families. But containing that inside you with no outlet, it destroys a person.” There’s a faraway quality to Xifeng’s voice, as though she’s invoking the experiences of specific people, reliving the hurt they showed her in their faces. “The government tells you that there’s peace and order and insists on rational dealings. But your mind, whether or not it has been fractured by trauma, knows there’s more to life than this. So it protests. But you can’t launch vigils or march in the streets, so these protests disappear into your body. They become kidney stones or trouble breathing. Backaches, migraines, neoplasms. Toothaches, depression, psychosis. They mushroom in your interpersonal relationships. Marriages fail, friendships disintegrate, the families left after the war are shattered.” She looks over her shoulder at Ify without missing a step. “You’re a doctor. Is emotional constipation a clinical enough term for that?”

  Ify demurs. “I’m not a doctor yet.” But everything Xifeng is saying is unspooling like thread in her mind, attaching to bits of driftwood, clue after clue after clue, and slowly pulling them together. She remembers the Cantonese woman who had died in her sleep, scared to death by her nightmares. Then there was the man who had gone blind after having witnessed his family’s torture. His sight had been restored, but only after weeks of trying to figure out what was wrong with him. And now the children whose response to deportation orders was to fall into comas. Was that what it was? A response?

  Xifeng stops in the empty cave corridor. The echoes of bustle and movement soften until the only noise either of them hears is the occasional drop of water from the ceiling, landing on a puddle at their feet. “It became an epidemic. And the only way the government could see fit to treat it was to wipe all trace of the war from the minds of its citizens.”

  “But how? How do you do that? How do you explain missing family members or a crater where a village used to be? How do you explain mechs that wash up on the shore in pieces? Or mines buried underground that haven’t detonated yet? I . . . I saw Biafra. Like none of it ever happened.”

  Xifeng only shakes her head, then she resumes walking while Ify hurries to catch up. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Nine-Year Storm.” Xifeng can barely bring herself to snort derisively at the fiction. “The government was busy. The people were the easiest part. They just wanted peace. And they were willing to do whatever it took to feel it again. Imagine coming back to your neighborhood to find it reduced to ashes by the people you went to work with. Imagine your coworkers coming home to the poorly dug graves of their children whom you killed. Lie to them and tell them a tornado ruined their lives. A wildfire, a tsunami, radiation fallout.” They stop at the threshold to another room. Outside the entrance stand two armed guards facing forward. Xifeng grows still, looks to the ceiling. “If you could be cured of any physical ailment, would you sacrifice nearly a decade of your past for it?”

  The question is like nothing Ify has ever heard before. Faced with it now, she can’t say what she would choose. So much of what and who she is now is not only because of what happened to her but what she remembers. And she knows for a fact that were her mind to be scraped of all those memories, her body would remember. She would carry those episodes, those experiences, in her ribs, in her heart, in her legs. In her eyes. Unless . . .

  “Forced cyberization,” Ify says in an awed whisper. “The government forced cyberization on . . . on everyone.” The horror begins to sink in. When Ify looks up, Xifeng is facing her and only nods her head before passing through the beaded curtain that leads to the next room.

  Ify can only stare, mouth open in shock. The government forced hundreds of millions of people to undergo cyberization. So it could catalog then delete their memories.

  She pushes herself to move forward, and when she enters the next room, she’s confronted by wall after wall of what appear to be, when she squints, hard drives. Piled from the floor to the ceiling. “What are these?”

  Xifeng walks back to Ify and puts a hand to her shoulder. “Memories. Every memory I could find and download about the Biafran War. It’s all here.”

  So much life, so much death. And to think, it can all fit in one room.

  “Is this a library?” Ify asks. “What are you going to do with these?”

  That hardness returns to Xifeng’s face. “We’re going to restore them. My team has already been delivering these to select households throughout the country. When people get enough clues, they realize where the holes are in their memory, and it is our job to fill them. People will remember.”

  Ify walks to one of the walls but feels as though she’s outside of her body. “But doesn’t it feel wrong?” She reaches up a hand to touch the ridged edges of the small devices, so many of them stacked together. “Making them relive their trauma?”

  Xifeng watches her, hands clasped behind her back. “And yet you remain. You persist. You poke your head and your shoulders through the broken seam of the chrysalis, unsure even of your new form, having not yet seen it in its entirety. That was you when you first arrived in space, yes? You couldn’t have had any idea wh
at you would become. But what you went through. That breaking, that rending—that’s where the pain is concentrated. Sometimes, what we are experiencing is simply our effort to reach forward. It’s a protracted stretching, Ify. One reaches toward something, one stretches a bit farther and is freed, having left behind some rusted-over part of one’s self, some shell that had clung to a familiar, safe tree but that is now an evacuated husk for which the butterfly has no more use.” She arrives at Ify’s side. “That’s what I am going to do for this country. Will you join me?”

  CHAPTER

  34

  War is raging inside of me.

  When I watch Xifeng and Ify move through cave headquarters, a part of me is feeling joy that they are seeing each other after so long apart and that they are knowing that the other is alive after passing much time not knowing. But another part of me is jealousing because Xifeng is looking at Ify like she is special, almost like she is wanting to call her daughter, and I am wanting Xifeng all to myself. I am not wanting to share her. Then I am jealousing again because Xifeng is looking at Ify like Ify is having answer to question she is asking, even though I am not knowing what these question is. And I am wanting to be able to look at Ify and see the mystery of myself being solved, and it is not happening.

  I walk into the medical chamber, and I see Grace Leung who I am beating before and then I am sadding when I am seeing her face, even though it is already healing from the chemicals and the small small surgery they are doing. But Grace is seeing me out of the corner of her eye, and her whole body is clenching like fist or like something preparing for blow. And it is making me to be hating myself that someone is looking at me and thinking this thing instantly. So I am running away and looking for empty room and finding small room that is branching off of one of the main pathways, and it is filled with cleaning products on the shelves and wiring that is bunching up in the corner. I am sitting on the floor and pulling my knees to my chest and hugging them there like this, because doing this is the only thing that is making me to be not crying, and I am wishing now that I never discovered feeling thing, never developing capacity for emotions or ability to do useless human thing like love and be jealousing.

  Beaded curtain is rustling, and when I am looking up, girl is searching shelves on opposite wall for something. It is Binye, who is running with me during mission and shooting and patting my head like I am being her little sister. “Where is it?” And I am hearing thing rattling around until she says, “Aha!” and is turning around and seeing me and almost jumping into the air from shock. “You scared me. What are you doing here?”

  But I am not knowing what I should be telling her.

  She is seeing the look on my face, and I am not knowing what face I am making, but it is causing her to crouch down and touch my face. “Oh,” she is saying like mother or elder sister. Then she says, “Oof,” and opens bottle of painkillers in her hand, dumps a few out onto her palm, then swallows them. She makes a move to put the pill bottle back where she found it, but then puts it in her vest pocket instead. “Cramps,” she tells me, and I am knowing she is talking about a thing that is happening with her body that is never happening with mine.

  “May I ask you a question?” I say in small small voice.

  Binye raises an eyebrow, then slides down the wall until she’s sitting like I’m sitting but with her legs spread out and not hugging them to her chest. “Go ahead.”

  “When you are first cyberizing, what is it feeling like? Do you remember?”

  Binye is considering the ceiling before she answers. “In the beginning? I felt . . . new. Like I’d been born a second time. There’s darkness, then for a few moments, I see myself. My body. I’m lying in a hospital bed, not moving. My eyes are closed, and I think I’m asleep. Or dead. Then I wake up. But not like waking up from a dream. It’s like waking up into the world for the very first time. And the lights are so bright it hurts. And the blankets are rough, and the noise makes my head feel like it’s going to explode. And all I smell is antiseptic. It was as though I were a child experiencing all of this for the first time.”

  What she is saying is reminding me of thing, but the remembering is like sand that is running through my fingers. I am trying to make the remembering come, to be pulling it from Binye’s words, but when I grab a piece of it—the smell of rain-wet soil, the sound of water lapping against shoreline—it is vanishing.

  “Why do you ask?” Binye’s voice is taking me out of my thoughts. Then she is squinting at me and saying, “Oh. You’re a synth. I am not insulting you. I am just realizing why you must be wanting to know.” She moves closer to me. “I see the way you all are. Like children. And you’re different. If you were all the same child, it would be easier to think you’re all machines, but . . .” She does not finish.

  I am smiling, and then I am waking up on recliner chair that is also lowering itself to being bed or table. Cushion beneath me is blue and plastic and torn. Wall is hissing around me, fans whirring, spraying mist on me, cleaning radioactive dust from everywhere in here.

  Around me, monitor is hanging at angles from the ceiling. A robot torso in the shape of a human leans forward from a wall, its arms limp in front of it, head bowed. Other Augmented parts is lying in neat rows arrayed by limb on counters opposite me, all the forearms in a row and, next to them, hands with their fingers separated and positioned in front of them.

  On almost all of the tables lie blueprints. Random bits of gear litter the floor at the base of reclining chairs. Hornets buzz out from beneath the table I am on and spray misty alcohol onto me and I am wanting to be waving my arms, but I am seeing why I cannot.

  I am having no legs and am having only one arm. But I am not being nervous, for some reason. This memory is in full colors. It has my colors, but it is sometime having blue-green on the edges. And it is having these edges when Chinese man with silver beard and doctor’s cap is smiling in my face. The colored edges fade in and out, in and out when I say, “Am I alive,” and he is chuckling.

  “Yes, quite,” he is telling me. “Though dinner won’t be ready for a few hours. I don’t think hunger will be an issue for you yet, however.” He is looking at me like he is remembering something or reminding himself of something, like how to have proper manners, but I am reading the way his body is speaking and I am knowing that he is looking at me and he is seeing the rememberings I am holding in my head before I am winding up with one arm left on this table. He is seeing that I am inside mech that is being shot down because I am in battle, then mech is plummeting into lagoon. He is seeing that I had been a pilot in the war, and when he is first seeing my body in the lagoon, I am just a mangled mess of flesh and metal. But he is saving me somehow.

  “Your name is Onyii, right?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  He smiles. “I’m your doctor. When we’re finished, you can meet some of the boys.” He looks at his hands, then up at me again. “I think they’ll be happy to have a big sister.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  Ify’s hand hovers over one of the drives. Small enough to fit into the palm of her hand. Large enough to contain most of the memories of an entire cyberized human being. Ify remembers once hearing in a lecture hall that all words ever spoken by human beings could be contained in forty-two zettabytes of data if recorded as ancient sixteen-kilohertz sixteen-bit audio. Of course, increasing the quality of that audio to today’s standards would entail an order of magnitude in the thousands, but, looking at the drives before her, Ify marvels. Hundreds of zettabytes of storage in each one. And thousands of them lining the walls of this cave.

  Xifeng’s question rings in Ify’s ears, the loudest echo she has ever heard. Will you join me?

  Ify touches one of the drives, runs a finger along a ridged edge, then slowly pulls away. She turns to Xifeng and sees the look of expectant joy on her face, the look of someone already having made her plans. A pang of guilt
stabs Ify’s heart, but she smothers the hurt. This is bigger than them.

  “No.”

  Disappointment pulls down Xifeng’s features like Ify’s words have deflated her. Then, for the briefest of moments, it curls her lips into a snarl before she schools her face into an aspect of calm and acceptance. “Why not?”

  “You’re forcing trauma on these people.” Ify feels serenity radiate through her. She is right, and she knows it. Amid all the uncertainty and chaos surrounding her, all the things that have happened and been said to her to throw her mind into tumult, there is this certainty. She clings to it.

  “I am showing them the truth. These piecemeal revelations are part of the solution, but they are not enough. You don’t understand, Ify. I have the tools to reverse the virus the government has injected into the minds of its citizens. This virus of forgetting.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A central data processing center. Everyone in Nigeria is connected. Everyone we will help is connected. Once I inject the right code into that center, it will flood the net with every forbidden memory. Everyone will remember. Only then will the country move forward.”

  “The country.” That familiar contempt returns to Ify. She keeps her anger at bay. But she allows herself to feel pity. “The country that you know so well. You’ve lived here for less than a decade, and you know what is good for this country? You were not born here. You were not made here. You never knew this place before war. How could you possibly understand it after war?” She draws closer to Xifeng. “What you’re doing is wrong.” With a wide sweep of her arm, she indicates the walls of hard drives. “This will only bring war back.”