Aminat is twenty minutes early for her appointment, which is exactly how she likes it. She is never on time, and she abhors lateness. She leaves her briefcase locked in the boot and her car in the visitors’ park even though she is an employee. The sign says Department of Agriculture, Ubar. Most people believe that, and there are a few legitimate floors that cater to the agrarian needs of Nigerians, which, in Rosewater, means storage of the abundant food growth in vast silos, refrigerated or otherwise. That notwithstanding, the main business of this building is in the sublevels that house Section Forty-five.
Before she reaches the main doors she powers down her phone by tapping her forearm twice. Inside, there are no receptionists. It is a Saturday and only workers with S45 business come around. She knows her implant has been scanned and doors open for her, but she does not meet a single person. The only sound is the click-clack of her heels on the polished floor. She comes to an elevator and it opens. There are no numbers on the inside, just polished metal and an overhead light. The music is something cribbed from Marvin Gaye that Aminat hums as she begins to descend.
She adjusts her suit and checks her make-up in the imperfect reflection.
“Miss Arigbede, the elevator will soon be coming to a stop,” says a disembodied voice.
“Thank you,” she says.
When the doors open there is a man waiting just outside. He is armed with a machine pistol, but he smiles and nods to her, then points to the double doors at the end of a short corridor. He wears no ID tag and Aminat wonders if this is so he can shoot without repercussions.
The doors open into a research lab. Femi Alaagomeji, Aminat’s boss, is already there. She is wearing an incongruous summer dress, but Femi is one of those exceptionally beautiful people who look good in anything. Everybody in every room stares at Femi. Always.
“You’re early,” says Femi. “Good.”
“Good morning, ma’am.”
“How’s your boyfriend?”
“I left him playing chess with a computer,” Aminat says. Not true, but it deflects interest.
Femi grunts, and hands Aminat a pair of wraparound goggles.
They stand in a small room with a bank of monitors, some technicians and a transparent screen that takes up an entire wall. Behind the screen there is a man strapped into a chair. It looks like he’s at the dentist’s, or is about to receive shock therapy, although he seems calm. He has on a navy blue body suit, and there are electrodes attached all over him. Technicians crawl around him, checking, calibrating, fussing. Opposite is a large machine with a cylindrical projection that points towards him as if it will take an X-ray photograph. The back of the machine is connected to a larger mechanism linked to a horizontal metal torus that curves into the distance and back. There are no people around it so Aminat cannot judge its height.
“You know why I’ve asked you here?” says Femi.
“An experiment in decoupling?” says Aminat.
“Yes. Since it’s related to your work I thought you would like to observe.”
Indeed. For decades the entire biosphere has been gradually contaminated with an alien species, a microorganism designated ascomycetes xenosphericus. There may be sub-strains and variants but they share a protean nature and a disdain for the Hayflick Limit. Over time S45 has discovered that these xenoforms have been slowly mimicking human cells, taking over human bodies. The pace has been leisurely, and Aminat herself is only 7 per cent alien. She has seen subjects with xenoform percentages in the low forties. Her job is to find a chemical cure. She knows there are others, like this bunch, working on the same problem. Decoupling is the theoretical separation of xenoform from human tissue. In practice, nothing has been able to remove the alien cells.
Femi points Aminat to a seat, but since her boss is standing, Aminat declines. She notes that apart from Femi’s fruity perfume, there is no smell in the room. Not even antiseptic. A large display counts down from forty-five seconds while the techies do their last-minute dithering. Aminat glances at Femi, admiring her skin, her posture, her poise. Femi is as tall as Aminat, but thicker about the middle and without the athlete’s muscle tone. This imperfection seems to make Femi even more attractive. Aminat knows that Femi Alaagomeji is only 2 per cent xenoform, one of the lowest on record for adults. Newborns have undetectable levels but by the end of the first year of life it’s usually up to 1 per cent.
Ten seconds. An alarm goes off and the techies inside the walled-off area run out and seal the subject in. He is sweating despite a display that tells Aminat it is twenty-two Celsius in the chamber. His eyes are wide and Aminat bets if she could read his mind he would be asking himself why the fuck he volunteered.
The lights dip when the counter reaches zero.
“That shouldn’t happen,” says Femi, frowning. “It has an independent circuit.”
There is no sound signifying activation, but the man winces. The biometry fluctuates wildly, too fast for Aminat to follow, but the techies at the monitors seem perturbed. The subject’s mouth is now wide open and his neck veins stand out like they want to burst free. He is straining against his bounds. He is probably screaming.
“Is this supposed to be painful?” says Aminat.
Femi turns to one of the techies who shakes his head. “The animal models didn’t suggest—”
The subject… disintegrates into a mud-coloured mush that splashes free of bounds and spreads over the floor. The spatter hits the screen, making Aminat jump back. The techies scream and cringe almost in synchrony. Femi alone does not react.
“I hope to God he signed all the release forms,” she says. “We can’t get cancer from any of that, right? Actually, don’t answer that. Why am I asking someone who just microwaved my test subject?”
“Ma’am, I don’t know what happened, how we failed,” says one of the techs.
“Who says you failed?” asks Femi.
“Ma’am, the man is dead?”
“Yes, but that was not the test, now, was it?”
“I don’t follow.”
Femi sighs. “Go into yonder chamber, yamhead, and take samples of the tissue. Test the tissue for xenoforms. If there are none, you have succeeded. Am I the only one awake here?”
“But the subject is dead, ma’am.”
“Details, details,” says Femi. “Have you had breakfast, Aminat?”
Mid-morning in Rosewater. After witnessing what happened to the subject Aminat cannot eat, but Femi seems famished and takes them out of the Ministry of Agriculture to a place in the south of the city by travelling on the anti-clockwise arm of the rail, past the north ganglion to the decidedly less affluent area of Ona-oko where she knows a small buka. The owner, Barry, has a third eye, a duplicate left eye, just in the pit of his throat at the root of his neck. It is closed most of the time, and crust builds up along the line of the lids. On occasion it weeps, and when Barry focuses on something it flicks open.
“I’ve never asked if he can see out of it,” says Femi between mouthfuls of rice and dodo. “I can’t see how it would be functional.”
Aminat does not comment. She pushes her food around the plate to be polite. She thinks the plantain they picked for her own dodo might have been over-ripe. When Barry hovers it feels like the unblinking eye of God, and makes her uncomfortable. The reconstructed always make her feel uncomfortable, like they are the aliens’ playthings or experiments. Of course, they do it to themselves, cutting and moulding their own flesh on the eve of the Opening, then basking in the healing xenoforms that emerge from the biodome. Aminat wonders if Wormwood really has to fix them up this way, especially since it can read genetic material and use this as an accurate blueprint. Each to their own. The buka is on the second floor of a three-storey petesi, and since Ona-oko is mostly flat the dome is visible. This morning it is a dull cerulean with dark spots across the surface. If it were the same colour every day people would not notice it any more, perhaps. If you lived near the Karnak Pyramids would you even see them? There are more protrusions this month than last, according to the radio. The spikes are relatively new features of the dome.
The seats are wooden, uncomfortable, and the place is clean, though barely up to regulation standard. The air is full of spices and flavours. Femi’s bodyguards have emptied the place out, paying for all the seats and soothing tempers. All four of them now stand facing the windows. Aminat knows that between them they are emitting a distortion field that protects the conversation.
“Are you okay, Arigbede? Do you need a debrief?” asks Femi.
“I do not,” says Aminat.
“The experiment bothers you?”
“Does it not you?” asks Aminat.
Femi takes a sip of water, then shakes her head. “The experiment, no. The outcome, yes. A little bit. But I have a lot of things to worry about, some of them even more gruesome than what we saw an hour ago.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I wish you’d be more informal with me. Not too informal, but…”
Aminat stays silent, feels it is the best option.
“How’s Kaaro?” asks Femi.
“He’s private,” says Aminat. The hair on the back of her neck rises.
“I’m asking professionally,” says Femi.
“Professionally, he’s private. We don’t speak about work; he has not betrayed any official secrets.”
Femi laughs. “Scripted response.”
“Ma’am, what’s this about?”
“How is your work going, Aminat?”
“I send weekly progress reports—”
“Yes, yes, boring, coated in jargon that could be interpreted either way, skilful equivocation that would satisfy a bureaucrat. I am not a bureaucrat, Aminat.”
“I don’t know how to—”
“Stop. Don’t waste my time. Give me your honest, blunt opinion of your work. No bullshit.”
Aminat exhales. “I find people with low xenoform counts and try to see if it can be kept low. I find people with high xenoform counts and I experiment with different chemical compounds delivered in different ways, then I check xenoform counts again, trying to achieve decoupling. My team is good, and I have good resources, but I do not believe decoupling is possible. The work is interesting and I’d like to continue, but I think the xenoforms are embedded fundamentally. They are a part of what it means to be human now. It’s like the best parasite or symbiote. Keep the host alive as long as it’s attached.”
“Six months ago the physics team came to me with this idea. Complicated higher math that I don’t understand, but they feel they can disrupt the Higgs field around the xenoforms and remove them at a sub-atomic level. That work culminated in this morning’s liquefaction.”
The wind changes and a sour smell from the Yemaja River displaces the savoury aroma. Femi wrinkles her perfect nose. Aminat suspects surgical enhancement.
“How would you like to go to space?” asks Femi.
“What?”
“Space. The so-called final frontier.”
“You mean like the Mars colony?”
“No, just to the space station. Our space station. To the Nautilus.”
Femi is trying to be casual, but Aminat can see her body language has changed.
“You knew the experiment would fail this morning, that the man would die. This is the real reason I’m here.”
“I got a second and third opinion from Beijing and Cambridge months ago. I knew their theory was faulty, but I didn’t know it would prove fatal for the subject,” says Femi. “And yes, this is why you’re here. Space. Geostationary orbit. Do you want to go?”
“Why? Space is a graveyard. Besides, isn’t the Nautilus decommissioned?”
“It makes more sense to answer your second question first. The Nautilus was not so much decommissioned as abandoned. It was barely a space station in the first place. An international African conglomerate financed it, but the money ran out and they just let the crew die. A mission to retrieve them would have cost too much. It was cheaper to cut communications, pay hush money to the families and announce a cover story of organised decommissioning complete with CGI showing some stages and labelling the rest Classified.
“As to the why, we need you to go up there and take tissue samples. If conditions in space can keep humans free of xenoforms that would be an interesting development.”
“How does that make sense? The xenoforms came from space in the first place.”
“This comes from on high, Aminat. Ours not to reason why, et cetera.”
“Okay, who’s paying for it?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said the cost of rescuing those poor bastards in the Nautilus was too high. How can they justify the cost of sending me there?”
“It’s not the same ‘they’ and not the same cost. What I want to know, Aminat, is if you have the ovaries for this. It’s a short mission.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Sure.” Femi drank more water. “But don’t take too long. We’re talking about the extinction of the human race here. Fairly important, I’d say.”
This is 98.5 digital and on your dial. That was “Cartwheel,” the latest single from Dio9. Breaking news for all you alien spotters, a roll-up was spotted breaching not once, but twice, folks, near Kehinde. Rosewater Environmental continues to investigate. Sunny day, no showers, no fog. Just a fantastic weekend for fantastic people.
With one hand on the wheel, Aminat undoes her top button. It’s fiddly, so she plugs into the grid and engages auto-drive. It has been glitchy for the last week or so, but she feels it should be able to handle a few minutes without taking a wrong turn. She directs all the fans towards herself and blows down her blouse. Hot. The brightness pleases her, though. There is something special about the sunshine on a Saturday morning, and the traffic isn’t too bad. The Opening—and its influx of pilgrims—is six months away, so the road users are bound to be hardcore Rosewater citizens. Her playlist cuts the radio and puts out Bob Marley, “Sun is Shining,” and Aminat sings along, trying to purge the vision of the human shit stain in the lab. She is in love with the day.
“Manual,” she says, and takes control of the wheel.
Space. It had to come to this. Aminat is not particularly afraid to go, but this is a government that does not subscribe to leaving no man or woman behind. What if she is left up there to die like the others? Would Femi tell her if that was a risk? Femi’s S45 status is a mystery these days. Kaaro said she had quit or was fired or something, but that may have been a cover story, because she works exclusively on the alien problem and has access to vast resources. Aminat has reported directly to her since last year.
Space, though. Aminat has always wanted to go, but secretly. She does not believe she has ever told anyone or written it in a diary or anything. Each time some gazillionaire blasts off in a rocket she feels a twinge of envy. Now, it seems, the Naija government wants to send her. Why do they not send a robot?
“Call Kaaro,” she says.
“Unavailable,” says the car.
“Call home landline.”
What the hell is he doing with the phone off?
“No response. Would you like me to leave a message or try again?”
“Negative. Voice message.”
A single beep.
“Kaaro, I’m finished, on the way home. I’ve had breakfast. Call me if you can.”
Most likely Kaaro went off grid because he knew she was going to be at S45 and see Femi. Kaaro used to work for S45 as the last of their quantum extrapolators, xenoform-infested mind-readers. It did not end well, and now Kaaro will not even talk about regular, everyday things to do with the aliens, information available to the entire public. Aminat loves him, but thinks he can be a fucking baby sometimes. He is up to something, spending his retirement studying or plotting, in contact with people he won’t tell Aminat about.
“It’s not in conflict with you or what you do,” Kaaro would say.
Aminat is not always sure this is true.
Outside and to her left, she sees the dome above all other structures. Blue-black now, and slightly reflective. It used to be a simple smooth bubble rising from the ground, but recently it has developed extrusions, spikes with sharp and blunt tips. Nobody knows why, but some of the scientists hypothesise that it has to do with widened reach for information transfer. The general public does not care about this as long as there’s uninterrupted electricity, and every year it opens to heal people. The alien creatures stay in, the humans stay out, all are happy.
Except that isn’t true. The entire atmosphere is full of xenoforms, has been for centuries. The first deposit arrived in an asteroid and, designed to adapt, multiplied and spread. Air, land, sea, an elegant invasion that did not involve UFOs or battleships, just a gradual replacement of human cells with xenoforms. Then there was Wormwood, what was thought to be an asteroid, but in fact was an outrider, a massive organism, as large as a village, sentient, subterranean, capable of moving around in the Earth’s crust. Wormwood settled in Nigeria, nesting under the protective biodome which seals off the other organisms that came living inside Wormwood and some humans that chose early on to live with the alien.
It has not been seamless. Alien animals have contaminated the general ecosystem, and while some are harmless others are predators. Xenobiology is a university specialism now.
The city of Rosewater grew around the dome from necessity, because of the healing powers. Pilgrims come from far and wide. The road Aminat drives on was based on a footpath, like almost every other road. The only part of the city that makes sense is the orbital rail system—one clockwise, one anticlockwise—that circumnavigates the dome.
Many of the other nations appear to have withdrawn into themselves, or are trying to weaponise the xenoforms. The only thing standing between the aliens and humans is Aminat’s team. If she fails, humanity becomes extinct.
She flashes back to the liquefied man in Ubar, shivers from evaporated sweat, or fear, and changes course. She goes to her lab.