From deep beneath Rosewater, Wormwood extends a pseudopodium different from the other thousands of projections on its surface. This digit moves upwards and in a south-east direction towards the marshy and vegetation-rich soil that banks the Yemaja. This tentacle is not just travelling. Its tip is bulbous and grows larger as the miles are covered. Within that tip cells divide, differentiate and combine into tissues of increasing complexity. The bulb snatches material from its environment, helping it to advance as well as providing material for growth. Dead and decaying vegetation, soil, rock, silt, water and buried metals, plastics and construction debris are all broken down by alien enzymes and repurposed into organic carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, sulphur, phosphorus, sodium and trace elements with which to build a body. Primitive synapses connect at first tentatively, then with authority. Chemical messengers run to and fro, and Anthony becomes self-aware.
He cannot open his eyes for now, as there is a continuous seal, rather than an upper and lower eyelid. He feels his body under construction, glands shooting test fluids, organs shifting into position in his abdomen, bones ossifying from cartilage scaffolding. His face is connected to Wormwood by umbilical tissue, feeding him with the necessary nutrients and cocooning him within the bulb. In his inner ear he senses his motion, speed between five and seven miles per hour.
After a while Anthony’s cerebral cortex is complex enough to take over as the guiding intelligence of this body’s creation. He even allows the flawed appendix to grow at the insistence of the genetic material.
He is in water now, sluggish, murky, moving against the undertow. The pseudopodium slows down, stops. Anthony hears the underwater sounds, the gurgling and occasional splash. A fissure forms, separating eyelids and he blinks. He is still encased in a matrix from Wormwood, with no direct connection to the waters of the Yemaja. He is surrounded by darkness and he knows it is night. He is a metre below the surface of the water. He has no access to the xenosphere because of the flowing water, but he is full sized and senses the pseudopodium breaking down, Wormwood withdrawing its nourishing fluids and arteries. It loses pliability, hardens, and cracks in multiple points, finally snapping off downstream somewhere. Anthony experiences turbulence. He breaks out of the cocoon like a bird opening a shell. The cold river water is a shock, but he immediately stimulates his hypothalamus to generate heat as a counter measure. He tears free the umbilical material attached to his nose and mouth and chest.
Anthony swims to the surface, but emerges on the south bank. The city is on the other side, so he plunges back into the river, breaking north. Visibility is poor apart from the pulsing glow of the biodome. He grows a tapetum lucidum in each eye for night vision. He is naked and has not bothered to grow the cellulose-based clothes he has used in the past.
The xenoforms attach rapidly, and in nanoseconds he is connected. They flood him with knowledge of local temperature, toxins in the air, the nearest humans, the distress of the trees recently cut, the mating calls of crickets.
Further along in the darkness he sees discarded clothing, robes. This comes from the Yemaja cult, he knows. They come to the river for their ecstasies and possession trances. He does not know why clothing would be abandoned as they are not a sex cult, but he puts on the robes, and covers his head with the hood. He cannot see the colour of his skin, but he knows it is one of the first things he needs to adjust. In the past he has come across as artificial because of the hue. Not the right shade of brown. Humans are weird.
Before he can move forward, he senses a presence approaching within the xenosphere. It is familiar and he suppresses a very human groan when he realises who it is.
“Hello, Molara,” says Anthony.
She appears in his mind’s eye in her favoured form, a black woman with massive butterfly wings protruding from her back. She is clothed in some diaphanous material, but it is like a nightgown and covers nothing. Her hair is short, like a boy’s.
“What are you doing?” she asks. “Where are you going?”
“Don’t you know?”
Molara is a sentient part of the xenosphere, but at the same time, she is generated by function. She is a data harvester, collating all the data in the xenosphere and sending them to Home in bursts. She appears to humans as a nightmare, a flowing form passing through their dreamscapes with a massive, tooth-filled maw being the only feature on her face, and billions of articulated legs with which she connects to all the minds. She can also be a succubus and had orchestrated the killing of all human sensitives. Bar one, Kaaro, whom Anthony had forbidden her to kill.
“I know everything there is to know,” says Molara.
“Do you know where the quantum ghost bedded down?”
Molara is silent.
“I didn’t think so. I’m going into Rosewater to find it.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she said. “The ghost can be found in the xenosphere.”
“Yet you haven’t found it.”
“It’s a large—”
“I know. Revival Scientist Lua wants this sorted out as soon as possible, and both of us working simultaneously can only improve the odds.”
She bats her wings gently, deep blue with black spots. She floats on the mental currents, surrounded by psychic miasma. Her lips are slightly parted, and Anthony can feel the human part of himself responding. He does not know if Molara intends this.
“Don’t get in my way, footholder.”
“If you had done your job I wouldn’t have to be doing it for you,” says Anthony.
“Excuse me?” Her eyes narrow.
“This process is simple, straightforward. A human body is sufficiently taken over by xenoforms, you send the signal, the revival scientist sends the test ghost. The xenoforms are primed to accept the consciousness. So how did you fuck it up? Because this is your fuck-up.”
“I don’t know, but I will find out.”
“We find the quantum ghost first,” says Anthony. “You can diagnose your own sickness afterwards.”
Molara appears to be preparing an answer, but Anthony disconnects from the xenosphere. He is barefoot, and grows a layer of callus under his feet to protect them. He sloshes through the mud and marsh, and the terra gets firma. Undergrowth becomes profuse, and he wades through elephant grass. There is fauna, but the animals flee before he reaches them: grass-cutters and bush babies and rats. It is not so windy or cold, and the robe is cotton which still billows. Here and there he encounters discarded canoes, old, decrepit. There are no paddles. He can hear burrowing animals below, traffic in front, and bats overhead. He heads for the road.
Nobody in Nigeria will stop for a barefoot man in a hooded robe on the side of the road in the dead of night. In the headlights of passing cars Anthony can see the colour of his forearm and he makes it darker, more like that of his friend Kaaro. The colour thing confuses him so. It’s a human thing. Near identical DNA, yet they discriminate against each other based on the divisions of white light and the degree of protrusion of the jaw or the shape of the eyes or nose. Madness. Similar to their clothing fetish.
He walks towards Rosewater.
The city is noisier and larger than he remembers. On the outskirts he encounters some dwellings of questionable legality. Dirt-poor people living in shacks of wood and corrugated tin. Anthony can steal their clothes, but does not. One insomniac sees him and runs screaming, begging the Judeo-Christian god for mercy, thinking Anthony a spirit.
Anthony does not stop. He maintains a steady pace trying to figure out how exactly he will find the quantum ghost. He remembers about money. Humans do not just give their shit away. You have to pay, a form of exchange or a promise of exchange. He will need to fit in, to wear regular clothes. The area around Yemaja is called Ona-oko, and it is severely deprived. He cannot further deprive them by just taking what he wants. He is contemplating the problem when he sees four reanimates on the road ahead. They are not moving, but stand close to each other, swaying as if listening to music. Anthony checks the xenosphere to be sure. They are blank mental spots, casting no psychic shadow. These are hollow men. Something from another poet.
Very well, then.
Violence.
He floods his system with cortisol and adrenaline, his mind full of verse. He grows callus over his knuckles, although there is not enough time for a full layer. Anthony skips, then breaks into a run, clenching his fists as he nears them. Only one turns towards the sound.
Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The Memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind.
He remembers how to fight. He hits the first reanimate with a leaping punch to the nose, but he misjudges his own strength and shatters the skull. A gooey mess of blood, brains and bone splashes over him and the other hollow men.
And Horror stalked before each man.
The body falls to the ground with a wet thud, and the others attack Anthony in a blind, automatic way. He uses open-hand strikes to push each one away—he does not want the blood of their fallen comrade on their clothes. They strike at him powerlessly, without real purpose, anger or drive. He does not even have to up his endorphins to endure their attack.
He kicks the knee of one, hears the patella and lower femur crack. He locks the head of a female and leaps over her, cracking the neck. The third is confused, and stops moving. Anthony kicks it in the chest, crushing bone and cartilage, stopping the heart instantly.
And Terror crept behind.
Anthony remembers that part of the clothing malarkey is that the genders use different clothes, which he finds irritating as the female clothes are more pleasing and often use more comfortable fabric. He takes the cleaner clothes off the men and discards his white robe. They are loose on him, but he grows a layer of fat to compensate. There is nothing to be done about the shoes—none of them fit. There is some money.
He tears into the flesh of one and pulls out the implant. This he swallows, but modulates his digestive acids so as not to destroy it. He will need ID in the city, and perhaps this one has not been deactivated.
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day,
It eats the flesh and bone by turns,
But it eats the heart always.
Anthony knows he smells foul, but at least he is more acceptable.