Rosewater has declared independence, and I’ve decided to keep this as a wartime diary until I can figure out the structure required. These will serve as my notes, source material for the… work. I don’t know if what I’ll end up with will be a book or a series of articles, or a dry official document for the Jacques Administration. Jacques Administration. That felt strange to write.
You know me. My name is Walter Tanmola. Yes, I wrote Banana Identity and The Tao of Black Motherhood and Kudi. Banana Identity and Motherhood were critical successes, but Kudi made me financially secure. Yes, my last book was ten years ago. I’ve been coasting on the fame and fortune of Kudi, which was adapted into a stage play, a graphic novel and two movies. Fun fact: kudi means money. Some said I used witchcraft to enhance the sales and that the name was a condition for the ritual. I don’t disabuse people of that because it sells books. I pontificate on Nimbus, on national television and web casts. I have opinions that are sometimes popular, sometimes populist.
I’ve been in Rosewater since 2064. Like many I came here for the healing and I got it. I suffered from PF-81, one of the myriad diseases unleashed when the world lost a lot of the permafrost. I was lucky, and here I am. I spend my days reading and rereading the non-fiction of Soyinka and smoking weed. My agent thinks I’m working on a book called A is for Eternity but she’s not stupid and I’ve resisted sharing even a snippet of the first draft, mainly because the first draft only exists in my head.
Rosewater grows the best weed in the world.
I’m writing and recording this particular segment in a bomb shelter on Kuti Street. It is difficult to compose with the bombardment and dust dropping on my notepad every few minutes, but needs must. When I can’t write, I use a voice recorder on my phone.
I got this particular assignment last week. I received a call from a contractor who identified himself as Fadahunsi.
“How did you get this number? It is unlisted,” I asked.
“I work in security. I’m calling to know if you are interested in meeting an important person for the purpose of an assignment.” He has a deep baritone, and I picture a large, muscular man, which is wrong. When I meet him, he’s barely six feet, and wiry.
“I’m not in university any more, so I don’t do assignments.”
“Nevertheless, he’d like to meet you.” He pronounces it “ne-vah-di-less,” the Yoruba way, with poor exposure to pop-culture. I wonder where he’s spent his life.
“There’s a war on, in case you didn’t know. We’re being shelled. If I could get out of the city, I would, but I’m not going to travel around.”
“I can guarantee your safe passage. I only require your discretion.”
“I’m very discreet.” Yes. I used the lives of all the people around me and a significant number of strangers to populate my novels and you expect discretion. Of course. I’m discreet until the next novel.
“Someone will be at your door in an hour.”
“How do you know where I live?” But he has disconnected.
I dress up, by which I mean I change my boxer shorts and hunt down clean clothes to wear. I haven’t worn a top for days now. I test my breath against my palm, but what bounces back is disgusting, and I have no mouthwash, so I gargle vodka, brush my teeth, and take an extra swig of the vodka for luck.
Two soldiers arrive to take me. They wear brown and beige desert camouflage and one of them has a plasma rifle. A quad bot follows them around, the kind with a truncated head and loping movements. They have a jeep with an internal combustion engine. All the cars in Rosewater are electric and since the power went out the roads have been empty. There is the small matter of bomb craters as well. There are sporadic generators, but the real problem is fuel.
There are checkpoints everywhere, but I’ll get back to that later. I want to focus first on the people who are running this rebellion or revolution or whatever we’re calling it these days.
The mayor’s mansion is somewhat reduced from its former glory on approach. I think it was built in ’60 or ’61, and is the official residence and seat of government. A number of concrete barriers have been constructed, so our route in is zigzag. There’s a tower pointing to the sky, about ten feet tall, repeated at intervals, which I suspect is meant to jam or interfere with satellite detection. I’ll ask later. The building itself has suffered a direct hit or two, and while it’s still standing, I wouldn’t swear by the structural integrity. There is active reconstruction going on when I arrive and there are yellow signs directing us to safety, although I’m handed a hard hat.
I am surprised that the mayor is right there in the battered building waiting for me. He spreads his arms like he knows me, and I am absorbed into his gravitational field. He is a big fan of Banana Identity and can he call me Walter and have I ever been to the mansion before and he hopes we can work well together, but either way can I sign his copy and let’s go downstairs where it’s more comfortable and am I hungry or thirsty? Jacques smells good and he hugs like he means it. I know he’s a politician and that getting me onside is his stock in trade, but damn, he picked the book that I thought expressed what I wanted to, and he’s just friendly enough to be the right side of smarmy. His greatest weapon, I surmise, is that he seems genuine. Maybe he is genuine, who knows. He’s definitely brave to be up where an errant bomb could take him out, but he knows this, and he knows that I know this, and that it will affect my impression of him.
He does not introduce his entourage, but there is one strikingly beautiful woman with dead eyes who looks at me like I’m a bug, and another woman who attends to Jacques’s every word. She’s like an administrator or something. She is precise and whispers things to Jacques every few seconds. I know neither of these is his wife Hannah, and none of their body language signals suggest sexual or even flirtatious relationships.
The stairs only go down one floor, then there’s a lift system that goes an indeterminate distance down, then we go sideways, and I understand that we’ve moved beyond the boundaries of the mansion, which I think is wise. The noise of construction is so loud that there is no point even attempting speech.
We come to an anteroom, white walls, a side table with bottled water, glass containers, which is a nice touch considering the number of plastic garbage islands on the oceans. Jacques spends exactly five minutes discussing Banana Identity and asking me pointed questions. Well done to whoever primed him. Then he gets serious.
“Walter, I need your help. All wars are propaganda wars. I want you to write the story of our struggle. Rosewater needs an impartial chronicle of this injustice.”
Do I detect a strange accent on the word “impartial”?
“Sir, I’m flattered, but I write personal pieces and my non-fiction is commentary. I don’t do reportage. No offence, but I find it boring.”
“Just do it in your own way. There is such a thing as historical fiction, right? Do that.”
“But,” I decide to be honest, here in this bunker, surrounded by the revolution itself, “I’m not sure I’m on board with the whole… Rosewater as a city state thing.”
“Excellent. That makes you a disinterested party. That will lend authority to your account.” If Jacques is surprised, he doesn’t show it.
“I don’t know, sir. This is outside my area of expertise.”
I relent, though. Not because Jacques is a convincing motherfucker, which he is, and not because I believe in their cause, which more on that later, or because I’ll have access to all the information I want. No, the real reason I join the team is they have access to fuel and food, fast becoming problems in a city that suddenly finds itself needing generators and non-electric cars. The sprayed defoliants damaged the ecosystem and the local council dishes out food once a day, but it is obviously rationed. The flowering black market can’t keep up with demand. I say I’ll do it on a trial basis, for a week, to see if it fits me, and we agree on a fee for the week and a bonus if I decide to take the job on. My agent will kill me when she finds out. Walter, never enter into any negotiations without me. Don’t even discuss the possibility of negotiations.
Once I sign a non-disclosure, Jacques turns me over to his assistant, Lora Asiko. My first thought is that this woman is of the Machinery. At the time I did not know the position of the Machinery on the war. I do now, but we’ll get to that.
Turns out hers is a story I want to know. The first few hours I spend with her are dizzying because she provides me with what she calls contextual facts. These amount to the tonnage of wheat used weekly in Rosewater, for example, and the amount of potable water left and estimates of survival rates to four decimal places with Confidence Intervals and P-values. She has an eidetic memory without a doubt. Her contextual facts are an inhuman amount of data which she simply recites. When I ask her to repeat something she does it in exactly the same way.
I demand a break, and while I sit on a sofa contemplating a painting of a housefly menacing a hibiscus, I doze off. Maybe it’s the weed comedown or stimulus overload, I don’t know. Either way, I’m standing in the courtyard, although this time bombs are falling all around me. I’m aware that I am dreaming, but I cannot wake myself up as incendiaries gulp the oxygen and eat everything in sight. Then I see a flying… thing, I know the name, but it’s gone. It’s an eagle and a lion. It lands in front of me. In its beak lie the remnants of some plant it has torn to pieces.
“Who are you?” asks the animal.
I don’t say anything. Every Yoruba child is brought up early to be wary of creatures you meet in dreams. You don’t speak to them, you don’t tell them your name, and for Olodumare’s sake, you do not tell them your mother’s name. In the Yoruba spirit world your name combined with that of your mother is your unique identifier.
The creature skips forwards and drops the leaves at my feet. “Eat.”
Definitely not doing that. Everybody knows that if you eat in dreams you die in real life.
“Fine, be like that,” says the creature, and bites me on my left calf. As it tastes my blood, I am suddenly aware of my own nakedness. “Oh, right, you’re the writer. Sorry. I’m kind of busy, it’s taking longer than I thought to find Anthony. You can wake up now.”
“What?”
“Walter,” says Lora. I open my eyes.
“Hi.”
“You were thrashing about in your sleep.”
“I was just resting my eyes.”
Gryphon. That’s what it was. Why would I dream of a gryphon?
“How did you meet the mayor?” I ask.
“I’m not important. All you need to know is I came with him from Lagos because I believe in him and what he intends for Rosewater.”
“So you’re from Lagos?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She’s attractive, but not in the same way as, say, Hannah Jacques who is discussed in the society pages every week. Lora, I decide, is perfectly symmetrical. Her left and right halves are perfect mirror images and, to me, pleasing. Her face is in constant enquiry, and her eyes are serious, intelligent, a lighter brown than usual. She parries all my questions about her, and in the end I just ask her for her phone number.
“Why?” She seems genuinely surprised.
“I’d like to phone you.”
“Why would you want to phone me?”
“So we can take a walk and drink shots of vodka while we yet live. If you don’t want to talk about yourself, we can talk about me. That’s my specialist topic.”
“I already know all about you. I did a background check.”
I shake my head. “You don’t know all about me. Do you dance?”
“I know how.”
“Good. Good.”
“Can we get back to the information you need?”
She scourges my brain with her data and when the day is over and distant explosions sound like thunder, I lie on the same sofa trying to sleep. It makes the night seem long and the darkness without moon or starlight makes me think I’ve descended into the land of the dead. I count sheep, literally imagining sheep being stalked by a screeching gryphon and running across my mind’s eye. I count them. Then I lose count. I argue with myself about whether I should start again or just pick a number and continue from there.
Lora wakes me up. She says it’s fortunate that I joined today because there’s an important phone call which Jacques wants me to witness. It’s all very hush-hush.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s how energy works in Rosewater: early on, before the area was incorporated, people had generators and a few people used illegal taps from the national grid, with mixed results. Cross stealing by stealth flex-wire was rife. The dome was up, and there are two projections from the alien called the north and south ganglions. Ganglia? Whatever. Both of them are nerve endings, or so we have been told. They regularly crackled with electric energy and were often the source of the defensive strikes the alien made against intruders. People died walking into or around the ganglia. When Jacques took over, he started a number of capital projects, but the first thing he succeeded with was the utilisation of the electricity that the alien used to think and defend itself as a power source for the city. The invention of the Ocampo Inverter made it possible. But.
The controller for the inverters lies in the hands of the federal government and the president switched off the lights hours before the first aerial bombardment of Rosewater. Now the ganglia just stand there like giant erections or the hand of Sango, electrocuting people with no rhyme or reason. Let’s not talk about the death cults who encourage their members to prance around the ganglia. I never saw the ganglia before Ocampo’s work, but those who were here tell me that they find the electrical activity somewhat attenuated. This might be so, but it might also be because the dome is degraded and they expect the ganglion to be less than it was.
We’ve been in darkness since.
So when I hear we’re going to speak to Ocampo, I get excited.
It’s a stand-up meeting, with a hologram generator in the centre. Lora silences me with an index finger to her closed lips. Jacques stands front and centre, the glow from the generator lighting up his features and doing the same to a lesser extent for his bodyguards and the other woman in his entourage. Who is she? Her eyes flick to me when I enter, and flick away in seconds. This seems to me like a séance more than the most modern form of communication.
The device beeps and Victor Ocampo stands before us, diminished, but jolly and bespectacled. For some reason he has the flag of the Philippines draped over his left shoulder and an old NASA logo from the 1960s sewn as a patch on his right. Someone speaks indistinctly from behind him, a female, which could be his wife, or his daughter, who knows. He comes to us from his private space station. Yes, he is that rich. The Chinese had a problem with it, wanting to regulate a Filipino in space, but he is rumoured to have pretended to only speak Tagalog and confounded the negotiators. I’ve heard all the documentation on the station is in Tagalog. He has a staff of forty keeping it running and comfortable for his family. Nobody knows how long he has been in space, and there are rumours of osteoporosis.
“Mr. Mayor,” says Ocampo.
“Please, Victor, call me Jack. How long have we known each other?”
“Yes, and you gave me that hundred-year-old Scotch, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“I have to tell you, it’s not the billions I made off the Rosewater deal that made me take your call. It’s the memory of that Scotch going down my throat. It was smooth.”
“I may have more,” says Jack. I note the cadence of his voice. He is trying to manage Ocampo.
“I’m sorry, Jack. I know why you’re calling me, and I wanted to tell you face to face that I cannot help you.”
“Victor, do you have access to the inverters?”
Ocampo has a pained look.
“Can you remotely turn our lights back on?”
“I can, but my control access is only for the purpose of servicing or maintenance should that become necessary. That is how businesses work, that’s how you sell technology. You and Miss Lora should know that.”
“Victor, it has become necessary. The device is shut down. Isn’t it your duty to turn it on again?”
“Jack, from my perspective, and from my consoles, I have a device voluntarily shut down. My hands are tied. I can only intervene in the event of a client request.”
“I am requesting—”
“You’re not the client, Jack. I reviewed the paperwork, or rather, my wife reviewed the papers and gave me the highlights. I did the work at Rosewater, but on behalf of the Nigerian government, and that isn’t you. Like I said, I’m sorry.”
Jacques must already know that. I can’t imagine he’d take the meeting without having read everything pertinent. Lora would have prepared as well. Which means this is a gambit of some sort, a pose. Jack looks pained and rubs his left temple with the tips of his fingers. The impression he’s trying to give is of deep thought, but I know he has known what he is about to say next for at least a day or two.
“What if… what if the blueprints leaked?” Jack sounds uncertain, just enough to be charming.
“Of the inverter? Are you kidding? That’s my livelihood. It’s proprietary.”
“No, I mean the switch. Just the switch.”
“I suppose—”
Mrs. Ocampo comes into the plasma field like a curtain dropping. “This communication is over.”
The light goes dead.
“Your boy is good,” I say to Lora.
Jacques is even better than I thought because an hour later a file “the size of Olumo Rock” is dropped into his private server from parts unknown. His tech experts begin to decode what is clearly the blueprints for the switch and instructions for construction. I don’t know how long it will take, or even if the necessary expertise is available in battered Rosewater, but the entire team counts it as a win. They start to source the best 3D printers still functional in the city and a language expert to translate from Tagalog.
Sadly, there is no hundred-year-old Scotch to celebrate with.
The next day, after an abbreviated cleaning ritual which I have now perfected, I go out with Dahun and two of his soldiers. He talks to me about the different fronts in this war as we drive around. He starts with the dome, which we arrive at in short order.
The dome is under siege in a microcosm of what is happening to Rosewater. Ten or so flying creatures are at the dome, doing… trying to eat the dome? They are green and made of vegetation from where I’m sitting in the jeep. The dome itself, close up, looks mushroom grey, with black spots. From a distance it resembled a pimple, or a mouse-bitten piece of cheese. The soldiers and turret bots fire on the creatures, cutting each one to bits. While I watch, two fall, but from the west two new ones replace them.
When the bots run out of ammunition they safety their machine guns and trot to a makeshift depot. Humans fit them out and change coolant like high-performance engines in a Formula One race.
There are three ragged holes in the top of the dome, but all are partially fixed. The real problem is nothing is deterring the green things. As each one falls, humans in hazmat suits pick up the bodies and take them to a building.
“Autopsies. Analysis,” Dahun says before I ask. “The results have been uniform. They’re made of leaves, vines, stems, some wood, and that’s it.”
“Do they ever attack humans?”
“Not unless you attack them first, and only if the attack is a nuisance. They’re single-minded, although mind is an exaggeration. They have no brains. The xenobiologists agree that they’re drones of some kind, but natural enemies to the alien.”
It’s interesting that I’ve not heard of this but access to the dome has been restricted since the war began. Cordons are set up a mile in all directions for non-military personnel. You can still see the tip of the dome, and the uppermost perforation, but little else. There are other matters keeping the people of Rosewater busy, most to do with survival. There are… new things, or perhaps old things that are emboldened by the sickness of the alien, of Wormwood. I have stayed in my home for most of this conflict, but I’ve heard rumours.
I ask Dahun where the green things come from and he says this is our next destination. These are, he says, the only two fronts within Rosewater, although there are protests and saboteurs undermining the war effort. He calls it that: the war effort.
Again, there is a cordon, then half a mile of demolished buildings, patrolled by irregulars, freemen and combat bots. Drones criss-cross the sky and we have our ID checked several times. What I’m looking at is akin to a tree bursting out of an apartment block. Some of the external walls are intact, but a complex trunk system and several stems exit through windows and cracks. There is no roof; a florid explosion of flowers occupies that space and even though it is mid-morning, even I can tell that there is bioluminescence. A root system has worked its way into the ground creating cracks that creeper vines grow towards.
“What the hell is this?” I say. It is hard to be understood from behind the mask, and I have to repeat myself.
“We don’t know,” says Dahun. “It’s not terrestrial is all I can tell you.”
“The green things come from this?”
He nods. “They come from the flowering part. It moves, too, so be careful.”
This thing is mostly green, but there are red, mauve and brown parts, excluding the flowers, which are a mess of colours. There is pollen in the air, explaining why Dahun has me in a face mask. Hallucinogenic, maybe? Or poisonous. From time to time an organ pumps out the particles, but otherwise the plant looks docile.
I don’t have to wait long for it to extrude one of its proxies. The roots and stems experience a tumult and start to agitate, then they part slowly to form an orifice with a vine-encrusted humanoid thing coming through. It has to snap connecting tendrils to finally be free, and it takes to the sky with flaps of its wings. It’s not like a new animal, and nothing about its flight is tentative. I am not sure why it has six wings, but in less than a minute it has shrunk in the clouds and disappeared. The limbs and roots rearrange themselves until the hole that spawned the creature is closed.
It is difficult to breathe through the mask. “So, there is a new alien creature, growing to giant proportions, just like the old, and it’s at war with Wormwood? Is this one of those ‘only room for one of us’ scenarios? High Noon over Rosewater?”
In my notes I call this creature the Beynon, because I always did love The Day of the Triffids, but when I give my first review of the situation in Rosewater the name sticks and Jacques’s people have called it that ever since. My first contribution to history?
We drive north. Here I am given a protective helmet where I did not need one before. I can hear gunfire and shelling. There are concrete barriers and short-span force fields that we have to weave around.
“What we have here,” says Dahun, “is machine warfare. Our turrets and drones fighting the Nigerian government’s turrets and drones. Our spotters think that so far they are evenly matched, but it becomes a matter of time. The feds can keep this up for ever, but we cannot continue to supply ammo or technicians for maintenance and repair. We can print parts, but we don’t have limitless material. And there are snipers who pick off our technicians. In turn, our snipers try to pick off theirs. Like I said, we seem evenly matched.”
“How long can we hold this line?”
“I can’t say that out loud. Surveillance bugs.”
The enemy has the high ground in the north as Rosewater occupies the river valley cut by the Yemaja through hill country. It forms a bowl with the dome at the centre, and the exhalations and extrusions of the alien provide a microclimate. When driving in that way you can look down to a vista that captures the entire city. Dahun concedes that it was a mistake early on, not fortifying and holding the area outside the city limits.
“The brief the mayor gave me forbade invading Nigeria, which, technically, holding those hills would be.”
It is not exactly a stalemate. We’re landlocked, we have no supply lines, and time is on their side. The sides of the roads are littered with discarded placards from yesterday’s protest, most of which say NOT IN MY NAME or I AM A NIGERIAN. It’s impossible to tell what percentage support the rebellion.
While observing food distribution I hear rumours and whispers of spontaneous human combustion.
Food is given away daily in various halls in different wards. The emaciated people of Rosewater have started to resemble the Africans you used to see on those infernal charity appeals back in the day, always begging for money that would ultimately go into the pockets of the local big men. All things considered, it’s an orderly process and I drift among the people, trying to get a flavour of the opinions. There’s a lot of verbiage about the hardships, which, to be fair, is normal for Nigerians. I mean, yeah, life outside Rosewater can be shitty, but even within, even when I started living here, people complained. It’s a communication tic.
But this is specific. It’s one thing for kids to complain that you can’t find snails any more, which is true because the defoliants removed the food source and threw the entire ecosystem out of whack. It’s quite another to talk of people bursting into flame.
“She burned to ashes. My brother came back from the market to see her corpse.”
“… in the middle of the night, set the house on fire…”
“My husband was right there. The woman started sweating from heat, then collapsed, then just started burning, starting from the thigh.”
I’m sceptical at first because the most likely explanation is some kind of mob justice for stealing or witchcraft. Necklacing is a common form of retribution or punishment. I don’t want to observe sacks of rice or grateful crowds, so I decide to follow this thread.
I interview those with the most specific stories, those with detail. I question those from whom they heard the story. It convinces me that there is something strange happening. I convince Dahun to follow me. There are specific addresses and they have the pattern of an infection to me, but I’m not a doctor. I know they have one in the mayor’s mansion, so I call Lora.
“I’ll tell Dr. Bodard, but if there’s an infective agent I wish for you to leave the area immediately.”
“Because you want me to be safe?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says.
“Because you like me?” I say.
“No, because you are important to the cause.”
“So you don’t like me?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m busy. Goodbye.”
She’s odd that one. I do not leave the area. Instead, Dahun and I go to each address. Sometimes kids throw rocks at us, mostly because of the uniform, but Dahun doesn’t mind and I have a flak jacket and helmet. Dahun is not just babysitting me. He takes calls and gives instructions over the radio, and he is monitoring the conflict in real time.
There are no stray dogs; they have all been eaten or blown up.
We find one burned corpse in a house. The paint is scorched, but no evidence of petrol or any accelerant. The person also seems to have burned from the inside out, like she swallowed phosphorous or something. I take flesh samples.
“It’s a xenodisease,” says Dr. Bodard later. The xenobiologist sounds harried and tired. “Wormwood must have served as a balance on the alien micro-flora, and with it incapacitated, organisms are becoming bolder and stronger. This one is an insect—no name yet, I’m calling it B718—lays eggs on the skin, the larval forms burrow into the subdermal fat. As it feeds, its waste causes host cells to generate heat and combust.”
As I write this no cure has been found, and people burn up every two days or so.
Jack Jacques is surprisingly upbeat and has taken to yelling “scribe!” at me when we pass in the corridors of the government building. Today, I am meant to sit in on a cabinet meeting but there’s heavy shelling and we’re all confined to the mansion. I have a sort of date with Lora. I bring coffee and chocolate rations. We stake out a corner of the canteen and the buzz of conversation seems normal, not wartime at all. I have never seen a woman eat in such a regular fashion. I watch her for a while, and the time between each bite, each swallow, is exactly the same. It does not seem strange to her that I am watching her, or that I am not eating. She does not make any small talk, and expects me to lead.
“How do you smell so clean?” I ask. Why, I don’t know. I ask strange questions when I’m nervous. I get nervous when I like a woman.
“Because I am. You don’t smell clean, though. You smell… of sweat and antimicrobial soap and gunpowder. Did you fire a gun?”
“No, but Five Yellow, one of my escorts, had to shoot at some people trying to rush the school convoy.”
“Why were they attacking schoolchildren?”
“Nobody knows yet. They ran away. Dahun docked Five Yellow’s pay for not hitting a single one.”
She has no pimples. Her skin is this russet colour, and I’d have put her as coming from the East of Nigeria, but who knows? Her hair is pulled back with not a strand out of place. She has those Indian extensions that fluff out beyond the hair tie. Her eyebrows are precisely cut, her lashes businesslike and unenhanced, and she wears no jewellery. I suspect she can look a lot more glamorous if she wants to. She watches me watching her. The coffee and the chocolate are gone.
“Walter, you are spending time with me because you like me,” she says.
“You have a strange way of talking, but yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s what asking you to have coffee is about, isn’t it? You definitely don’t remind me of my mother.”
“How so?”
“I never met her. She died giving birth to me and my twin brother, who also died, by the way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She inclines her head towards me. “Does it make you sad?”
“Not really. I never knew her, like I said, so it’s this vague… absence. I did have a surrogate, a step-mother who was really cool, if a bit stern. She was a widow, manufactured in bereavement counselling for my dad.”
“She was manufactured?”
“No. Figure of speech.” Now I’m wondering if she’s one of those literal people. I struggle to remember if she’s ever cracked a joke in my presence. She is always so serious.
“I sometimes struggle with symbolism,” she says. She smooths her skirt. “Time for me to go. Thank you for the chocolate and coffee. I hope to reciprocate soon. I don’t know if I like you, but I am happy that you choose to like me and demonstrate by inviting me here. Well.”
She gets up and leaves with no backward glance. Decisive. I like that.
I don’t want to talk about atrocities, but I have to.
I’ve procrastinated a number of times, but I can’t get away from it. There are three types of soldiers in this conflict: automatons, mercenaries and freemen. As yet no government ground troops have entered the city. The automatons maintain the perimeter, with gaps plugged by the freemen. Most of the human soldiers are “freemen”: incarcerated criminals serving in the makeshift army to earn freedom. The mercenaries are paid by Jacques, some say from his personal fortune and not the government coffers.
Freemen are less well trained and subservient to the mercenaries, but remember these are criminals, and not known for their obedience to authority. Fadahunsi, I found out, leads the mercenaries, and, of necessity, the war. There is no civil defence to speak of, and there are no military police. In some wards there are Rastas who have taken it upon themselves to defend their neighbourhood, seeing it as the honourable thing to do, but there are very few of them, like three, four hundred, and they have primitive weapons, often refusing to take ordnance from the government, who they consider to be “contaminated babylon.” They won’t accept food supplies. The Rastas have brief, bloody clashes with the freemen infrequently. A lot of the freemen are bored, hopped up on drugs and trying to amuse themselves. Drills won’t quite cut it. They have hours to burn and we, the civilians, learn to avoid roving freemen.
There’s a lot of interrogation of “saboteurs,” some who can be found hanging from street lights next morning with placards around their necks. There’s theft, although it doesn’t get people anywhere because transactions are now by eru and the banks are shut. Lots of rumours of systematic rape in some wards. Dahun responds swiftly to these incidents, and I have heard from one of the grunts that he is brutal. Then there is the problem of the twins.
The twins are the heads of organised crime in Rosewater. What we’ve done, what Jacques has done in the last few weeks, is to train all the foot soldiers for the bosses. There is human trafficking and organ harvest. I don’t know how they get past the blockade but they do. Drugs, of course. And they run the black and grey market.
People disappear all the time and nobody can say if they’ve been taken by a xeno-lifeform, murdered, vaporised in a bombing, trafficked, or what. Nobody knows who keeps attacking the school buses or why they want the children, so attendance has dropped. The good news is that no pupil has been successfully taken. That we know of.
There’s a unit that goes on patrol with flame-throwers every day. Their job is to burn the droppers that have proliferated during this time. Dual organisms, perhaps plant-based, but we don’t know. They have two parts, one that mimics human form and the other that drops or sprays digestive liquid on anyone curious or stupid enough to investigate. Few natives of Rosewater fall for this, but animals do, and sometimes they can catch you by surprise.
I think the flame-thrower unit burns humans sometimes, just for laughs. There is so much that I won’t be able to unsee.
Whenever this war ends Rosewater will be a different place.
There is a direct hit on an ammo dump. It is beautiful and terrifying. It has to be allowed to burn out because the fire service is not functional. Fireworks, random metal fragments falling from the sky at odd times that smell of spent ordnance, that gigantic blue-black cloud in the sky for days, it’s tiring.
The girlfriend of one of the soldiers told me it wasn’t an enemy shell or a missile. She said one of the freemen set charges in the dump to cover up munitions they had stolen.
I believe this.
The night after the dump explosion, there is a bombardment for real and we cannot leave the bunker. I lie in my bunk writing. The door opens and Lora comes in, and locks the door.
“I didn’t give you a key,” I say, sounding stupid.
“I have all the keys,” she says.
There’s a lot of fucking going on in the wartime cabinet spaces, people being desperate or just looking for some comfort, a “for tomorrow we die” vibe that I have taken advantage of once or twice. When Lora disrobes, I am unsurprised. It lasts a long time, by which I mean, she lasts a long time, never gets tired or bored. I hold her afterwards and she never goes limp or changes her breathing. I fall asleep first. I wake up in the dark and she’s sitting across from me. The bombardment has ceased and an eerie silence stalks the halls. We sneak into the kitchen and look for stray rations. Lora knows where there are sachets of honey and, though now it seems silly, sucking out of them seems hilarious. We act like we have a cannabis high, though the war is cramping my style.
“Walter,” she says. I’m still giggling.
“Have some more honey,” I say.
“I’m a construct.”
“What do you mean?” At this stage I’m thinking it’s too early in the morning for philosophical discussions.
“I’m a robot, Walter.”
“I don’t get the metaphor, girl. Is this about working for Jacques? You work all the time?”
“I am a woman manufactured, not born. I have personhood, and a passport, and autonomy, but I am not human in the conventional sense.”
I finally understand what she is saying.
“Breathe, Walter. You have stopped.”
I exhale.
I’ll tell you one thing: a time will come in your life, at least one time, when you have to confront your own self, your own mind, your own prejudice. I don’t know what is on my face, but my mind is racing and I imagine my speech centre is asking the other parts of my brain, What the fuck do I say? Give me instructions, motherfucker.
Say her name.
“Lora.”
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to proceed.”
Speak. Buy time.
“You’re not playing with me, right?”
“I’m very serious.”
Do not say, “You look so lifelike.” Do not say, “I couldn’t tell.” Say something honest, dumbass.
“I have never been in this situation before.”
“I have.”
The words seem uninflected, but even at that moment I know it’s untrue. My mind’s eye has changed, that’s all. In reality, those words are heavy with her personal history, with disappointment.
What if she malfunctions and kills you while you sleep?
What if something inside her, her power source or some chemical, gives you cancer?
What will your friends say?
Can a robot really be a person?
Speak, Walter, the silence has gone too long.
But no words come, so I place my hands on her cheeks, and I kiss her on the lips.
Religion is a problem here. The African Traditional Religion folks break curfew all the time, particularly the masquerades, especially oro. The Abrahamic ones, especially the more tradition-bound, just go the way they’ve always gone, ritual keeping them safe. Some of the evangelicals try to run retreats and those mass prayer meetings where they Jedi-push each other down en masse. They point-blank refuse the curfew at first, but one particular bombardment gives them a bloody demonstration of what God’s will in the matter is. Since that time, evangelicals are more manageable.
The Machinery—are they even a religion?—can’t make up their mind if they are Nigerians or from Rosewater, because each identity would require different duties. Their debates go on for weeks on end, and because their services are open to the public, I attend one.
In case you’re not from here, the Machinery are people who seek tranquillity by removing emotion from their lives. I’ll attempt an explanation, but I think they have to speak for themselves and don’t deserve this slapdash explanation from an old reprobate like me. They posit that all of humankind’s problems stem from emotion. People of the Machinery act predictably, suppress any expression of emotion, act like machines as much as possible. They have meetings where they share “programming” and “re-synchronise” with each other. They are only found in Rosewater and sociologists have not been able to explain what it is about our microenvironment that breeds them.
They have names, but refer to each other by number. If someone not of the Machinery speaks to them, they answer to their names, not numbers. They make excellent employees, hardworking, loyal, dependable. All of them, male, female, trans and cis, sport the same short hairdo.
Hold your amateur psychology 101 bullshit about this section being due to Lora Asiko. Just shut the fuck up about that. I was always going to do this part.
A woman speaking—her name, 1638853—says, “Transformation. When Rosewater was part of Nigeria, we were Nigerian citizens, bound to obey the laws of that country. The very moment Rosewater became a breakaway state, we became citizens of that city state. Our responsibility is to our new country. We build this country up. We fight at the front, those of us who are able-bodied. Those less able or less inclined to combat look after the vulnerable. This much is clear.”
152381 says, “I disagree. Rosewater is neither country nor city state. Right now, it is in a state of rebellion. This is an insurrection. There is no real government, and the legitimate government of our country, Nigeria, is reasserting itself. We are Nigerians until the fate of this city is known. We have to go with the last or current passport.”
It is a strange meeting for me, although Dahun notes down the people who insist on being Nigerians. There is none of that murmuring of dissent or assent. No hecklers. It’s the most orderly gathering of humans I’ve ever seen.
Humans want to be machines; machines want to be human.
I can’t help that thought. Unlike these motherfuckers, I have actual emotions.
Rough day.
The prototype replacement inverter is about to be tested when a high-altitude bomb obliterates it, causing electricity feedback. Forty dead, a hundred bystanders injured, and the idea of turning on the lights takes a massive setback. Jacques is superhuman and just says something like, “Let’s get back to work reprinting the components.” He gives solo applause to his people. “Well done, well done. You can do this. Go.”
The engineers want a break, but it isn’t going to happen. They lose a lot of good workers, but they go back to the grindstone.
Scant rumours of rats swarming like locusts, eating everything in their paths, including small children, although I doubt the last part.
I try to read an old copy of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart but I can’t get into it, can’t get past the title, which is part of the Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” a work that always freaks me the fuck out, especially the last line.
What slouches towards Rosewater?
I don’t know which is more frightening, living in Rosewater without knowing what the leadership is thinking or living in the bosom of the mayor’s team and knowing that we face the abyss here, propped up with a brutal detail of mercenaries and the charisma of the leader. Jacques takes setback after setback in his stride. He is a true leader in that sense, although if you ask me, his declaration of independence was a bit premature.
I get to spend some hours with him towards the end of my trial week, shadowing as it’s called, which is what it says on the tin: I follow him everywhere. I don’t know if it’s for my benefit, but Jacques takes a lot of risks. He goes out of his safe bunker to speak to stitched-together crowds in a form of rally. The cheering is lacklustre, but he persists in that upbeat way he has about him. He spouts Yoruba proverbs. He promises a swift rebuild as soon as he can come to an accommodation with Nigeria. He says investors are lining up to work in Rosewater, that his phone is constantly ringing.
His beard is Castro lite, and he is not as dapper as he could be, but Jacques is canny. The bunker has ample opportunity and resource for him to groom. If he looks scruffy it is deliberate. He may even wish to channel revolutionaries dead and gone. Most people cannot fathom how Machiavellian Jacques can be because… well, you feel at ease in his presence. He’s handsome, everyone knows that, and he knows people. A bit weak on economics, but, as America once proved, that needn’t stand in the way of becoming chief executive.
After the speech he steps off the podium, takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his gabardine, and joins the street crews in repairing the craters. They like this more than all the words he throws at them, and it’s on the internet within minutes.
Oh, and, yes, internet. So, before Nimbus, internet is how the world used to connect. I can’t tell you much about it, except that it was slow, not much removed from tin cans and wire according to some historians. Well, Nigeria cut us off, didn’t it? Some folks found out that the internet infrastructure wasn’t taken down, it was abandoned. Well, abandoned by the mainstream. Unregulated, it’s become the nesting place of extreme porn, paedophilia, alien trades and terrorist cells. Into this morass Rosewater carved out a space for its citizens. Because subdermal phones are powered by our own bodies, they still work in a local peer-to-peer cloud formation, as they are designed to, but signal problems abide. Lots of local solutions of which I’m proud. The spirit of Jugaad, alive and well in Rosewater.
Jacques takes off his shirt and I swear I hear a gasp go through the crowd. His body is sculpted, and with his lighter complexion he easily holds all the eyes. A detonation at this time would immortalise him for ever. He works, I sweat.
Later, back at the bunker, he takes a quick shower. I meet Hannah. I met her before at an event, but she doesn’t remember, and I don’t push the matter. If these two decided to have children, their offspring would be magical demi-gods of perfection. And yet, it’s all a construction, part of the Jacques plan, the machine. Perfection meets perfection and presents itself to the world. This is a man destined to be a head of state, and I don’t mean destined in a mystical “all hail, Macbeth and Banquo” way. He just has all the qualities and has studied the right philosophers. It makes me want to light a joint and take him apart one hair at a time.
I don’t know if I can bring myself to tell Jacques that most people on the street see him as a tyrant. I don’t know how to tell him. I don’t even know how to tell Lora.
When he emerges I ask him if what he said about investors is true.
“It will be,” he says. “Stop. I know what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth. You’re thinking that or a variant thereof.”
I am not.
“Who said that?”
“Samuel Johnson. But I have a different saying for you. Truth is a tool of war. It must be treated as a scarce resource.”
“You mean you’re justifying lying to your public.”
“As generations of radioactive Fukushima pigs will tell you, that means fuck all in the grand scheme of things.”
What is he talking about? Is this an advanced form of verbal misdirection where I’ll keep quiet because I don’t understand his obscure allusion?
“Jack, what is your endgame here?”
But Lora comes in and urges us out because the sky is about to fall.
Later that day Jacques inspects the new farms. We’re in a convoy of three cars, Dahun driving the front one with a mounted machine gun and a guy standing looking tense, Jack and I in the middle, his bodyguards behind. I forget what Jack is saying but a plasma bolt comes out of our left and slices off the upper torso of the gunner. A sonic weapon goes off and the jeep behind us tips over on to its side. Fucks up my middle ear. Shit. Shit. Shit. Dahun does a U-turn and comes alongside us, protecting us from the field of fire. He launches micro-drones, robotic insects, which fly off in a cloud towards the direction the attack originates from. The car is sprayed with conventional bullets, which Dahun’s jeep can take. I think this is a good sign until Jack says that their plasma weapon is probably recharging. The insects mark several targets with red lines of laser and Dahun fires a rifle through the open window. Charges fly towards the targets which are still beyond view and there are six individual explosions. I’d like to say I was carefully noting everything down, but I concentrate on maintaining sphincter integrity. There is nothing glorious about facing death. I hear a sound, maybe, because memory is a funny thing. I push fucking Jacques down just as plasma cuts a superheated path through Dahun’s jeep and crosses where the mayor used to be. There’s a crack as air rushes back and my hearing finally goes. The car splits open, dropping both of us on the asphalt. I smell burning flesh. I see smoke rising and fluid leaking from the bodyguards’ car.
“The fuel is dripping out,” I say.
“Don’t panic. That’s not fuel,” says Jacques. “That’s the body fat of the… yes. Body fat. The guards.”
I try to think of an exit, but it’s not to be because I lose consciousness. I wake on a stretcher in one of the ambulances. Jack is lying parallel.
“Good job, scribe!” says a cheerful Jacques. He is making a thumbs-up sign. “You probably saved my life.”
I feel a “but.” It doesn’t come, but hangs in the air swirling between us, only me. I say nothing and I don’t try to get up because I’m still woozy.
“We rounded them all up, you’ll be glad to know. Paid by the president, no doubt.”
“Motherfucker, give it a rest,” I say, before I can stop myself. “I can tell when you’re lying now. You haven’t rounded up shit and that wasn’t the president. That was your own people crowdsourcing weapons to kill you hard.”
“The president—”
“No, no, no. Not the president. The people of Rosewater rising up against a tyrant. They hate you, Jacques. You’d know this if you read the graffiti that your mercenaries clean up before you come round. You’re beautiful and perfect and fucking patronising and paternalistic and my God, do they hate you.”
He is silent and I’m breathing hard. I’ve gone way too far, but I’ve decided against the gig anyway.
“Thank you for your candour,” he says. “Memento homo.” He is, for the first time, subdued and withdrawn. His screen is down.
“Mr. Mayor—”
The ambulance stops and the doors open. Dahun is there, bearing enough arms to kit out a whole ocean of octopuses.
“You’re not my paramedic,” says Jacques. “Help me up.”
They help him up and the sheet slips, revealing air where there should be a left leg. He looks back at me. “Not so perfect any more, eh, scribe?”
He winks and is gone.
Lora purses her lips, which is a thing she does when she’s thinking, although I don’t know exactly how constructs think. “Memento homo,” she says. “Remember you are human. It’s a call to humility in a successful person.”
I know this, but I don’t interrupt, although like many things we think we know about the Roman Empire, it has probably been exaggerated over time because it is striking.
“He showed you his amputated leg on purpose,” she says. “You had attacked him, and he had to counter-attack, make you feel bad.”
“The sheet fell.”
“No. The mayor does not make mistakes, especially when it comes to impressions of him. How do you feel?”
“Guilty. Ashamed. A bit angry with myself.”
“Exactly. And how do you think he felt when you told him Rosewater hates him?”
“I wonder what he’ll think if he finds out about us.”
“Oh, he already knows.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’m an employee of the Office of the Mayor. So are you, even if it’s temporary. There are policies. We have to disclose any fraternisation. I told him the day after we first became intimate.”
“I’m not sure I’m okay with that.”
“This is real life, Walter, not sitting at home all day, living off royalties and being whatever it is you were. In real life there are protocols to avoid conflicts of interest.”
My boxers are bunched around my ankles. I start to pull them up at the same time as I rise from the bed. Lora sweats. Do you know how freaky it is that robots sweat?
“Why are you getting dressed?”
“This,” I say, doing up the buttons on my trousers, “this is a big milestone. This is us having a quarrel.”
The bombing stops and people start to stir. It’s my last day and I’m mentally prepared to return to my cubbyhole, outside the protection of the bunker. I’ve been sweating since after sex with Lora.
I hear footfalls stop in front of me and I look up. A woman stands there with an eight-, nine-year-old girl. The girl has a perm; the woman has afro-puffs. The child tugs at her arm, and she bends down to listen to a whisper. The movement exposes some of her belly skin and I swear, the child has tattoos that move.
The woman straightens up and tells me, “I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, your work lives for ever. Or whatever passes for for ever in this part of spacetime.”
“What do you mean? Who are you?”
They seem to fade, and I reach for where they are, but… but my hand is burning. Both of my hands, arms, torso… I’m cooking from the inside. I may be screaming, but I don’t know, my head feels hot. I think that