GANGER

1 Infimum

• • •

Among the Yoruba people, it is said that Olofin Ogunfunminire of Awori, the famous hunter who gave up his place of honor in the palace of Oduduwa at Ile-Ife for little more than the opportunity to seek out new hunting grounds, eventually lived to such an advanced age that his body could no longer keep up with his skill and desire. His bones ached, his muscles sagged, his eyes dulled, and his hands trembled when he took aim. He became too weak to carry his own weapons, too easily disoriented to navigate his way through new forest paths, too slow to stalk and chase down sprightly deer and palm civets and wildfowl and boars. And so, at last, one day when he attempted to rise at cockcrow and felt the full betrayal of his own body, the final moment of realization settled upon him. The once-spirited man was overcome with sorrow, for life had held no greater pleasure for him than the thrill of the hunt. He hid himself away in his hut near a small hill in Iddo, refusing visitors, gifts, food, the pleadings of his own children; declining to participate in life itself. He stopped shaving his beard, stopped polishing his weapons, and only washed himself when he could no longer endure his own odor. He spent those days angry and sad and alone, weeping bitter tears for what he had lost, what had been taken from him.

• • •

Two days before her seventeenth birthday, Laide Haraya tried to kill herself.

She only failed because the Legba-6 sub-cranial interrogator sitting just above her spinal cord detected both the flood of distress signals coursing through her nervous system and the significant disruption of base electrical activity within her cerebral cortex due to hypoxia, via the embedded neural dust in her brain. Her rapidly rising heartbeat, the bright lights flashing behind her eyes, and the popping sounds in her head as she slowly slipped away from consciousness—all were inferred from a mathematical model, the probabilistic solutions to which all converged at one solution: one minute and fifty-three seconds until death, plus or minus twenty seconds.

The exception triggered Legba-6 to send a priority-1 alert through the distributed dataspace of the city, an electronic cry for help issued at the speed of light. It instantly repurposed the nearest available android programmed with a medical subroutine suite—meddroid LG-114—which had been assisting Mama Peju, Laide’s elderly neighbor, through her stroke recovery for the last three weeks.

The instant its quantum processors were seized by Legba-6 active control, LG-114 stopped feeding Mama Peju her thick brown unsweetened akamu. The droid dropped the spoon halfway between the bowl and Mama Peju’s open mouth and spun round, leaving a mess on the floor. It ran right through the solid white graphene wall separating Mama Peju’s assigned living unit from the one Laide shared with her parents. The action was so unexpected, it left the old woman shocked and slack-jawed with unswallowed pap dribbling down the sides of her mouth.

LG-114 reached Laide just as her muscles stopped twitching and went slack. With smooth, geometrically precise motions of its articulated limbs, and using a scalpel extruded through the smooth silicon surface of one of its fingers, LG-114 cut the faded green and yellow Ankara cloth Laide had rolled and tied into a crude noose. LG-114 pulled Laide down, braced her head and neck, allowing normal blood flow resume to her brain. It calculated the time it would take to get her down the elevators and through the connecting tunnels to the only medical center in Isale, the migrant section of the city. The result was beyond the margin for acceptable risk without immediate endotracheal intubation. LG-114 engaged its emergency flight protocol. There were no windows wide enough to fit an adult-sized human body and so it expanded the one in the wall, tearing the frame and the connected graphene walls away with little effort before activating its jets and taking to the skies along an optimized trajectory, a perfect parabolic arc, with Laide nestled in its arms like a sleeping child.

LG-114 returned to Mama Peju’s side exactly four minutes and twenty seconds after it left, having effortlessly inserted itself between Laide and the death she desired. LG-114 had only suffered superficial damage—scrapes and tears in its synthetic silicone flesh from the jagged edges of the wall breaks and a hole in its back where the emergency jets had burned through, exposing the metal chassis beneath. LG-114 cleaned up the mess it had made in its haste, helped Mama Peju finish her food and get into her bed, and then auto-scheduled itself for repairs in four hours at the level 1 maintenance hub where, given the timing, it would also receive its daily software update.

• • •

The first thing that Laide did when her consciousness returned was cry. Her body was racked by heavy sobs that hurt her bruised neck as she looked up at the sterile white ceiling of the crowded medical center. Her mouth and throat burned, like they had been scraped raw with sandpaper. The low, steady beeping of monitors made strange music in her ears.

At the sound of her awakening, her anxious parents rushed to her side and leaned down to envelop her in awkward embraces. Her father was crying too; she could see teardrops lingering just beneath the frame of his glasses before they descended onto his chubby cheeks when he came up to kiss her forehead. Her mother was less tearful, more vocal. She draped herself over Laide thanking Olorun effusively in loud, ringing Yoruba, for saving her daughter’s life. And then her gratitude shifted quickly to questioning that hinted of judgment.

“But why did you do this?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

Laide tried to open her mouth, but a fresh bolt of pain radiated out from her jaw to her neck and the back of her head, forcing her to stay quiet.

Laide’s father touched her mother’s bony wrist and whispered, “Not now. Not here.”

And so, they remained there in an uncomfortable group hug, ignoring all the other patients in the packed open ward until a meddroid with an almost kite-shaped head and long arms came up to them. Its entire body was smooth. Its interior metal interior chassis completely covered with a flesh-like silicone that gave all the droids the appearance of animated dolls. Its head and hands were alabaster white, while the rest of its surface was shaded a light gray to give the appearance of clothing. Laide’s parents pulled back as the six-foot tall automaton scanned her with its two beady black irises, ringed electric blue.

“Laide Haraya, migrant code OA-X139-2096, I am LG-496, your doctor. You suffered brief hypoxia, but your vitals are all stable now, and there is no permanent brain damage. You have some irritation and two minor lacerations in your pharynx from the intubation. These should clear up on their own in a day or two. Since you are now fully conscious, you have been physically cleared. Your dataspace profile has been flagged as at-risk and the appropriate adjustments made to your neural thresholds. Please fill in the forms provided.” The droid pointed with a rigid white finger to a screen that had extruded from beneath the programmable material bedframe. The screen blinked blue, like the artificial limbal rings around the droid’s irises.

“Counseling is recommended but not compulsory. Please indicate on the form if you wish to be registered for counseling. If so, a session will be scheduled for you. If you decline, you will be released in an hour. That is all.”

And with that, it pivoted around and ambled on to the next bed without waiting for a response.

Laide shook her head and grit her teeth until she couldn’t hold back anymore. The stream became a flood as bitter tears ran freely down the side of her face.

“Laide please . . .” her mother started, making to step toward her, but Laide pushed out a palm to stop her and turned away. Laide looked across the expansive space of the medical center’s emergency ward until she thought she could see the smooth blue and white surface of the city skydome through a solitary window at the far end of the wall.

There were no privacy screens or isolation tents for any of them. What use is privacy in a city where your own brain is always spying on you? They were all just data points for the system to parse and analyze and correlate and coordinate as efficiently as possible. They only mattered when they did something unexpected, unusual, something beyond the pre-set threshold parameters of the Legba-6 system.

Something like trying to kill myself.

Ever since her family had come to Legba city, when she was still a thumb-sucking toddler with knots in her hair and bright lights in her eyes, everything she did was controlled, every molecule of air she breathed was sanitized, every movement she made was restricted, every ray of light she saw was filtered, everything she needed was provided, and every risk she tried to take was mitigated and managed, all by Legba-6. Within the dome, everything was artificial. There were no sunsets, no flowers, no trees. Just graphene walls and metal piping and perfect clear glass. And there was nothing meaningful for the inhabitants like her to do except produce entertainment for those who ran the city, the citizen-investors that had created Legba-6 who lived in the other side of Legba city, in Loke. There was no need for labor in a city where everything was automated, restricted, controlled. Where everything was managed by the droids and drones and mechs and machines following the prescribed calculations of Legba-6. There was nothing to do except exist and obey. Eat, shit, sleep, and entertain. Like birds in a cage.

What is the point of it?

How can they live like this? How can anyone?

Her parents had chosen this life, but she hadn’t. They said life outside the city was impossible and that it had all come to chaos in the world beyond, but all she remembered of that world outside were the trees and the wind, and the flowers, and wild streaks of coquelicot that ran through the low clouds at dawn, and the mesmerizing view of a starry night sky. Some said there were other cities, cities run by people less obsessed with efficiency; where people lived fuller, better-shaped lives. Cities that had found ways to live more naturally despite the dangers in the air and from the sea. She’d heard of them, seen the rumors online. But she had no idea how she could get to them even if they were real. No one in Isale - on her side of Legba city - knew. Her parents had brought her here, and there was no way to leave. She’d never even been given a choice. She’d tried to escape the city twice when she was fifteen, even though she had no idea how she would survive beyond the dome if she made it that far. The first time, she’d tried stealthily following behind a group of droids and the second, she’d tried to rappel, with a homemade rope, off the side of a tower. But her own mind betrayed her before she even completed the first step in either plan. Just like it had when she’d finally given up and tried to end it all. Nothing that happened to her was a result of her own decisions. And nothing would ever be.

There is no point. No point to any of it.

Legba-6 wouldn’t even let her die.

It’s all meaningless.

I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to live like this, stuck in cage, just another variable for some computer program to optimize.

Laide closed her eyes, shutting out the view of the dome and the other patients and the white walls. The darkness behind her eyes felt tangible and liquid and sticky, like coal tar. It clung to her like a second skin, getting heavier and heavier with each painful breath she took until finally, she screamed, expelling as much of the pain and anger and frustration and despair as she could until her throat was raw and tender.

An array of heads around the ward turned to stare at her but she didn’t look at them. LG-496 turned to her too, scanning, but it didn’t approach, it simply continued attending to another patient when it determined she hadn’t screamed because of physical pain. Mouth shut, she found it was hard for her to breathe. She opened her eyes and started to hyperventilate. Her hands trembled and her teeth clattered against each other.

Her parents exchanged looks of worry as they approached cautiously until they could touch her again. This time, she let them, because she didn’t have the energy to resist any more.

“Don’t worry, Laide,” her mother said.

How can I not?

“Everything will be all right,” her father added.

No, it won’t.

Legba-6 was supposed to protect them, give them safety and stability in a place they had come to after fleeing global disaster but all it had done was make her life meaningless. She longed for her childhood memories of nebulous, half-remembered things like the touch of hibiscus and the sight of a real sunset. Anything that would make her feel something more than the steady emptiness. The city had left her empty of joy, of will, of everything. Even the feel of her mother’s hand on her head and her father’s rough palm on her shoulder as they tried to comfort her felt cold and lifeless.

I refuse to live like this.

And so, on that hospital bed in the emergency ward, Laide Haraya resolved to do two things.

First, she decided she was never going to let anything make her cry or scream like that again, no matter what.

Second, she resolved to live. Truly live. She would find a way to finally escape Legba-6’s monitoring and control. No matter how many of her attempts were thwarted. No matter how much effort she needed to put in. No matter how long it took.

No matter what she had to do.

2 Intersection

• • •

One day when the sun was high in the sky, and the wind was whispering wisdom to those who knew how to hear it, the once-great hunter Olofin Ogunfunminire was sitting on a cane chair outside his hut by the hill. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and staring off glassily into the distance when he saw a young babalawo passing by who had ornate white chalk marks on his face and a bulky load on his shoulders. From the markings and from his aura, it was immediately clear to Ogunfunminire that the babalawo was a person of great knowledge for he bore the marks of one touched by Elegba, the messenger Orisha.

The stories go on to say that Ogunfunminire called out to the babalawo, and when the babalawo halted and gave the great hunter his attention, Ogunfunminire, explained his plight, the cause of his unhappiness. Ogunfunminire asked the babalawo if he had any wisdom or charms that could help him return to the glory of his hunting days, something that would help give his life meaning again, no matter the price.

The accounts of this story differ on what happened next and when exactly it happened. Some say the young and powerful babalawo initially refused to respond and continued his journey but returned on the next full moon to give an answer. Others say the young babalawo first asked for some water to drink and then gave his answer. Still others say that there was no delay, because the babalawo had foreseen the intersection of their life paths and was already expecting the encounter and the query and had come with an answer prepared, which he promptly gave. There are still other accounts. But all of them agree on these two things:

One, when the babalawo responded, he first smiled and looked into the old man’s eyes.

And two, the answer he gave was “Yes.”

• • •

“Do you want to apply for a marriage assignment?” Laide’s mother blurted out as they dug into the lumps of cold eba and ewedu soup that the fooddrone had delivered a few minutes before sunset. It was two years since her attempted suicide.

Her father didn’t even look up. He continued to roll the yellow lump of eba between his fingers into a ball, pressed a space into its middle, and dipped it into the viscous green soup, scooping some of it up and swallowing the whole thing in one go.

So, they finally want to get rid of me.

“No,” Laide said, dropping the lump of eba in her own hand back onto the plate. “I don’t want to be matched to a husband.”

She didn’t want to be matched to anyone, she wasn’t attracted to men or even women in the way that others were; she wasn’t attracted to anyone at all. She wasn’t even comfortable in her own body, and so the thought of intimacy with someone else’s drove her to near panic, but she didn’t say that because it would have probably broken her mother.

Laide’s mother, Kemi, was a quiet and awkward woman who liked things to go exactly the way they were expected to. Like most others of her generation, she’d seen what the world was like before they’d made it to the city, before Legba-6, before order and stability were imposed on the millions of people fleeing floods and poisoned air. Laide had heard all her mother’s harrowing stories, but they seemed like tales from long ago, a different life, a different world, one she had no experience or recollection of. They’d been in Isale for almost two decades.

“Mama Peju’s grandson, the one you used to play with sometimes when Peju came to visit, he just got married, did you know?”

Laide shook her head.

“Legba-6 matched him with a very nice girl, I think her name was Debola or something like that. Yes. Debola Alakija. Good family. Good genes.” She looked to her husband who nodded in encouragement, and then back to Laide. “Mama Peju said they are very good together, they understand each other. They had a very high compatibility index so I’m sure Legba-6 will find someone in Isale for you that is—”

“No,” Laide repeated, and she slowly pushed her plate away. She didn’t shout or change her tone. She always tried to be reasonably respectful to her parents, even when she disagreed with them. Especially when she disagreed with them. It was a Yoruba thing.

“I don’t want to be matched or assigned to anything or anyone. I just want to be free,” Laide said as she dipped her hand into the distilled water in a silver washbowl at the center of the table.

“Ah. Not this freedom wahala again.”

Laide’s mother looked back at her father for more support, but he simply stared back at her and shrugged his shoulders. Her father Saliu used to be a boisterous man when she was younger. Whenever he finished his assigned work-shifts making virtual games to amuse and entertain the rich citizen-investors who lived on the other side of the city, in Loke, he’d come home and create his own three-dimensional virtual environments, full of trees and plants and colors and sounds and improbable creatures that he said were based on creation myths and stories his own mother had told him when he was young. Sometimes, too, he would go up to the rooftop to talk and drink with his friends in the social area of the tower, the only place they were allowed to congregate outside of assigned work. Laide had seen some of his creations when she was younger. She still had a few recorded on her tablet. They had made her think he was like her too, full of yearning for something more than the standard-issue life that they had in Isale. But he had changed once she’d hit puberty and began asking him hard questions about why they couldn’t leave the city, why they couldn’t live more richly, deeply, fully. He’d become less eager to engage with her, to show her things, to answer her questions. After her first failed escape attempt, he became soft-spoken. He no longer created his fanciful virtual environments, but he still drank with his friends. Perhaps even more than he used to.

“You are free enough,” he said to Laide.

Her mother jumped in. “Exactly. You are free to apply for marriage whenever you want.” She paused and reluctantly added, “Or not at all. You can choose. But we really think it would be best for you to find someone and settle down.”

“Free?” A small sneer escaped her despite her best efforts. “Am I free to leave this tower? To explore? To grow my own food? To get out from under this dome and sleep outside under the stars? To die?”

Her mother flinched and shook her head. “Don’t be unreasonable, Laide. There are real dangers out there, and you know it. You are free within reason here. Marriage will be good for you. You should try it. Or at least request to be assigned a job at the base to give you a sense of fulfillment. It’s not good to just stay here at home doing nothing.”

“Sense of fulfillment?” Laide threw her arms out to the side. “How do I get a sense of fulfillment from making silly digital distractions for other people to amuse themselves?”

Laide heard her father grind his teeth. “Don’t mock what we do, young woman,” he said, putting down his eba.

“Fine. I’m sorry. Maybe that’s enough for you but it isn’t for me. Can’t you understand that? I want to be able to choose to live in a way that matters to me. I want to be able to plant seeds in soil and grow something real and tangible in the world. Something I can smell and touch and taste, not just videos and streams. Not things that feel hollow and pointless.”

“Everything we need is provided,” her mother said, exhaling deeply with exasperation. “You should be grateful that you don’t have to labor for your own food and clothes and shelter. You have a good life here. And you are free to enjoy it, but you are too stubborn to let yourself. I don’t know what is happening inside your head.”

Laide leaned back in her chair, her eyes wide. She’d had enough.

“If I am so free, then please just let me be. I said no.” Laide stood up and went to the door, painfully aware that all her emotions were being transcribed to code by the tiny nanobots in her brain and analyzed by Legba-6. Luckily, Legba-6 didn’t care about familial harmony or personal happiness so there would be no thresholds violated.

“Where are you going?” Her mother asked the question like she was firing an arrow.

“To the rooftop. I want to be alone for a bit.” Laide paused and shot a backward glance to see that her mother was about to rise and follow, but her father reached out and took her wrist.

“Leave her,” he said. “Maybe she just needs some time to think about it some more.”

Laide shook her head.

What I need is a drink.

She made her way down the corridor of the tower as her parents resumed their meal.

They don’t understand, she thought as she walked away, and they probably never will.

She swept past several other living units: Mama Peju’s, the one occupied by the nosy Gwanle family, and one—the only one—with a blinking red light-sign on the door indicating that it had been unoccupied for more than three weeks, ever since the occupant Mallam Rabi’u had passed away peacefully in his sleep. She reached one of the main vertical highways and pushed the thin gray button set into the wall to summon one of the elevators.

My parents. Neighbors. All of them. Can’t they feel something isn’t right? Don’t they miss the sun and the sky and the soil beneath their feet? Don’t they want to be able to do more than just what some algorithm tells them to do?

An elevator arrived with a gentle ding and its gray metal jaws yawned open to receive Laide into its cavernous space, which was larger than most living units. It was surprisingly empty. The walls were ribbed and embossed with an elaborate pattern of stripes and dots that probably meant something to someone, but not her. She entered and keyed the numbers 5-9-1 into the panel. The door closed and the elevator began to move so subtly that she almost didn’t notice the motion except for the increased pressure in her ears.

When she arrived at the rooftop level of the tower and the doors opened again, her ears popped. Laide opened her mouth, elongating her jaw and rubbed her ears to equalize the pressure. She exited into an open area where rows of compact programmable material tables and chairs sat, protected by a light-barrier overlooking the geometrically precise arrangement of the city’s towers and its interconnecting tunnels below. There were two utilitydroids moving about, serving drinks to the few sparse patrons at the tables. She noticed that there was only one person sitting alone, a young-looking man with a large puff of hair like an explosion on his head. All the others were in pairs or groups. Most of the residents who drank didn’t like to drink by themselves.

Laide looked to the western edge of the light-barrier where she’d made her second attempt to escape the city using a makeshift rope. One of the utilitydroids had intercepted her before she even crossed the array of light sensors.

Fucking Legba-6.

She looked up at the surface of the skydome as she went to an empty chair and sat down.

There was a hint of orange running through it to indicate that it was sunset even though the material of the dome didn’t let in the full spectrum of natural light. It used internal emitters to simulate what was absorbed or reflected externally.

Fake sky. Fake city. Fake life.

She looked down and scanned around. There were other towers just like hers, so close together that she could almost see what those other residents were drinking on their own rooftops. In the spaces between the towers, she spotted flashes of a shiny blur of buildings, like seeing through a heat haze. It was Loke, the other side of the city where things were supposed to be more elegant, less crowded, more beautiful. She couldn’t really see anything of it, only rough shapes, thanks to the magneto-optic screen. Besides, looking between buildings was like peeking out through the mouth of a monster, seeing between large wet teeth. Laide wondered how they felt—the people of Isale who lived in the towers directly adjacent to Loke. How did it feel, always seeing the boundary of the citizen-investors domain, always blurred from their view by the magneto-optic screen, always looking at a warped, dreamy version of the place they could not go? Probably not too different from the way she felt looking up at the skydome.

Laide exhaled slowly through her mouth and focused back on the skydome, clearing her mind. After her suicide attempt, she’d dedicated herself to finding out as much as possible about how Legba-6 worked. She didn’t even remember when it had been installed but she knew the interrogator device in her head could monitor all her brain activity, just like it did for everyone else, and that it only actively responded to deviations. Legba-6 used a principle called “management by exception.” She’d read in online forums that because of that system design philosophy, which meant Legba-6 only detected things that deviated from its expectations and predictions, it was theoretically possible to hide herself by flooding her mind with memories so powerfully that it seemed she was reliving them while simultaneously controlling her breathing to keep her body calm despite what was happening physically around her. The incongruity posed a difficulty to Legba-6 since it could not always distinguish between reality, dreams, and memories—it was all just brain activity to the interrogator. If the memory was strong enough, then Legba-6 could not tell if it was real or not, creating a contradiction in the interrogators output and Legba-6 could not be sure if it was an exception or a data error or if the person was just daydreaming. That uncertainty created a gap in its response time. That gap was what she could exploit. So, she did. She’d turned that theory into practice and was now fairly adept at it. It took conscious effort, and it was extremely difficult to do anything else requiring motor skills while she was in that state, but it was doable, managing two contradictory perceptions in her mind at once. Like being in two places at the same time without ever having to do anything more complex than closing her eyes and focusing intently.

She did it now, focusing on her most precious memories of childhood. A memory of a day her mother had taken her to the park or the forest reserve, she wasn’t sure. She must have been about two years old at the time and the memory was nebulous, filled with flashes of sensation but little tangible detail. She wasn’t even sure it was a real memory. It could have been induced, reinforced by her wanting it to be real and by images she’d seen online and by telling herself that it had happened, conflating some real event with other thoughts, desires, imagery, to weave something potent she could hold on to. But it didn’t matter. The uncertain nature of the memory was exactly what she’d found worked best for hiding her thoughts from the probing electric eyes and ears of Legba-6. Unclear, wispy images of green grass and a sensation of touch came to her. Her mother’s hand encasing hers. A walk or a run through a blur of green. Where was it? She couldn’t remember. Perhaps she’d never known. Perhaps it’d never happened. But she remembered the towering trees, the smell of grass and wet soil, the brightly colored flowers, the sound of wind as clearly as any reality she could be sure of. And above it all, a many-splendored sunset.

Breathe slow. Don’t let Legba-6 infer anything unusual.

Laide opened her eyes without letting go of the memory and doing everything she could to not think about what she was about to do.

Images of the sun and trees and flowers from her memories seemed to be superimposed over reality, over the view from the rooftop. There were tree trunks between the tables, flowers weaving through the hair of the guests. Elements from her loose recollections overlaid atop the present like a kind of augmented reality. She stood up and walked toward the light barrier. Slowly and calmly. The superimposed images began to fade but none of the droids had noticed or intercepted her. The interrogator in her brain hadn’t realized what was happening yet. She kept going, inching closer and closer to the barrier. A wave of lightness entered her head when she realized she had made it past the red lightline on the ground marking the boundary. It was farther than she had ever been. Excitement filled her, sneaking past her active memories, and she knew the dopamine and serotonin spike had given her away even before the droid appeared beside her, placing its heavy arm on her shoulder.

Shit.

It said, “Please remain within the marked social area.”

Laide turned around and forced a thin smile as the images of trees and flowers and sunset dissolved completely, leaving the cold, clear vision of the droid and concrete and the dome.

“Yes. Sure. I was just stretching my legs. Got distracted.”

The droid’s expression did not change. “Would you like a drink?”

She nodded. “I’ll have palm wine, with ice.”

The droid stepped in front of her and nudged her in the direction of her table. “You will be attended to shortly.”

She went back and sat down.

At least I made some progress today.

None of the other patrons had paid much attention to her interaction with the droid or to the fact that she had actually crossed the lightline.

They are the ones truly distracted. They’re all too distracted to notice anything.

The man who was the only other solitary patron had left, and there were only clusters of people at the tables now. She was the only one sitting alone. She watched them talking and gesturing and laughing with varying degrees of animation as a thought flitted through her head, bouncing around like a ball.

These people. My parents. My neighbors. Even Mama Peju. They’re all happy or at least grateful to be here. Content. Is there something wrong with me? Am I the strange one? The only one who can’t accept her life?

Her palm wine arrived in a tall, sweaty glass. Floating in it were two small spheres of ice that looked like they, too, were made of glass. They reflected and refracted the last of the simulated orange light from the dome as she swirled the glass. She sipped the palm wine slowly, savoring the sweet and milky and slightly sour flavor.

By the time Laide left the rooftop, night had fallen, and the dome had fully darkened. The rooftop was crowded now. More people had finished their dinners, had finished putting their children to bed, had decided to come up.

She’d had two glasses of palm wine and was feeling a little bit less unhappy than when she’d first come up, but she didn’t want to spend any more time than she had to surrounded by people who seemed so content with a life she could barely endure. She rode the elevator with two other residents back down to level 311, where the living unit she shared with her parents was located.

She had just stepped out of the elevator when she heard a series of dull thuds come from the unoccupied unit next to Mama Peju’s. She froze. The sound continued and then stopped. She turned to look and was surprised to see that the lights of the unoccupied unit were on—there was a diffuse white brightness peeking from the space between the door and the floor. The red lightsign indicating its vacancy was still blinking, and there’d been no notice from the system of transfers or arrivals, which all the residents on level 311 should have gotten. New occupants were almost unheard of, people hardly ever came to the city from outside anymore, but the unit would probably be allocated to a newly assigned couple eventually. She cocked her head. Curious about the sound - something so unexpected, so unusual, and perhaps a little bit of the encouraged by the palm wine, Laide went up to the door. There was a sound like scraping or dragging. Someone was inside. Laide felt a rush of excitement, she wanted to know what it was. She paused and stepped back, summoning the dreamy memory of the day her mother had taken her to the park or the forest reserve again, and she superimposed it on reality before Legba-6 triggered an alarm.

Focus on memory. On wind. On joy. On the bright pink of hibiscus.

She took a series of deep breaths before pushing against the door.

Breathe.

When she did, she was surprised again at how easily the door gave. It had been broken in . . . or left open.

Focus on memory just like on the rooftop. Breathe slow.

She entered.

The unit was just like the one she shared with her parents. Small. Very small. With smooth white graphene walls that held air in the wall to buffer temperature changes. There was a black, programmable, nanomaterial couch in the middle of the central space. Its surface rippled gently like the surface of a lake as the nanoparticles adjusted continuously to micro changes in the environment. A dinner table also made of black programmable material was set in the corner next to the drone delivery hatch. Plain white floors. But these floors bore marks—a trail of dark scratches. Something heavy had been dragged in and through the unit to one of the walled-off private areas in the back.

Laide paused again and exhaled slowly, scratching at her forearm. If she panicked, Legba-6 would intervene before she could find out what was going on.

Clear your mind. Focus on green leaves. On orange sky. Breathe slow.

Laide followed the trail and in a few steps, she rounded the corner out of the tiny central space to face the even smaller private area. Her eyes bulged when she saw a man sitting on the floor, bent over what looked like an inactive utilitydroid, his fingers buried in its open neckport.

“What are you doing?” she blurted out. She immediately realized that she’d already let the memory of the day at the park slip, that she was no longer calm, and that Legba-6 had probably detected it.

Shit.

Not again.

The man turned sharply and then, to her surprise, he grinned at her as he put a finger up to his lips signing for silence. His teeth were shockingly white against the smooth dark brown of his skin. He was thin and wiry and young, probably not more than thirty years old, and his afro was tall and wild and unkempt, with an assortment of small tools stuck into it like ornaments. His overalls looked like the ones she had on—standard issue but weathered and torn at some of the seams. The smile lines spread and creased his whole face. Laide realized that he was the man who’d been sitting alone at the rooftop earlier.

“Please don’t shout,” he said in fluent but accented Yoruba.

She was so surprised at his reaction that she simply repeated her question. “What are you doing?”

“I heard your question the first time.”

His Yoruba was vaguely French-accented. He was probably Cameroonian or Togolese.

Laide shook her head. “Look. I don’t know what you are doing or why or how Legba-6’s thing in your brain hasn’t detected it, but I’m sure you already know mine has and that it will send a droid soon.”

“No, it won’t,” he said, so confidently that Laide thought she must have misheard him.

“No droids coming, although people might be a problem. That’s why I need you to please not raise any alarm.” He pulled his fingers out of the droid’s neckport and stood up. “Bloody hell. I knew I should have locked that door. This was supposed to be quick.”

She shook her head quizzically. “What do you mean there are no droids coming?”

The man laughed and tapped his breast pocket. “Dataspace signal blocker. Ten-meter radius. Well, more accurately, it’s a signal looper. Legba-6 would flag an obvious block immediately. It’s called an anansi device, after the Akan trickster god. Cool right? All the buffer brain activity in your interrogator, from the moment you came within range of this unit, are being resampled and looped on top of each other. Mine too. It’s a jumbled mess of thought patterns. Legba-6 probably thinks we’re dreaming. The anansi only works for about twenty minutes every twelve hours though and it can’t be used at the same time every day, else the pattern becomes predictable. Legba-6 is very good at picking up on patterns.”

That sounds just like what I try to do consciously—resampling and superimposing old memories to confuse Legba-6.

Laide briefly wondered if he was lying. But the fact that they were still talking and had not been swarmed by droids stood witness for him. “How?”

“There’s a group of us. We have all sorts of tricks for living free of Legba-6 control.”

Her eyes widened.

Free of Legba-6 control.

The thought of it made her feel lightheaded.

He must have read the look on her face because his smile expanded, and a twinkle came to his eyes. He pulled two chips that looked like twin spiders out of his pockets. “Here,” he said, “Let me show you what I was trying to do before you walked in. But maybe we should lock that door first.”

Laide almost sprinted back to the living room door and pressed her hand to the flat black button on the wall beside the door. Three magnetic latches slid into the door to hold it shut.

By the time she returned, the man was once again sitting on the floor, legs crossed in front of him. He had already attached one of the spider chips to the droid’s neckport and held the other gingerly behind his own neck at the base of his skull. “Okay, thanks for locking the door . . . and for not screaming.” He winked. “Now watch.”

He pressed the other spider chip into his neck and the light in his eyes dimmed even though they remained open. His body stayed rigid and upright and for a second, Laide thought he had done something to hurt himself. But then the utilitydroid on the floor stirred, raised its head, and propped itself up on an elbow.

“Hello again.”

The voice was different, it possessed the almost screeching electronic whine of most droids, but the French accented Yoruba persisted. It was him.

She could only let out another stunned, “How?”

“Ganger chips. They’re devices that allow exchange of all brain activity between a human and a droid on a dedicated private quantum network. The irony of the entire system this city runs on, in both Isale and Loke, is that while Legba-6 keeps track of everything we do, it doesn’t actively monitor its own droids unless it needs to commandeer them in an emergency. They are largely autonomous, and so, if you hide your mind inside one of them, you can be too. You can think and do pretty much whatever you want when you’re piloting a droid with a ganger chip, and you’ll not get flagged for anything unless it’s something seriously unexpected, something that triggers a major exception in Legba-6’s statistical analyses. Like using a droid to destroy city property or something.”

The utilitydroid that was the man rose to its feet, his flesh-and-blood body sitting still as if it had been frozen in place. “Sometimes the only way to be free is to go deeper into the prison, to become part of it.”

“Who . . . who are you?” she asked, amazed.

“You first, girl. I’ve told you a lot of things that could get me in serious trouble. The least you can do is tell me your name.”

She nodded and pushed thin braids of stray hair behind her ear. “My name is Laide Haraya. I live down the hall and I . . . I don’t do much else.”

“Nice to meet you Laide. I’m Issa. Issa Maigari. I used to be a programmer at the migrant management hub in Loke until . . .” The voice trailed off as the droid froze in place and—back in his biological body—Issa’s eyes regained their spark. He stretched out his arms and neck.

The silence settled between them like dust, as Laide looked back and forth from the droid to the flesh-and-blood man who had just transferred his consciousness like it was any other dataspace file.

“Issa, can you get me one of those . . . ganger chips?” Laide asked. “Please.”

“Why?” he asked quickly, almost like he’d been anticipating her request. “Why do you want it?”

Her ears flushed hot. She was not expecting the question even though she knew she should have. Was it a test? She tried to think of something that would convince him, but to craft a clever answer she would need to know more about who he was and why he was asking. And so she tried for honesty.

“Do you know what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong in your body? In your life? Like you aren’t a real person, just an object being poked and prodded and told what to do and so nothing you do really matters?”

Issa nodded gently.

“That’s how I’ve felt most of my life. Like nothing was right. Like nothing mattered. That’s what people don’t seem to understand. The opposite of happiness isn’t sadness or anger. It’s hopelessness. It’s feeling like your life has no meaning. Anger means you have something to care about, something that matters to you. I know. I am angry now, but I wasn’t before. I was hopeless. And it drove me to a very dark place.” She touched the front of her neck and exhaled a deep breath. A tear slid down her cheek. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. “Since then, I’ve wanted nothing more than to be free. To know what it’s like to do something that isn’t being monitored. To make choices that I know are mine, unconstrained by some silly algorithm. I want to go outside this tower. To leave the city and touch a real flower, to sleep under the stars. I don’t know if that will be enough, but it gives me hope,” she said, wondering if she sounded silly to him. He was clearly nothing like the other people in Isale but she wasn’t sure if his personality was more like her parents’—motivated by the practical and pragmatic like trying to seize control of the city—or more like hers—longing for something more than a prescribed life, something to give him a sense of purpose and meaning and hope. Perhaps he was just somewhere in between. She pressed on anyway. “I want hope. I want to feel free. This life doesn’t feel real. It never has. All this—living under the dome, being tracked by Legba-6, having no real work and no real purpose; it all feels like living death. Like being a thing. I want a real life, or something like it, even if it’s dangerous, even if it kills me.” The tears were flowing freely now, and her hands were shaking. She’d told herself she wouldn’t cry anymore. But this was different. She was pleading. She felt a flush of embarrassment at that. She was pouring out all her pain to this strange man. She felt messy. Like she’d sliced herself open, spilling out her guts and holding them up for him to inspect, to appraise, to determine if she was worthy.

Please give me a chance at hope. A chance at something beyond this false life.

But his face remained stoic, hard to read. She couldn’t tell if he understood or even cared.

Maybe I should have just lied.

Laide wiped at her face with the sleeve of her coveralls. “Please will you give me one of those chips?”

Issa continued to hold her gaze, face unchanged for a few silent moments, like he was evaluating something before he finally smiled and said, “Yes.”

3 Supremum

• • •

The vagrant and powerful babalawo whose name is never given in any accounts of this story, gave Olofin Ogunfunminire the words of an incantation cloaked in a song as well as two small earthenware pots, each one appearing empty to the cursory eye. But woven deeply into them was a potent charm, an old magic that communed with the fabric of creation. And thus, every day before the cock crowed, Ogunfunminire would awaken early, sing the words of incantation, which was an appeal to the very essence of things, and then dip his head into the first pot. Upon doing this, his bones would rearrange themselves, his flesh would tighten, his muscles would twist into new, unfamiliar shapes, his teeth would sharpen, and his hair would grow out wild and bristling until he was transformed into a frightful and mighty young leopard. In this changed form, imbued with vigor and strength, he would run freely into the forest and hunt to his heart’s content, reveling in the excitement of stalking cautious deer, the joy of chasing down swift rabbits, the exhilaration of biting into the thick necks of wild pigs. This would continue through the day up to the yellow edge of eventide. And when the sun had set in the sky, before the other true, unenchanted leopards of the forest roused to begin hunts of their own, he would carefully return to his home and dip his head into the second pot the babalawo had given him. In so doing, the transformation would reverse, and he would become a man again with both the familiar weight of his age and the newly acquired contentment of another successful hunt settled upon him.

• • •

Two days after she stumbled into him tinkering with the droid, Issa and Laide met again.

They rendezvoused in the same vacant unit next to Mama Peju’s, and this time, she noticed that he made sure to lock the door. He was wearing coveralls again, but they were white this time, and surprisingly clean and undamaged. His afro was combed high and round. His eyes and his voice were solemn as he explained to her what he’d been doing that day and why.

Just like her, he had been brought to the city when his own parents fled the rising sea levels and the increasing concentrations of CO2-T nanoparticles that were meant to capture CO2 molecules from the atmosphere but were now replicating too fast and spreading too quickly to be controlled anymore. A cure worse than the disease. CO2-T had made the air around the world unbreathable. But unlike Laide, Issa was an adolescent when it happened. Grown enough to have to carry his own small luggage, forage for his own food, fight to defend himself. Aware enough to understand and remember it all clearly. The blood in the grass. The cries of anguish. The ugly smell of desperation. All of it. First the slew of changes in the climate and then the spreading CO2-T had conspired to turn his country into a mess, like so many others around the world back then. They’d all come, migrants, including Laide’s own family, seeking refuge in the privately run Legba City, where billionaire tech mogul Fisayo Daurama-Shaw had created a fortress of safety in her privately owned and AI-managed city high on the Jos Plateau, four thousand feet above sea level. Fisayo initially offered entry to anyone who was willing and able to prove that they would provide some intellectual value. Skilled workers. Doctors. Engineers. Agricultural scientists. Anyone with unique know-how. Fisayo had held up her city as a model utopia, a calm center in the middle of a raging maelstrom, protected and managed by technology most governments hadn’t even heard of including the skydome to keep out the rogue CO2-T nanoparticles. Fisayo promised safety and freedom within her city, and the offer had seemed genuine. Until the migrants became too many. Too many to let in. Too many to turn away. Too many to let die. Too many to embrace without fundamentally changing the nature of her city. She temporarily froze immigration, and they began camping outside the dome, screaming, crying, and eventually, in some cases, dying.

“It was terrifying,” Issa told Laide, explaining that his family had been out there for weeks, braving the cold, the stray fire of the protective gun turrets thwarting would-be violent invaders, the hunger, and occasionally sharing an oxygen tank with another family to whom they’d traded their food for untainted air, until finally Fisayo announced that she had divided Legba City in two. One section—which she called Isale—would be for the migrants, and the other, called Loke, for the original citizen-investors: a mix of “high-value” individuals with the resources to get there quickly and the investors and minority shareholders of her company who’d been invited and had their places reserved.

Laide’s parents had arrived after the partitioning of the city, so they’d avoided the worst of it. She had heard some of the stories from them and some of their friends, but whenever her parents told their story of coming to the city, they did so with reverence, their gratitude covering up the nastier aspects of things. Issa did nothing to sugar-coat the chaos and desperation and uncertainty of the time.

“The segment of Legba City they ceded to us was basically one large neighborhood that had been rapidly modified by machine labor into this.” He swept his arm across the room. “Towers to store us like spare parts. Plain. Ugly. Crowded. Many of them still under construction. Nothing like the images we’d seen on broadcasts of homes and gardens and fountains and the like. They kept all that for themselves, on the other side, in Loke,” he said, sitting with his legs crossed in front of him on the floor and staring intently at her like he was a meddroid scanning her brain. “And then they used the magneto-optic screen to block us from even looking at it.”

She noted the anansi device sitting like a tiny sentry in his pocket, his own shield against the omnipresent eyes of Legba-6.

He explained that he and his family had moved into Isale where the promise of safety still held but the promise of freedom did not. Then Fisayo had automated everything because the migrants were too many, too diverse, too expensive to manage without committing large amounts of time and the efforts of her own citizen-shareholders. As a condition of entry, the migrants were all forced to accept injections of the nanomachine solution that would become the neural dust with which they could be monitored and managed remotely and efficiently using Legba City’s army of machines and the ubiquitous Legba-6 AI. The same system that had been used to make life as easy and seamless for some of the people in Loke, executing their demands at the speed of a thought through the connected city, was now turned to use for keeping the flood of migrants in check.

“Many people were eager to accept the injection and enter. What choice did we have back then? To stay outside meant slow and almost-certain death. At least we survived.” Issa turned from Laide and looked through the window up to the dome, which kept out the ever-increasing volume of CO2-T that covered the world. “Even then, I knew something was wrong about her actions. It didn’t make sense. Why take so many of us in when she could have just let us die outside?” He shook his head. “I wish I’d known then what I know now.”

“And what is that?” Laide asked, her voice low as she tried not to show how curious she was.

He turned back to face her and said, “You’ll see for yourself, soon.”

It was the first time that Laide noticed his eyes were unnaturally bright and brown, like polished amber.

He continued. “They took me from my parents when I turned sixteen. Said I had been flagged as a high potential individual from my neural logs. Said I had a high IQ and a gift for numbers. Spatial aptitude. Abstract logic. That kind of thing. They took me to a special school in Loke to teach me things. Things that would make me good enough to become a researcher, working on ways to improve the system. I’m guessing you didn’t even know they did that. Did you?”

“No,” Laide admitted. She didn’t. No one she knew had ever mentioned it. No one on the online forums either.

They probably don’t take enough people for us to really notice. Select few. Cover stories. Lies. Or maybe people are all just too distracted to notice.

“They do. I lived on the other side,” Issa continued. “I saw what it was like. And the only thing I spent all that time thinking of was how unfair this system is. We’re all trapped under the same dome, but they live as well as they can while we have to entertain them and make do with whatever they decide to give us.” He smiled bitterly. “Have you noticed that Fisayo has never addressed the people of Isale since the first arrival, not even once?”

Laide shook her head. It hadn’t even occurred to her until he mentioned it. She had never seen or spoken to anyone in charge of Legba City except the droids.

“That tells you everything you need to know about how she sees us and why we need to change things. Why we . . .”

Issa exhaled and paused for a long time. “Ah. Enough reminiscing. Let’s get to what you came for.” He smiled at her, then continued. “There are a few ways to temporarily avoid the passive, exception-based monitoring and management of Legba-6: focused memory, neural overstimulation, meditation, medication, electrocution, if you’re desperate enough . . . Some of these are known and out there already, but we need more if we are ever going to make a difference. That’s why we built the anansi and the ganger chips and another really cool gadget we call the leech—I’ll show it to you some other time. They are tools. Tools we could use to truly avoid the surveillance of our own minds and eventually equilibrate the two halves of the city. Tools we can use to position ourselves to take over and make sure that we share resources and responsibilities fairly, so that everyone has a decent quality of life.”

Laide nodded, the blood pulsing irregularly in her head like a talking drum.

Breathe.

If the anansi device fails now, Legba-6 will detect such a spike of nerves that it’d probably send a hundred droids up here.

Issa stretched out his hand, where the two ganger chips sat in his palm like tiny twin spider gods.

Laide scratched at the side of her neck.

“Take them,” he commanded.

She did. They felt hard and sharp and powerful. So strange. So small. I’m holding the power to map my mind in the palm of my hand. “How do I . . .?”

Issa held up a palm. “You need to connect the first one to a droid, any droid, while it’s being updated. You’ll know when they’re receiving their daily updates by the rapid blinking of the ring of light in their eyes. Just push it into their neckports. The two ganger chips acting as nodes will establish a private quantum network that runs in parallel to Legba-6’s dataspace. You may need to stalk some droids for a while to establish their habits and know when they get updates. Utilitydroids work most independently, usually in secluded locations, and they are the easiest to take over and use. For example, I noticed this one came to this empty apartment for maintenance every day since the occupant died, and it got updated about the same time each day.” He laughed. “I was here, intercepting it when you walked in on me two days ago. I should have locked the door.”

Laide smiled at that.

“Once connected, adjust the neckport configuration like this.” From his coverall pockets, he pulled out a small piece of white paper with a schematic in blue ink of what lay beneath the standard droid neckports. He pointed at three lines indicating wiring. “Just change that to this.” There was a hand-drawn reconfiguration of the same lines at the base of the schematic. She’d have to swap two wires and disconnect a third. It looked simple enough.

“Once that’s done, place the other ganger chip behind your head, at the base of your skull.” He reached over his head and pointed with his finger. “It has bioelectrodes that will autoconnect to your brainstem and complete the private network between your brain and the droid’s on-board quantum processors. Your consciousness will transfer, and you’ll be able to pilot it while your body basically sleeps.”

“And when I want . . . have to . . . get back to my body?”

“Just think it. Everything in the private quantum network will be under neural control, just like your body. You’ll see when you try it. It feels different, being embodied in a droid but it’s still you in a different body—like a doppelgänger for your mind. That’s why we call them gangers.” He laughed a small, awkward laugh that made Laide think that he was the one that came up with that and thought it was very clever. “You won’t get tired, or feel pain, but you will be able to see and touch and hear through the ganger’s haptic translation systems. I know you want to use it to explore beyond the city, and you’ll be able to. Droids are allowed to go up to fifty kilometers or so beyond the dome before their behavior being flagged as anomalous. But be careful and just make sure you get back to your body before the droid’s next update or Legba-6 will flag that as an exception and initiate a search. Droids don’t miss updates.”

Laide suddenly realized she was leaning forward, toward Issa. She settled back and said, “Thank you,” as she digested all the information.

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Issa replied as the remnants of mirth faded and a serious look entered his eyes. “I hope you understand that this makes you one of us now. We may call on you to help us do something when the time comes.”

Laide suddenly felt foolish for not realizing sooner that he’d been recruiting her. She’d let herself believe that perhaps he’d been helping her out of some sense of kindness or even pity or understanding, but she’d been wrong. He had his own agenda. Of course he did.

What are you doing Laide?

It was only in that moment, as she considered her response, that she acknowledged the insanity of what she was doing: sitting in an empty living unit with a man she barely knew beyond what he’d told her about himself, agreeing to trade some yet-to-be-determined favor for a chance to hide her mind inside a droid based on technology she didn’t understand. But now she was so close to what she wanted, she knew she couldn’t pull back, couldn’t give back the ganger chips, no matter her reservations. Could she?

“Yes. I understand,” she said before she could stop herself.

“Good.” Issa nodded, his humor returning. “You’ll need this too.” With a grin, he handed her another anansi device from his back pocket. “Don’t want them to flag you prematurely, messing with droid neckports. Remember, only twenty minutes every twelve hours, and a ten-meter radius.”

He unfurled his feet and stood up quickly, heading to the back room where the utilitydroid he’d taken stood upright like a watchful sentinel, a ganger chip still lodged in its neck. She followed Issa and watched as he lay on the bed, arms folded across his chest like a mummy.

“Do you need anything else?” He asked when he saw her following him.

It took her a moment to remember why she hadn’t left already.

“Umm. You never told me what you were doing with that utilitydroid ganger.”

Issa winked and pinched his fingers. “Just a little sabotage.” The light caught his amber eyes. “Which I need to get back to. Good luck, Laide. I’ll be in touch. And please, lock the door.”

• • •

At two-thirty in the morning, while Laide was lying in bed and staring up at the graphene ceiling, unable to sleep, she finally decided that she would make Mama Peju’s meddroid LG-114 her ganger.

She choked back an ironic chuckle when the thought first occurred to her, and then she started to cough, as her own saliva was pulled by gravity back into her airways. She propped herself up on an elbow until the coughing stopped, pressed the button atop the anansi device Issa had given her and thought about it some more. LG-114 was old and hadn’t been reassigned after Mama Peju recovered from her stroke. It had been left with Mama Peju as a caregiver meddroid since she lived alone and was still considered at-risk. Just like Laide, but for vastly different reasons. Laide wondered at the illogicality of it—Fisayo’s obsession over preserving the lives and health of the migrants in Isale while limiting their choices and access to resources. It was not the way Laide imagined a visionary leader would operate. Not unless she truly saw them as being less than herself and her citizen-investors, as Issa had implied. Less than fully human. Just resources and datapoints to be warehoused and exploited and optimized. But what did Fisayo or anyone in Loke gain from someone like Mama Peju or even her deceased neighbor Mallam Rabi’u before he’d passed away? Probably nothing more than a migrant life expectancy efficiency score on a Legba-6 report somewhere. There was little thought for their happiness or their joy or their sense of purpose and meaning. Maybe Issa was right.

She diverted her thoughts back to her burgeoning plan. Since the meddroids were adaptive, it was likely that LG-114 would have adjusted its update times to match Mama Peju’s typical sleep cycle. If it had, then that would be her chance. Laide continued to think about it, planning what she would say and do, walking through the steps in her mind repeatedly until she convinced herself it could work, would work.

If the system probed my mindlogs right now, how much of what I am thinking would Legba-6 be able to infer?

She slowed her breathing down first, then turned off the anansi device and tried to sleep, but she couldn’t. She was terrified that Legba-6 would isolate some vagrant neuron misfiring in her brain and infer what she was planning or that she was going to mess it up when she tried to plant the ganger chip and a droid would come for her. She sat back up, fished out her tablet, and pulled up an old 3-D display of colorful, magnificently rendered mythological creatures that constantly morphed from one shape to another—one of the last artistic creations her father had given her before he stopped making new pieces—and forced herself to stare at it till dawn. If she couldn’t smother the nanomachines in her own mind with blissful oblivion, she would at least confuse them.

When the skydome was finally brightened with filtered and augmented light at dawn, Laide turned the display off. Afterimages of swirling colors and wings and teeth remained imprinted on her vision for a few seconds.

Breathe.

Before exiting her room to sit quietly with her parents for breakfast, Laide exhaled and then flooded her mind with the misty memories of that day she’d gone to the park with her mother. The memories that she’d been using to confuse the subcranial interrogator in her mind.

Focus.

“I’m going to visit Mama Peju today,” she announced, speaking slowly, as she took a spoonful of cold and dry ewa agoyin with barely any palm oil in it.

Her mother’s head spun sharply like she’d been hit by a jolt of electricity, and her father raised an eyebrow, frozen. She’d caught them off guard but they both recovered quickly and said it was a great idea and that of course they were happy she was thinking of the old lady that used to babysit her almost a decade ago, and that it was good that she would get to spend time with someone else. They agreed it would make the old woman happy.

Laide nodded and offered them a smile, using every technique she’d read about and practiced to keep her mind distracted from what she was really planning. To stop the memory of the park from slipping.

Focus on memory. On happiness. On green. On air.

When her parents finished eating, they deposited their dishes at the drone port and left the living unit to go to their assigned jobs at the base of the tower, creating entertainment for the citizen-investors. Making virtual games, competing in games of chance, and performing live reenactments of scenes from ancient history. They seemed more cheerful than usual. Laide waited a few minutes before she dropped off her half-eaten plate as well and went over to Mama Peju’s. She scratched the inside of her wrist and looked away when LG-114 opened the door.

Focus on memory. On joy.

She swept past, ignoring the meddroid that had really brought her there and stepped inside.

Mama Peju was sitting on the programmable nanomaterial couch at the center of the unit which looked like all the others but with a few unique touches which made Laide smile. She loved to see it. There were the same smooth, white graphene walls but hanging all over them were an assortment of items which Mama Peju had once told her were gifts from her husband, before he’d died. The couch had a red bead-woven cover draped on it that rattled when Mama Peju moved.

“Ah. Laide Haraya! Is that you?” she asked, her voice shrill. The right side of her face barely moved as she spoke. She was gaunt with sunken cheeks, her curly gray hair was cropped close, and she looked frail, but her eyes still twinkled like a binary star, “You have finally remembered me.”

Laide ignored the spike of guilt that pierced her gut and knelt to greet the old woman in the traditional way, “I’m sorry Mama Peju, I’ve been having some personal difficulties.”

To the far left, Laide thought she could see a faint square-shaped outline in the wall marking the repairs that had been needed when LG-114 had broken through to interrupt her suicide attempt. There was a similar outline in the central space of her living unit, which was why her father had moved the couch so that it was facing away from it.

“Hmm. Yes, personal problems. Your mother told me.” Mama Peju said her brows furrowing, “It’s not really my place to say ehn, but it seems you are feeling some things too much. Your internal senses are imbalanced. You need to get back your balance, come back to iwa-pele. To center. Like I taught you. Remember to take some time every day to reflect on yourself and pray so that you can be in alignment with your Orí. Your true purpose. Once you find that it will be well with you.”

Focus on memory. On the feeling of the wind.

Laide didn’t want to confess that she had long given up on the Ifa spiritual practice which mama Peju had taught her as a child, so she simply lied and said, “Yes. I will, ma. Thank you.”

Maybe she’s right, maybe I should return to prayer instead of doing this. To try to find peace in my Orí.

It had worked once, at least Laide thought it had, back when she was an adolescent. Back then, appeals to what she imagined to be her Orí, a kind of spectral version of herself floating above her head, used to provide a sense of balance of orientation in the world. But then puberty had arrived, and her body had changed in strange and uncomfortable ways making her feel like she didn’t belong in it. And then came the pain of unanswered prayers when she’d fallen into her lowest, most desperate moments, the hollow echoing that had returned when she’d focused and tried to reach out for her sense of higher self, all of that had left her mind bruised and bitter and full of doubt about her spirituality.

She rose and settled down next to the old woman, the couch adjusting itself to cradle the added weight of her frame. They talked for hours as Laide pretended to be interested in the minutiae of Peju’s son’s marriage, petty online squabbles within the community of elderly migrants, and other assorted trivia. Occasionally, she found herself more than a little engrossed when Mama Peju slipped into a story about the time before she came to the city, telling of her travels with her husband to places like Cape Town and Bangkok and Houston. Giving little snippets of the years of freedom and chaos. They played Ayo as they talked, an old game Mama Peju had taught Laide to play. They used smooth stones as “seeds” and a wood board with circular depressions set into it—the “houses.” The objective was to capture the opponent’s seeds by running your own seeds counter-clockwise to try to land in an opponent’s house and claim theirs. Laide let Mama Peju win most of the games.

At noon, the old woman’s eyes began to droop and LG-114 stealthily came up to the couch. “It is the optimal time for your daily nap, ma.” The voice was high pitched, with a faint crackle at the end of each word.

Its audio transmission system is old.

Mama Peju’s eyes opened wide, and she looked at Laide. “You see? My Peju isn’t anymore here but you see how this robot is taking care of me? Thank Olorun for this place and that Fisayo woman. The wahala outside this place is too much for an old woman like me.”

Another one, grateful for her prison.

And then Mama Peju added, “Honestly I don’t understand what happened to the world.”

There was a depth of sadness in her voice that Laide hadn’t quite heard before and it resonated with her.

Maybe not grateful, maybe just tired and afraid.

She nodded and followed as LG-114 took Mama Peju into her private area and helped her into bed. Laide held her hand, tracing the line of her wrinkles with a finger until her eyes closed, a small smile lingering on her lips. LG-114 retreated to a corner of the room and stood watching over its sleeping charge with its beady red-ringed eyes.

Laide rose and took a deep breath before sinking to the floor across the room on the opposite side of the bed, resting her back against the wall and keeping her eyes on LG-114 in turn.

It’s just a matter of time now.

Focus on memory. On the pink and red of hibiscus.

Almost an hour passed before she saw the rapid flashing of red in the droid’s eyes like an insistent warning. Its daily update was being downloaded from dataspace.

Focus on trees. On air. On freedom.

She quickly switched on the anansi device in her pocket and shot up to her feet. Pulling out the ganger chips from the fold of her coveralls, she covered the space of the room in three broad steps, her heart pounding as she let the memory of the park that she had been cycling fall away. With trembling fingers, she jammed one of the chips into LG-114’s neckport and hurriedly worked it into the configuration Issa had shown her.

The blinking of the droid’s eyes stopped, holding wide and bright and just a little bit terrifying.

Laide hesitated for only a second, wondering if it would work, if Issa was a spy or agent sent to Isale to entrap and weed out dissenters and potential threats, and this was all an elaborate trap, with droids already on the way to intercept and take her away. All her fears coalesced in that split second into something cold and raw that held her sessile. But she remembered the depth of her despair the day she’d tied that Ankara noose around her neck; and the depth of her desire to find hope, to be free, overwhelmed the flash of trepidation. She’d been given an opportunity to feel the opposite of all those negative emotions even if only for a while. She was burning to no longer have to police her own thoughts. To finally relax. To see the fields outside Legba City. She’d been waiting for the chance for years. Besides, it was too late to turn back now. She was committed. She reached behind and pressed the twin ganger chip into the base of her own skull. There was a painless prick, a sense of ice running down her spine and then her consciousness fell out from under her, dropping into a deep, richly-textured darkness.

Where am I?

She panicked for a moment when her consciousness was suddenly returned to her in an alien package, like she had fallen asleep and woken in a parallel universe where everything was fundamentally the same but slightly altered.

She saw Mama Peju’s private sleeping area through a distorted 180-degree field, from a center of vision that was about a foot higher than she was used to. And the colors of everything she saw were much more defined as though the reflected light had a sharpness and texture she had not been able to see before. There was a new sense of temperature too, like she could see the heat as well as the light from every object around her. She was also intimately aware of sounds that she hadn’t heard before, strange new vibrations entering her consciousness. And some familiar ones too, like Mama Peju’s gentle snoring. Nausea, or something like it, lurked beneath her throat but not the throat she could sense, a ghost throat in another body. She didn’t move for a few moments.

Focus Laide. You can handle disoriented perception. You are used to feeling alien in your body. You can control this.

She imagined swallowing and, with only a thought, turned LG-114’s head gently, first to the left, then to the right. There was no delay, but it felt unusual. She repeated this until she felt synchronization between her thoughts and the movements of the droid. It took Laide a while, but she finally began to get used to articulating the limbs of LG-114’s steel frame encased in silicone. She moved in small, gentle steps with slow changes of hand position until she no longer felt like she was constantly about to keel over. She knew the disorientation was all in her mind, that her brain would take time to get used to controlling this new body through its old neural pathways, but the internal haptic controls of LG-114 kept her stable and upright.

When she felt comfortable enough, she raised one metal leg, balancing carefully on the other and spun around, looking at her own still flesh-and-blood body propped up against the wall, hands down by its (her?) sides. Her body seemed so short from LG-114’s elevated viewpoint, the long, thin braids of hair sitting on her shoulders like a shawl. It was surreal, being displaced from her body and staring back at herself.

I’m free. Free of my body. Free of my own brain. I wonder if Mama Peju would say I am free of my Orí too.

She pivoted on one leg again, spinning back to face the bed, enjoying both the feel of pressure that the motion generated on LG-114’s body and beneath its feet, as well as the realization that Issa was right. She could do whatever she wanted in this form without being flagged, at least for a while.

I’m not completely free of this city . . . yet.

Panic surged through her displaced mind when, in her peripheral vision, she saw Mama Peju stir.

Shit.

Taking long strides, Laide hastily retreated back to LG-114’s prior position and stood next to her own body.

Take me back. Take me back to my body. Take me back to my body now.

She thought the command repeatedly until the world dropped out from under her consciousness again.

“Omo mi, you are still here?” Mama Peju asked, rolling onto a bony hip just as Laide’s eyes shot open.

Laide let out a deep breath, surprised at how relieved she was to be back to her own mind and form where everything was comfortably familiar and under the watchful eye of Legba-6. Her stomach tightened, and she swallowed back a lump in her throat. The anansi device was still on in her pocket. She reached for the still-attached ganger chip behind her head and pulled it out, pretending to scratch an itch. It slid out as easily as it had gone in. “Ermm . . . Ah. Yes ma. You beat me five times, I didn’t want to leave without asking for a rematch.”

The old woman smiled and stretched out a hand. It was thin and wrinkled, but her fingers didn’t shake. LG-114 and Laide both stepped forward to help her up at the same time, Laide doing her best to fight back the roil of her stomach and the dizziness at the edges of her vision. Mama Peju’s smile evolved into something that was not quite laughter but came close.

“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your manners,” she said. “Your parents raised you well.”

Laide played three more games of Ayo with Mama Peju and won two of them. She didn’t leave until she was sure that Mama Peju hadn’t noticed the ganger chip attached to her caretaker droid’s neck.

• • •

When Laide took over LG-114 again, it was almost two in the morning, and she did so from the comfort of her own bed, leaving her flesh-and- blood body prone and still and silent, where it (she?) wouldn’t be disturbed till morning.

Her sight resolved slowly into the droid’s 180-degree field of vision. Despite the darkness, she could see clearly thanks to the droid’s visual processors, which gave her access to much more than just reflected light. She could even differentiate individual strands of gray hair on Mama Peju’s head as the old woman’s chest heaved beneath the covers on the bed. It was still strange. Laide’s biological brain still expected everything to be less clear and to appear closer than the signals it was receiving from LG-114’s processors. It would probably have given anyone else a headache, the constant mismatch between expectation and perception, but luckily, she was used to holding contradictory thoughts and images in her mind. She’d been practicing obfuscation techniques against Legba-6 for a long time.

Everything is elastic. Even consciousness.

As LG-114, she switched off the anansi device which she no longer needed since her consciousness was running on LG-114’s processors, and gingerly made her way out of the private area. Mama Peju wouldn’t need or look for LG-114 until it was time for breakfast in about five hours. Laide went to the door of the living unit, and exited, moving swiftly through the narrow corridor to the elevators. She paused there for a moment when she passed by the door of the unoccupied unit where she’d met Issa a few days ago. The blinking lightsign had now turned yellow which meant that the unit had been reassigned and the new occupants would arrive soon. Looking at that door, that ordinary door, accidently left open for her to walk into the miracle of what was happening now, filled her mind with a surge of joy.

I’m free. Free to see. Free to leave Legba City.

She continued into the elevator, hovering LG-114’s silicone fingers over the gray keypad. She usually only went to the rooftop on level 591 for some space when she felt claustrophobic and to stare at the smooth surface of the dome. Her parents worked in base level 3 where the entertainment studios were located, creating performances for the citizen-investors of Loke. She’d only been down there once. For the first time ever, she keyed in the numbers 0-0-1 to go down to the first level, where only droids and maintenance bots were allowed and where a network of tunnels connected all the towers of Isale through gigantic access ports.

The sensation of touch was changed through the haptic processors. It was a mostly heightened awareness of pressure and temperature and friction, but with the nerve cell endings in her skin gone, so were the myriad other inscrutable things that usually came with them. It was like being partially anesthetized.

At least I can still feel.

A green light flashed out from the panel and scanned LG-114, checking for its access permissions, and then the elevator began to move with a subtle lurch.

Throughout the four-minute-long descent, all Laide could think was thank you Issa and I hope I don’t get caught.

The elevator opened to a cacophonous world of metal and silicone in motion. Giant silver-skinned machines moved in predefined pathways on their massive wheels, ferrying mechanical parts into, and treated waste out of, the wide space through a thick open gate that looked like it could survive several thermonuclear blasts in the far eastern wall of the building. The gate and all the walls on every side were concave, curved away from her like the space had been inflated from within. Thousands of smaller droids and drones walked and rolled and flew across the expansive area, weaving around their behemoth cousins, each on its own journey through the network of towers, every action calculated to manage the city.

Laide stood there, her consciousness encased in LG-114 for a few terrified seconds, taking it all in before she remembered that she needed to move. She fought the instinct to hide from the machines and moved purposefully, following a procession of metal beasts that were the size of six or seven living units, each one carrying a tank of what she thought was water or oil or perhaps waste, given the sloshing sounds they made as they moved.

When she cleared the gate, she stopped following them and looked around. She was on the outskirts of the city, but couldn’t see Loke on the other side of it. The citizen-investors lived in lower, less towering buildings with more living space while the array of migrant towers ran into the sky, piercing the localized cloud formations like spiteful fingers. The diffuse darkness of the night-time dome was a solid curtain above it all, and it ran far to the horizon on all sides.

In the distance, Laide spied another convoy of machines moving toward her, each of them loaded with a green mass of harvested and sanitized crops.

They are coming from beyond the dome.

She moved towards them, piloting LG-114 with measured speed until she went past the lumbering line of massive robots and then she broke into a run, sprinting toward the illuminated arc of the dome. LG-114 covered three meters of asphalt with each bounding step, and it made her feel like she was flying.

As she approached the place where the dome cut into the horizon, she could make out an opening. It appeared suddenly, a dark, nebulous yawn in the smooth surface of the dome, as another convoy of robots made their way through the sanitization chamber at the entry point.

Laide watched, trying to remember everything she’d been told as a child or learned online about the poison that lay beyond the dome. CO2-T had been deliberately released into the atmosphere as an emergency measure—an engineered viral nanoparticle meant to mitigate the climate crisis by binding itself to carbon dioxide molecules and steering them to sequestration stations based on its on-board programming. It had initially been released in a controlled environment over the North Pacific, with a carbon dioxide processing and storage hub offshore where the nanoparticles were recovered and recycled. It had worked for a while, but apparently, the replication protocols failed due to a mutation in the viral component of the particles, and it began to rapidly replicate itself, eventually escaping the control area on air currents. It spread globally, before anyone could regain control of it, until it was just part of the air, attaching itself to lung tissue, triggering a spate of agonizing pulmonary diseases and, eventually, death. In small quantities, once isolated, it could be processed and removed faster than it replicated. But that wasn’t good enough to reclaim the world.

So now the dome kept CO2-T out, with every machine, crop, person, and molecule that crossed the threshold sanitized by the nanobots first. Just like she was about to.

The neural dust in my brain back in the tower.

The CO2-T in the air outside.

The nanobots in the sanitization chamber.

They are all enabled by the same technology. They are all aspects of the same thing.

Laide felt that there must be some poetry or irony to it that was barely beyond her. She kept running, pushing LG-114 to what she instinctively knew was almost its maximum speed, until she reached the foot of the hyperbola that the dome cut ahead of her. The doors of the sanitization chamber were made of the same material as the rest of the dome, and they adjusted to match the ambient colors of the surroundings, camouflaging itself when the doors were shut. Laide waited until it slid open with a low mechanical whine. She stepped in alongside two identical utilitydroids and a group of larger machines with massive shells that ambulated on four pillar-like legs, lurching to each side like tortoises. The door shut behind them and there was darkness for a few seconds until the chamber was abruptly bathed in red light. There was a hissing sound as a vacuum was established. She admitted to herself that even if she’d ever escaped and made it this far, she wouldn’t have been able to use this exit if she were still in her own body. She wouldn’t survive the lack of oxygen. After a few seconds, the light turned bright green and the large metal gate on the opposite end opened.

Laide waited for the awkward tortoise-machines and the utilitydroids to go ahead and then she piloted LG-114 across the threshold. She was exhaled into a clearing of loose wet soil that bounded the curve of the dome and looked out into an open field of verdant maize stalks. Their tassels came up to just under LG-114’s neck. Paths of cleared soil radiated out from the edge of the dome like spokes on a wheel. Laide looked up at the sky, the real sky, for the first time in seventeen years. A clear, bright half-moon hung low, dappling the sea of stalks with silver. There were a few low clouds with a wispy white ethereal glow like shiny smoke. And there were stars! So many stars. She had almost forgotten what stars looked like. In a sense, she wasn’t sure she’d ever truly known.

Amazing. This is amazing.

The gate of the sanitization chamber closed shut behind her with a hiss of vents. The sound jolted Laide’s attention back down to the loose earth and the expansive field and the hard dome. She spun LG-114 back to see that the entire outer surface of the dome was covered in an array of large gun turrets like lethal hair. She was surprised at first. From within, it was easy to forget that Legba City was originally meant to be a fortress, that the dome was designed to keep out more than just wandering CO2-T. There were no more migrants, rebel groups, opportunists, criminals, or any of the myriad detritus of the failed states that surrounded the city when the world began to fall apart. But the weapons remained. Like the stones and bones of the Paleolithic, the weapons persist long after the blood is spilled, rationalizations are forgotten, after the flesh of the dead has rotted away. The dome and its guns would probably outlive the people of Legba City.

Laide turned back to the field. The machines she’d come through the chamber with had taken one of the straight, radiating paths and had become small dots in the darkness, tending toward the moonlit horizon. The path seemed to go on forever, or at least much farther than she could see. Laide stepped forward, off the boundary clearing and into a set of tracks dug into the radiating path by the large harvester machines, turning to face the field. She touched a long stalk of corn, sliding a thin leaf blade between LG‑114’s fingers. It was smooth, like graphene. She thought out the scalpel from a finger in LG‑114’s hand and used it to cut the leaf from its sheath. She pressed it into the space above the LG‑114’s ear until it was wedged there, the leaf moving with the droid’s head like an ornament.

She stepped off the tracks and walked into the field, drinking in the touch of nature. The leaves and tassels and silks brushed past LG-114’s frame flooding her mind with haptic input. She walked faster and faster, until she was running, bounding across the field, and savoring the feeling that was so much like flying, like freedom. She was surprised at how natural this artificial body felt to her. The myriad chemical signatures were converted into smells that seeped into the deepest parts of her mind, dredging up raw emotions from linked memories. She allowed herself to luxuriate in all the sensations, the sinking of metal feet in soil, the sweet chemically analyzed scent of esters and aldehydes and chlorophyll, the rush of air, the touch of things that had grown from the earth, until she was taken back to her childhood, regressed back to a state of pure feeling where the sky and the air and the motion and the womb of nature all conspired to make the moment magic in her mind. She let out a laugh through LG-114’s speakers, a choppy harsh sound that rang through the air.

It’s like I’m in a dream.

Laide kept running through the field, ignoring the occasional maintenance drone that went by overhead. Like the people of Isale, and everything else in Legba City, they were too focused on their own pre-defined tasks to dedicate any processing power to her. She kept going until the noctilucent clouds lost their glow and sun began to peek out from below the horizon, casting pink and yellow streaks into the twilight sky.

She stopped then and leaned her head back to watch the sun rise. As it did, so did she. She was in a different, denser body but she felt weightless, inflated with a pure inarticulate joy that she had almost forgotten existed, and she flowed with that feeling, finally freeing her mind of everything for the first time.

Rooted in place, facing the sun like a flower, Laide didn’t move, only heading back to Isale when the base of the solar disk finally cleared the horizon and unfiltered dawn blossomed in the sky.

4 Complement

• • •

And thus, the aged Olofin Ogunfunminire continued his daily ritual of transformation, hunting, and reconstitution, his soul constantly oscillating between being ensconced in the body of a leopard and returning to its old and diminished human shell. It is said, in every version of the story, that this went on for a significant amount of time, but the accounts do not say with any measure of precision how long this period lasted. Some, when they tell the tale, say it went on for years. Others, only a few days. But all tellers of the tale agree that it went on without the knowledge of Ogunfunminire’s family and friends, and that during this time he experienced many new things beyond the joy of the hunt he had sought to relive. And how could he not, being so fundamentally changed? The stealthy approach to unsuspecting prey was joyfully familiar even in his leopard form, but now he experienced new things too. Like the iron taste of blood in his throat when he bit into raw flesh. The sense of perfect balance of his weight along an elongated tree trunk as he dragged dead deer up high up into the swaying trees. The rush of damp air in his lungs when he pounced at blinding speed with strength he’d never possessed before. And he experienced the bone-chill of a deep and ancient primal fear, something he had never felt before, when he first crossed the river that split the forest in two. Terror that induced abience inflated his lungs when he first saw unclear reflections on the murky surface, felt the water’s cold heaviness on his fur coat, and sensed the movements of crocodiles lurking below in the unknown depths. The presence of those ancient saurians, opportunistic apex predators that occasionally ate careless ones of his animal-kind taught him a new and terrible fear.

• • •

Midnight. The familiar blank-screen darkness of displacement eclipsed Laide’s mind when she lay back in her bed and pressed the ganger chip to her skull for the fourth time in a week.

When she came to later, her consciousness smoothly running on LG-114’s quantum processors, Mama Peju was sleeping in her usual position. Chest rising and falling steadily. Breaths steady with the fluid thrum of a low snore. A thin moustache of sweat on her upper lip.

The room was the same as always. Laide was starting to get used to it. Her stomach hadn’t even felt any discomfort the last time she returned from beyond the dome at dawn and thought herself back into the flesh. After that first, glorious time outside the city, her stomach had churned violently when she awakened from the ganger experience. Her body had felt strange and alien to her after being embodied in LG-114 for hours. She’d barely made it to the bathroom in time to throw up the previous evening’s drone-delivered semovita and banga soup—a red, oily mess that she hadn’t enjoyed on its way in and enjoyed even less on its way out. But with each successive ganger displacement, she got more and more comfortable switching between flesh and metal bodies, neural and circuit minds. The misalignment between her sense-of-mind and sense-of-body was narrowing after every displacement. It was curious. True, Laide had never felt comfortable in her own body, never thought she saw a representative mind-image of herself when she looked in the mirror and caught a flash of her shape. Never felt the way she imagined she should when she ran her hand along her belly and her hips. But when she was in LG-114 all of that seemed to not matter as much. It wasn’t her body per se, just a shell she piloted. Same same but different. She was almost more comfortable out of her own body. She was pure mind in a new shell for a few hours, and she liked it.

Laide, as LG-114, switched off the anansi device and quietly made her way out of Mama Peju’s unit and down the corridor to one of the elevators, where a couple, just returned from the rooftop social area were riding down to their level, eyes glazed over and glued to the screens of their tablets. She ignored them as they descended. The displacement process may have been getting easier but her eagerness to be outside the city and beyond the reach of Legba-6 hadn’t abated.

Not even slightly.

When the elevator came to a halt at level 1, Laide exited back into the basement world of manic machine motion. A variety of animated steel and titanium and graphene and silicone frames lumbered and whizzed and rolled by. This too, she was getting used to. She began to walk purposefully toward the opening gigantic eastern gate when a utilitydroid, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, sidled up to her, walking in step.

“Hello Laide.”

Laide was startled but not enough to stop moving. There was a hint of a French accent under the electronic drawl. “Issa? What are you doing here?”

The utilitydroid that was Issa had a humorous expression on its quadrilateral face. “I was waiting for you. I knew you’d come down here at some point tonight.”

Laide’s steps became less confident; her pace slowed.

“Why?”

And how?

“I want to show you something. In Loke.”

Laide thought that she could feel her face contort into a frown but LG-114 didn’t have the right facial muscles for it. She remembered reading online that droids could be made to look completely human with all the right anatomical features, and that they very nearly were, but at the last minute, it had been decided to give them angular faces, a small adjustment that was just enough to dip them into the uncanny valley and ensure people always knew that they were not human, to prevent them from anthropomorphizing what were essentially complex machines. It worked. Laide had always found droid faces to be unsettling even though she’d never had trouble interpreting their expressions. But now here she was, mind in a droid shell, talking to another human in his own droid casing. Frown or not, something happened to her features that made her sure that Issa had registered her displeasure because he hastily added, “It won’t take long. You’ll have enough time to go back out beyond the dome for whatever you want to do. We’ll just take a different exit.”

Laide thought about it for a moment, the ambient noise of Legba City’s machine circulatory system steady around them. “Is this part of the favor I owe you?”

“No. Not at all. I just want to show you something. As a friend.” He spread out his droid hands. “We are friends now, aren’t we?”

Are we?

Laide wasn’t sure, but she’d never been to Loke before, and as much as she wanted to see the cornfields and the sky again, she admitted to herself that she was at least a little bit curious. “Yes. Fine. Show me.”

The Issa-droid smiled and Laide visualized his real flesh-and-blood face, superimposed over the hard edges of the droid’s.

“Follow me,” he said, turning away from the towering eastern gate.

The Issa-droid moved in the direction of the tunnel network that connected different sections of the city. Shadows cast by the harsh electric lighting gave each tunnel entrance the sinister appearance of hungry mouths. Laide followed. They were swallowed into darkness, but she could still see based on the temperature differentials between the Issa-droid, the warm walls, and the cold ground. There was the steady hum of machinery and the drip of water from condensation along an overhead pipe, constant background noise. The two of them moved quickly through the tunnel, breezing past the occasional droid and autonomous tortoise-shaped transport vehicle until they came to a split in the tunnel. One way was dark and wide and flat and went as far as Laide could see, and the other led to an upward-sloping ramp where bright light cut across the ground like it had been painted across with the geometric precision of an AI-artist.

“Up here,” Issa said.

They went up the ramp and into a narrow passageway. The walls were made of metal and etched with elaborate swirling designs that reminded Laide of her father’s 3-D art. Lights beamed down aggressively from the high ceiling. There were sharp corners everywhere. The passageway seemed to twist and turn endlessly like they were walking inside a hollow snake. They went on at a steady pace until finally, they came to an exit door that looked like a smaller cousin of the eastern gate.

They were scanned by a red beam. The bulky metal door opened, and they emerged from behind a small metal structure that looked like a maintenance shed. Laide was shocked to see that they were surrounded by green grass, the blades glistening in filtered moonlight beneath them.

“It’s artificial,” Issa explained just as she realized there was no crunch of soil beneath LG-114’s feet like she’d felt beyond the dome. “Looks good, but it’s as dead as any of the droids.”

She looked up and around her. Houses stood scattered around the grass, plenty of space between them. There was no road. Each house was either three or four stories high. No more. And while they bore a general sort of similarity in their luxury, each house was unique in some way, either in configuration or aesthetic. Some of them were red brick townhouses with wooden roofs. Others were gleaming white mansions with roman pillars and gold paneling. A few were elaborate glass and steel designs, reflecting filtered moonlight from a dozen angles. Most of the windows were darkened but a few had white and orange lights peeking out from within.

She was stunned by the sight of it all.

This is nothing like the cramped towers of Isale. Nothing at all.

The Issa-droid pointed ahead at a series of connected gaps between the houses that made up a kind of path. “Walk with me.”

They walked along the false grass, taking in the houses and the neighborhoods. Laide caught sight of bold Arabic writing on a large plaque outside one of the houses, silver against black, its meaning unknown to her but its beauty undeniable. She spied a colorful children’s playground in the space between two sprawling white houses, like looking through a mouth of gold-plated teeth. Above, even the dome-adjusted light of the moon looked different, more real.

“I’m sure you’ve heard rumors of Loke before. You already knew it was a much better, much nicer place than Isale but it can be a shock when people finally see it for themselves. It was to me. That’s why I brought you here. So that you can see for yourself. See that even within the dome of Legba city there is a better way to live.” Gray and white droid arms spread out to each side.

Laide took it all in. He was right. She’d heard, but this was beyond what she’d imagined. Seeing it all, the abundance of Loke, was like being shown the open palm of injustice, unrepentant and uncaring. And then being slapped with it.

“All this space for so few. All this beauty and choice and variety just for them while they pack us in like luggage in one small segment of the city’s circle. Do you know the population of Isale is now almost twenty times that of Loke? Twenty times. That’s a little piece of information that they hold very close to their chests. Twenty times the population but occupying less than fifteen percent of the space and consuming less than ten percent of the resources available. That’s one of Legba-6’s objectives, even, to keep that value at or below ten percent. It’s obscene. And they know it too, if not they wouldn’t have to use the magneto-optic screen to hide it. When you have to go to the lengths of manipulating the polarization of light with magnetic field interactions—contorting the Faraday effect in bizarre new ways just to make sure people can’t see how well you live while depriving them of resources, you know your conscience isn’t clean. It’s wrong. We must change it.”

“It is. But how can you change any of it?” Laide asked gently, being careful not to accidentally rope herself into his cause yet with a “we.” Her head swiveled, taking in as much of Loke as she could. Then she looked at him: “Fisayo controls the Legba-6 algorithms that run the entire city, right? Including all the machines. Her own personal army. She could shut it all down with a thought. Besides, she has access to everyone’s brains.”

He spun around to look at her and, without missing a beat, walked backward for a few steps. “Yes, she does. And yet, here we are. You and me. Every system seems infallible and inescapable and inevitable until it isn’t. And every technology can be circumvented. It’s just a matter of will and opportunity.”

They came to a clearing, where the houses had receded to form a wide perimeter around a marble fountain that occupied a space at least ten times larger than the living unit Laide shared with her parents. Laide had never seen anything like it. Bright yellow lights beamed out from under the water, giving it an ethereal shimmer. A dozen statues ringed the edge of it. They depicted famous African thinkers and philosophers from history, some of them she recognized, all of them had their names inscribed on brass set into the marble below them: Njoya, Al-Jahiz, Salau, Diop, Ajimobi, more on the other side. At its center, there was a giant robed form of a tall and stout woman with plump cheeks, an elaborate gele on a proud head, streaming jets of water cresting and falling around her.

Is that Fisayo?

The Issa-droid looked at Laide and nodded as though he’d read her mind.

Laide stared at the water rising and falling in wide arcs, catching the yellow light so that it looked like liquid gold. She could imagine children splashing noisily in it in the daytime, shouting and jumping in its spray. Something she’d never experienced in Isale. The image was clear in her mind, like one of her superimposed memories. Did Fisayo really think of herself so highly as to erect this immoderate monument?

What is the point of all this?

The Issa-droid approached her. “I told you before that Fisayo doesn’t care about the people of Isale. I hope you can see that for yourself now. She is a narcissist, and I believe she always has been.” He paused. “Do you know why Legba-6 tries to prolong every life in the city as much as possible? It’s obvious for the people of Loke, that’s what they paid for—long comfortable lives which the system is optimized to provide. But do you know why it doesn’t just let the sick and elderly of Isale die?”

She shook LG-114’s head, genuinely curious. I want to know why it didn’t let me die.

“Data.” Issa spat out the word like it was corrosive.

Laide was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

The Issa-droid looked away from her and up at the dome for a moment, like he was downloading his thoughts before speaking. “Okay. Let’s take a step back. The interrogator sitting in your brain, your real brain, back in Isale, it’s the main processing center of the self-assembling nanobots in your brain mass, the ones injected into you when you entered the city. They attached themselves to your neuron membranes and now they record all neural activity data using a parallel electrochemical signal relay to your neural pathways. The interrogator collects all that activity data from them, holds it in a buffer, screens it for deviations from a pre-set baseline, and periodically—well, unless the deviation is big enough, then it’s immediate—converts it into qubits and transmits to Legba-6 via dataspace. You know that part, right?”

“More or less, yes,” Laide replied.

“Good. That’s important. So, you understand that right now, the system can only record brain activity. And trigger action when there is an exception. But think about it in system design terms. If you are trying to efficiently control a system, any system—and that includes people—then frequent and accurate monitoring and measurement are just the first step, so you can rapidly intervene based on what is going on. It is limited, reactive control. The next step, the big one is real-time modelling or simulation or emulation or whatever, the idea is the same. With that, you can take all that live measurement data and build a detailed model of the system that is always up to date and accurately predicts the system behavior—a digital twin of the system. And once you can fully observe present and predict future behavior based on that model, then you can really control it. Control us.”

Laide suddenly felt very anxious. The steady sound of fountain water falling back into the pool had turned from relaxing to ominous as she started to realize what Issa was telling her.

Mind control.

Issa continued. “That has been the goal all along. Complete control of people. Build good enough real-time models of how our neural pathways inform consciousness, memory, emotions, experiences, decisions, and behavior to be able to reliably adjust them all using an improved version of the interrogator. To remotely influence thought and action at the source without having to physically intervene or get her hands dirty.” He looked down, back to the fountain, eyeing the statue at the center like he was challenging it directly. “But analytical models of the human brain are incredibly difficult to parse even with the best quantum computing tools we have available, simply because we still don’t really know how the brain works. Not really. But you don’t always need to know exactly how something works to model it if you have enough data to throw into an algorithmic blender and see what comes out on the other side. I mean, we don’t even know what consciousness is, and yet I can port it onto a droid processor with the ganger chips. That’s why she’s keeping everyone in Isale alive for as long as possible. The longer you all live, the more sample data she gets about the spectrum of human brain function to plug into her algorithm and improve her models of the human mind until they are good enough to use Legba-6 as a tool to control our very thoughts.”

Laide shook LG-114’s head again as though she were trying to shake out what Issa had just said. She’d always felt like she and all the other people of Isale were nothing more than data points to the system but now she finally knew why. Why the people of Isale had been let into Legba city in the first place. Why they were kept fed and healthy and distracted. Why she’d not been allowed to die. Still, something else Issa said was stuck in her mind.

“The ganger chips . . . you didn’t come up with them by yourself, did you?”

The Issa-droid turned to her, mouth drawn back into a thin line and red-ringed black eyes trained on her. He nodded. “No, I didn’t invent them. I told you I worked in research. Fisayo was developing mind emulators already. I just copied her research and modified it so that it could run on local droid processors.”

The Issa-droid walked around and away from the fountain, along the artificial grass. Laide followed, still processing what he’d said. She felt faint and light-headed like her consciousness—or whatever this distillation of her essence was—had been attached to a balloon. As they reached the opposite perimeter of white and red brick houses, she returned her thoughts to what he’d said earlier about Fisayo and mind control.

“Okay. I understand what you’re saying but, what’s the point of what Fisayo is doing?” she asked. “We are all trapped here in the city by CO2-T. Even if Fisayo eventually finds a way to control us all like she can her droids, what’s the use? What does she gain?”

“Honestly. I don’t really know her motivations for sure,” Issa replied, moving purposefully in the spaces between the houses again. “I’ve only ever met Fisayo once myself. But from that singular meeting, and from everything else I have seen about the way this city was designed, I am certain of a few things, and I can make a guess about others. I know she is a narcissist who believes she is better than most people because she is smarter than they are—that’s what she thinks anyway, and even I won’t deny her genius in some areas. But you’ve seen the kind of historical figures she places herself in the company of. I think this arrogance extends to the way she perceives the rest of humanity—that we exist in natural intellectual classes and that the only worthwhile people are people like her—the thinkers and the scientists and the philosophers and any other ‘smart’ people who can synthesize new grand ideas, make elaborate things, pull off impressive cognitive feats. That’s why she still screens the brains of people in Isale, searching for what she thinks are important neural markers, taking the few people that meet her intelligence criteria and putting us to work to help her further her research. It’s nothing but new-age phrenology.”

“And the rest of us who don’t meet her criteria?” Laide asked, her mind still reeling as they cleared the scattershot houses and came to an expansive steel and glass building.

“She will probably treat them like dead weight,” Issa replied. And then he added, “Look, I don’t think she’s some kind of cartoon villain. You need to understand that. She just has a wrong and dangerous worldview. She thinks she’s smarter than everyone else. That she has a sacred duty as a genius or whatever to make a better world while causing as little damage to the ‘inferior’ people as possible. But you can probably already see the problem with that.”

“It’s immoral.”

They finally stopped moving.

“Exactly. But she’s certain her technology will be the optimal solution for humanity. That it will enable the so-called smart people to make all the important decisions for everyone else. As if the smart people aren’t the ones that first hurt the planet with their unsustainable technologies, and then wrecked it trying to hurriedly fix their mistake with CO2-T. If she gets her way, she’d be able to control everyone in the city and build her perfect world where the only truly free people are the people she decides can be. People like her, who she thinks can drag the rest of humanity forward into some imagined glorious future without having to pay attention to the dead weight of everyone else. The other people will just be excess biological mass—I’ve seen that term used before in her notes—and so maybe she’d use them as a library of genetic material to choose from. You can already see from the crude marriage application and allocation system in place that she’s trying to selectively breed people in Isale to produce more of the intellectual traits she wants. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a pilot program for what’s to come.”

“You’re describing eugenics,” Laide said, suddenly thinking of how unhappy she’d been for most of her life, unsatisfied with the current constraints of Isale. How much worse would it be for her if those constraints were extended beyond having a spy-device in her own mind to a full-on harness—the parallel pathways of the nanomachines in her mind forcing her to think and do things she didn’t truly want to? What about all the other people like her who’d never fit in. Didn’t want to be assigned partners. Didn’t want to entertain citizen-investors in Loke. Didn’t want to live in stacked graphene boxes. Would they be forced to marry, to breed, to conform?

“Yes,” Issa replied. “Bloodless and benevolent in a sense, but it is wrong. I don’t know if she really planned this from the outset, or if she initially let us into the city because it would have made her look bad if she didn’t, and then she saw us as an opportunity to improve her neural technology and impose her worldview. But either way, that’s what she is working on now.”

“And all her citizen-investors . . . they are intellectual geniuses too?”

“No. But money answereth all things,” he said in heavily accented English before switching back to Yoruba. “Only a few of them in the board know the details of what she is planning, but they all paid for a lot of the city, for her tech. Including this building.” He indicated the glass and steel box ahead of them with a silicone finger. “The research center where I worked until recently.”

Everything is elastic. Even ideals.

Two droids with translucent white chassis like no other Laide had seen before, exited the sliding doors of the building. They were carrying a human-shaped lump wrapped in black plastic. Laide swallowed as the horror of what she was seeing began to well up.

The Issa-droid placed a hand on her shoulder, and they both watched the two strange droids take the human-shaped thing around the right side of the building, to a shed like the one Issa and Laide had come through when they entered Loke through. The droids disappeared into it.

Issa said nothing for a few moments. Allowing it all to sink in.

“I know you only wanted the ganger chip to fulfill your own innate desire to be free,” he said. “And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. I wish more people in Isale were driven to pursue even their most abstract wants and needs. Less distracted and content with their lives and less grateful for their perceived security. Maybe then they would stand a chance. I admire you for having the courage to be yourself, Laide. But now that you have been outside a few times, I wanted to show you Loke, so that you see there is more than one kind of freedom to fight for. I hope you understand why it’s important that we take control of Legba City from Fisayo and her citizen-investors. Why we need to stop her from achieving what she wants. Why there should be no more Isale and Loke division. We should be one city, a fair city, even if we have to remain under the dome to breathe.”

Laide experienced a sudden and thorough exhaustion. All she’d wanted was to feel free, to see the sun and the sky and the grass and the flowers. This was all too much. The world she inhabited was far stranger and more sinister than she’d ever thought, even at her lowest point when she sought to escape it. It was always a dark river that had threatened to drown her, but now she’d found that there was a crocodile with massive jaws and sharp teeth swimming beneath, threatening worse. A tech megalomaniac who had herded them all like livestock, storing them in Isale as data sources under the guise of protecting them from the ruined world outside. And giving them no more than necessary, with nothing to do but exist and entertain her and her rich friends until she was ready to take control of their minds.

It’s too much. I don’t want this. It’s too. Too much. Out. I need to get out. I need to go outside.

“I need to go outside,” she said. A ghostly memory of the deep relief that sometimes came simply from lying down and letting out a deep breath floated up to her mind and made her yearn for it even though she didn’t experience any physical sensation of need.

“Sure,” Issa said. “We can exit through the northern gate.”

“Thank you.”

As Laide processed it all, they walked quietly toward the research building the droids had emerged from, and rounded it on the left side, following a parallel path to the one the two droids had taken. It was clear that everything about Legba city, about Isale was a lie created by an obsessed woman. Most of the constraints around Laide’s life were artificial, and had driven her to the brink. And it seemed worse was coming. Her mind was suddenly filled with a sense of the same fiery rush of blood that had made her scream in the hospital two years ago. She tried to summon the familiar vague but comforting memory of the day in the park with her mother, but she couldn’t. Even the memory of wind and hibiscus and joy and sun was slippery with fear and anger. Even her anticipation of the coming freedom of being outside the dome seemed tainted.

They came to a door that was similar to the one they had entered Loke from and followed a mirror-image route of the way they came, descending solemnly until they were back in the tunnels.

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Issa said finally. “But I think it’s important that you saw for yourself.”

“Why?” she blurted out, angry at what she’d seen. “What do you want from me?”

The hum behind the walls, and the drip of condensation, and the sound of approaching tortoise-shaped machines came at her like a cacophony.

“I want the people of Isale to be free.”

“Yes. But that’s not all is it? I assume you have a plan to try to make that happen. And that you want me to help you execute it. Why else would you be showing me all this?”

The Issa-droid nodded as they emerged back into the expansive space of machines and drones and droids in frenzied motion. They were facing a gate as large as the one she’d been using on the eastern wall but with a red arrow painted high above it. Laide suddenly realized that they weren’t in a separate room at all. It was a hollow torus that ringed the circular base perimeter of the divided city, connected by the tunnels that ran through its inner radius, just like the one they had emerged from.

“But only if you want to,” he said, and Laide thought she heard a hint of hope in his transmitted voice.

They dodged a group of incoming waste disposal machines and went through the gate before it closed.

Outside, under the curve of the dome, Laide, some of her anger abated, asked, “How exactly do you want me to help?”

“I can’t tell you any details until I know you are with us. I don’t think you’d willingly betray us, but you may get caught and anything can happen. The less you know, the better.”

“And if I don’t join you?”

“Then you are . . . free,” he said, turning the Issa-droid to face her as they walked in the now familiar direction of the sanitization chamber. “We know we are doing the right thing, but we aren’t like Fisayo. We won’t force anyone to agree with us or help us. But we will call on you for the favor you agreed to. One task. A fair trade, nothing more.”

“And after that I can keep the ganger chips?”

Another stiff nod. “Yes.”

She shifted LG-114’s feet. “Tell me something. And be honest. What you’re planning, how dangerous is it?”

“Very. We’ll almost certainly be killed if we fail.” He paused before adding, “but we won’t fail. Not if we do this right. If we have the right people.”

A lot of ‘ifs.’

She looked directly into the placid black eyes circumscribed with red light. “I need to think about it.”

“Of course. We aren’t in a hurry. We need to get enough people on board before we make our move.”

“Okay.”

They went ahead a bit until they were midway between the gate and the sanitization chamber. Issa stopped moving but it took Laide a few steps to notice and halt. The camouflaged door of the chamber opened in the distance, a dark hole in the dome, like a portal, from which a train of sanitized droids and lumbering tortoise machines emerged.

“This is where I leave you,” Issa said, smiling thinly, the towers of Isale rising behind him.

“Right,” she said, because she didn’t want to thank him for showing her the horrible truth of Legba city, though deep down she was grateful for it. “See you later.”

“Sure. I’ll find you again in a few days. Be careful. Don’t get caught before then.”

Mama Peju won’t wake till dawn. LG-114 updates are always run around noon. I’ll be fine. I have bigger things to worry about now anyhow.

She nodded.

Issa turned the droid around and walked back to gate.

She watched him go for a moment, the smooth bounce of shoulders and low undulation of articulated pelvic structure, wondering if that was exactly how she looked too when she walked, her mind wearing its LG-114 suit. Graceful. She spun around and ran toward the place in the dome where the chamber was set. She focused on the rush of air sweeping past, the pressure of ground pushing against soles, flushing her mind with haptic input enough to distract her from what she’d seen and heard.

By the time she reached the chamber entrance and looked back over, the Issa-droid had disappeared, leaving not even a trace of temperature differential, as though he had simply merged into the shadows of the city.

5 Involution

• • •

And so, as the tale is so often told, Olofin Ogunfunminire’s kinfolk grew increasingly concerned about his self-imposed isolation though they knew nothing of his bodily transformations. They convened a meeting at which it was resolved that his two sons, Ogunneru and Ogunbiyi, would lead a party to visit him in his secluded abode the following day, and stay with him for at least a day to ascertain his condition. Whether he approved or not. When the visiting party arrived at the appointed time, they called out greetings and made loud noises but when they received no response, they searched the premises, increasingly worried. They did not find him, for at that very moment he was in the forest, perched atop a tree, tearing the flesh from a ravaged doe’s neck. His clothes lay on the dusty ground in front of the two charmed pots that the babalawo had given him. There was a trail of leopard footprints leading out of the hut. Upon seeing this, his sons cried out loudly for they immediately took this for a sign that their father had been attacked while drunk or sleeping; that he had been dragged out by a leopard, naked and inebriated, to be killed in the forest like one of his own prey. In a mournful rage at their father’s perceived fate, Ogunneru and Ogunbiyi rolled on the floor and tore out their hair and gnashed their teeth and kicked out violently at the chairs and the mat and the two pots until they shattered into a dozen jagged pieces. When their rage had turned from a boil to a simmer, and their eyes finally cleared, they set out into the forest, following the leopard prints to seek some sense of vengeance and what, if anything, they believed remained of their father.

• • •

Two days later, beyond the dome, morning came cold on the plateau. Laide could sense the weight of dew on LG-114’s frame and the chill of dust-and-CO2-T-bearing wind, the tiny particulates forcing the droid’s internal filters to work harder than usual.

Harmattan is coming.

She smiled as she ran silicone fingers through a tassel of corn. It was comforting to experience something familiar (at least in theory anyway) about the local seasons, to know they hadn’t changed completely with the rest of the world’s climate even though the harmattan was coming much earlier than usual, in May.

The sun rose, illuminating the field and flecking the edges of visible seeds with gold. It was so beautiful, Laide felt she could cry. She watched the sun hoist itself up into the sky, making a new precious memory that she could hold on to, and then she could try to forget what Issa had told her, had asked her. But it was persistent, the doubt and the fear.

Do I want to join their fight against Fisayo? What’s the point of it?

It had been two days, and she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Even the thing she’d been craving for most of her adult life—being free, beyond the dome—wasn’t as pleasurable, as satisfying anymore. A shade of that familiar hollowness had returned.

And if I don’t join them, am I going to have continue hiding my mind inside this shell just for a glimpse of the sunrise, a touch of soil and flowers, until Fisayo finally seizes complete control of my mind?

It seemed silly the more she thought about it. And yet, there was an appeal to it. An escapist appeal to deny what she knew, accept her fate, and distract herself until the bitter end, like her parents and everyone else in Isale.

The sun suddenly seemed too bright. She looked down at the ground. A pink-fleshed earthworm was wriggling through clods of russet soil. She watched it curiously for a few moments, remembering what she’d learned about the strange creatures. They live in the soil, eat it, excrete it, their entire existence is in the earth, defined by it. Laide felt a flicker of something in her mind like a realization. The earthworms, like the corn and the trees and all other creatures of nature know their place in it and within it. They are defined by each other and in that there was certainty, balance. Something she’d never felt. Not in her body, not in the city, and not even now, out beyond the dome.

Come back to what our people call iwa-pele.

Mama Peju’s words echoed in her memory.

Be in alignment with your Orí. Your purpose. Once you find that, it will be well with you.

She watched the worm disappear into the soil.

What if I’ve been searching for an illusion of hope all along? What if I’ve been too selfish, too focused on finding purpose within myself?

There was a swell of something within her that was akin to the first time she’d left the dome, but stronger. Something flowering in her mind that was more potent than her most strongly held half-memories.

What if my purpose is to do more than temporarily free myself from the city? What if it’s to help permanently free the city itself? To do my part in helping to rebuild it into a place I can be happy in?

She glimpsed it in her mind’s-eye. A dream of a future rather than a yearning for shadows of the past.

Maybe there can be a higher purpose.

Something to hope for, beyond myself.

Laide hadn’t prayed since she was a child but something about the sun and the worm and the thought and the moment compelled her to drop LG-114 to its knees. Its weight sank into the soil, rooting her to the world.

I hope there is enough of my consciousness here for my Orí to answer me. I hope it can still recognize me in this artificial body.

She spoke out loud into the wind, reciting a few words that Mama Peju had taught her when she was just nine. She applied focused memory too, selecting a day she remembered because it had rained and the patter of the rain on the dome sounded like drumbeats. She focused until she could almost see wispy images superimposed over the cornstalks, of a younger Mama Peju speaking words for her to repeat.

Relax. Calm down.

But in LG-114’s frame, there was no heartbeat, there was no breathing, there was no skin or sweat and everything was different, heightened.

Focus on memory. On sound. On the feeling of calling out to a higher sense of self.

Everything faded into the background. Time flowed around her like a river around a rock but she didn’t notice how much. She was zoomed in on herself in a way she’d never felt before. Bringing all the disparate elements of her essence that had been pulled apart technologically, spiritually, psychologically, biologically, into one clear mental whole.

She didn’t have her lungs with her, but in her mind-space she recreated the sensation of exhalation, and all at once, there was a preternatural calm deep within. A sense of clarity. A sense of hope.

I know what I must do.

Laide stood LG-114 up and let go.

The signals from LG-114 returned in a rush of stimulation.

She looked up and a bulky scouting drone flew across her field of vision, cutting a line across the beaming sun. It reminded her of something, but it took a moment for her to place it.

Shit! Breakfast!

Mama Peju is probably up for breakfast and wondering where LG-114 is.

Laide turned around sharply and ran back the way she’d come, tearing past leaves and tassels and silks and stems as she bounded with great big steps of the droid’s frame, throwing soil up into the CO2-T saturated air. She wanted to take it all in as she had before the sunrise, but she was now too worried to enjoy the feeling of flying through the field. She had to get back.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I got carried away. I forgot the time.

She tore past the curtain of stalks and back onto one of the radiating tracks leading back to the clearing that surrounded the dome. There was a giant harvester machine ahead of her. She followed it, the feet of LG-114’s frame digging into the loamy red and brown soil with every powerful step. The dome loomed ahead, its smooth surface of gun turrets more imposing than ever in the cold clarity of daylight.

What if Mama Peju woke up to eat already and panicked when she didn’t see LG-114?

What if the guns turn on me?

I can’t get caught now that I finally know what I want . . . no, what I need to do.

Laide forced herself to slow down as she approached the dome, bringing LG-114 to a brisk walking pace close of the edge of the field.

Calm down.

She was trying not to panic but it was hard to keep her composure despite the uncertainty.

She heard the steady hum of a harvester convoy approaching. She waited, until the first one came up to her side and then she stepped into the track, following it with steady steps.

The gate of the sanitization chamber at the base of the dome opened ahead of them like a lazy mouth. Laide thought she saw the guns angle slightly down toward them, but she was sure it was just her imagination.

Don’t panic.

Laide thought herself calm and kept moving behind the harvester with the convoy until she’d cleared the gate. There was the hiss of venting and a flood of red lights. Her mind was overcome by the sensation of her skin crawling, as she imagined the nanobots poring over every nanometer of LG-114’s frame again, hunting for the viral CO2-T nanoparticles she brought with her.

When the lights turned green and the exit opened, she wanted to sigh with relief, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have lungs, and she didn’t have time.

She broke away from the convoy and piloted LG-114’s bulk speedily back toward the towers, her fear of detection diminished since she hadn’t been stopped at the dome. That meant Mama Peju was probably still asleep. For a moment, that usual pang of sadness hit her, as it did whenever she returned from outside; the grief of being an animal corralled back to a cage. But the conviction of her decision and her newfound sense of higher purpose kept her going until she reached the gate in the eastern wall. She entered and wove through the chaotic order of autonomous machines going about their tasks in the torus: appearing and disappearing in and out of hatches and gates and tunnels and elevators that led to every part of the city as if it were an anthill or a hive. She made her way to one of the elevators and keyed in the numbers for her level.

3-1-1.

The empty elevator ascended.

Almost there. Almost clear.

She let out a small, nervous laugh. She’d finally found some sense of clarity, something that felt like it could give the shape of her life meaning, something like iwa-pele. And then she’d immediately almost blown her chance to act on it because she’d lost track of time.

My Orí must have a twisted sense of humor.

The elevator arrived at level 311 with a gentle ding and the gray metal doors slid open.

When she stepped out, Laide was suddenly overcome by a sensation like she was falling, endlessly falling into a bottomless nothing, because there, right in front of her, was her own flesh-and-blood body, lying in the arms of a droid she had never seen before, her parents crying and hugging each other as they followed behind it.

No!

In a panic, she thought the command she’d so often used to return to herself.

Take me back to my body.

But this time, nothing happened. There was no emptying out of the world. No darkness. No displacement of consciousness. No awakening. There was just the terrible sensation of nothing happening.

Take me back to my body.

More nothing.

She watched in horror through LG-114’s eyes as they filed into the elevator.

Please, please, take me back to my body.

She pleaded silently with every fiber of her consciousness that she could muster, imploring the spider-shaped ganger chip in LG-114’s neck, her Orí, the directional photons of LG-114’s processors, the gray and white matter and nerve cells and blood vessels of her own brain, everything. Everything that she could think of willing to action, she did. But there was only that great and terrible nothing.

Laide watched in horror through LG-114’s eyes as the strange droid maneuvered. It angled her limp body to the side, and it was then that she finally saw that the twin of the ganger chip in LG-114 was no longer attached to the soft flesh of her neck.

6 Null

• • •

That day, when the night had just begun to settle into the sky, a few hours after his sons had set out into the forest seeking some imagined vengeance, Ogunfunminire returned to his home, tracing a new path, and found the pots given to him by the babalawo broken and empty, all the potency of their charms gone. He let out a wild roar when he realized that he was now trapped in the body of the beast and had no means of regaining his frail, familiar human form. The gravity of the misfortune that had found its way to him was great, pulling him into its center with an inexorable force. He shook and trembled and let out a variety of anguish-flavored sounds. When all his emotion was spent, he observed his hut more keenly and saw the shreds of his children’s clothes, smelled their sweat and tears lingering in the air, and at that his shock and rage turned to dismay as an understanding of what had transpired began to settle upon him.

• • •

Two hours after they first got out of bed, once they had finished their breakfast, showered, dressed in their coveralls, and were ready to go down to their assigned entertainment pods on level 5, Laide Haraya’s parents had tried to wake her up.

Saliu and Kemi Haraya found their daughter asleep in her programmable material bed, with one arm lying across her steadily heaving chest and the other planted awkwardly behind her head, elbow bent. There was a blissful, unflinching smile cut into her face like they had not seen since she was a child. For a moment, her mother felt flush with joy, because she thought her daughter was dreaming a good dream, which she took to mean that Laide had regained the potential for happiness after so many years of persistent dissatisfaction.

But when her mother noticed that Laide’s eyes were flickering yet she didn’t stir, even after they called to her again and again, telling her that they were leaving for work, their joy was slowly replaced by worry.

“Saliu, I think something is wrong,” Kemi whispered to her husband as if saying it out loud would suddenly crystalize her fears into reality, making things wrong by acknowledgement.

Saliu nodded in agreement and went up to Laide’s sleeping form, the smile across her face now a creepy mask hiding his daughter’s consciousness. Her shook her, gently at first and then more insistently, but she didn’t respond.

“Laide!” he shouted as he straightened her arm and lifted her head up, cradling it in the crook of his own arm. “Laide, it’s your father, answer me!”

Nothing.

When he felt a scratch in the crook of his elbow, he looked under her head, pushing away her thin curtain of braids to reveal the ganger chip attached tightly to the base of her skull, just under the hair line, like an electronic leech. He touched it tenderly and looked to his wife with a querying terror embedded in his eyes. “Do you know what this is?”

Kemi dug her hands into her hair and shook her head.

They both held each other’s gaze, the unspoken question hanging in the space between them needed no words: Was she using some strange new technology to try to kill herself again?

Her mother began to wail. “Laide! Omo mi! Laide! Please wake up!”

Her father seized the chip with his fingers and tugged. It gave a bit, and he could see thin thread-like tendrils piercing the brown of her skin. He pulled, gripped again, tighter this time, and yanked it out with force. A trail of thin, almost invisible bloody electrodes hung lazily off it like threads of a broken spiderweb.

Laide remained unresponsive.

The chip in her father’s hand suddenly began to smoke and disintegrate, its black and silver body reducing rapidly, like it was evaporating. It became hot to the touch. He fell back, sitting onto the floor as he tossed the remains of the chip into the space between him and Kemi like he was throwing strange dice.

“What the . . .?”

He shook Laide again, but she remained unresponsive. The smile was frozen in place, like she was mocking his concern. His tears began to flow.

Kemi ran over to the body that was supposed to contain her daughter and pressed its head into her bosom. “Ah! What is this? What is happening?! Help! Olorun oh! Help! My Laide! My daughter! I am dead! Ah!”

• • •

The distress signals spiking Saliu and Kemi Haraya’s nervous systems were both flagged by their interrogators and correlated against the stimuli coming in from all the other parts of their bodies. No physical tissue damage was detected on either of them, so Legba-6 narrowed down the primary cause of distress to the input from their optic nerves with a 98.6% certainty. Their rising heart rates, the sickening twists in the pits of their stomachs, Kemi’s cries of anguish and Saliu’s quiet despair, they were all processed and fed into its mathematical models, a matrix of equations which resolved to a simple solution: they were seeing something that was causing them severe emotional distress.

Legba-6 sent out a priority-2 alert, repurposing the nearest available machine to investigate.

By the time food drone FD-1021 arrived, shedding its bulky outer casing to enter their living unit through the food delivery port, the ganger chip that had been attached to the back of Laide’s head had been reduced to nothing but a stain on the graphene floor. Kemi and Saliu had lifted their daughters’ body up from the bed, cradling her head gently like it was tender fruit as they carried her into the central area of the living unit.

FD-1021 observed them with its large black camera-eye, like a cyclopean spy, transmitting the images through dataspace as they struggled to the door of their living unit in tears.

Legba-6 ran a diagnostic on Laide’s idling mind. Each neural dust nanobot sent packets of data to the sub-cranial interrogator which relayed them, but none of the information could be fit into a model result that indicated cause for concern. The myriad interacting neurotransmitter systems in her brain stem, hypothalamus, and basal forebrain all indicated that she was asleep and not drugged. And yet corresponding neural data from her parents, and visual data from FD-1021, made it clear that she could not be awakened normally. Legba-6 correlated all the data points, and its final inference, based on its existing library of human brain states, was: She had been sleeping, dreaming deeply, and had slipped into an acute non-traumatic coma of undetermined etiology.

Legba-6 repurposed the nearest droid with a medical subroutine that was large enough to carry Laide—an older model, LG-023, which had been administering vaccinations to a group of children on level 298.

By the time Laide’s parents exited their unit, LG-023 was already waiting to take her insensate body for further analysis.

• • •

It was only when she saw the other elevator doors begin to close that Laide finally moved, compelled by instinct to follow the droid carrying her body because she didn’t know what else to do. She pressed in just before the thick titanium doors could fully shut.

The sudden motion drew momentary looks from her parents, and it took every ounce of her mental restraint to stop herself from crying out It’s me! Laide! and trying to hug them, to tell them it was their daughter trapped behind the casing of metal and silicone, staring back at them through those beady black eyes. But her parents suddenly looked small and scared and weary and old, and much more frightened than she had ever seen them before. And the sight of a droid claiming to be their daughter would probably only terrify them more.

Would they understand what was happening? Would they somehow know it was her?

I’ve put them through so much.

The guilt hit her mind like ice, freezing her in place.

She kept trying to think her way back into her body even though she already knew it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t reconnect to herself.

Take me back to my body. Please. Please. Take me back to my body.

She stopped trying only when they reached level 5 where there was a wide transparent tunnel connected to the medical center.

Laide watched, still as a statue, as the elevator doors closed and the droid took her body away, her parents following it like fearful pets.

The sadness that hit her displaced mind like a wave was familiar but with new notes. It washed over her consciousness until there was nothing left but that singular sad feeling, and her mind was saturated with a single thought: I’m lost.

Just when I thought I’d found myself, I’m lost again.

Time flowed past her. Around her. How much? She didn’t know. It could have been anything between a minute and an hour. She wasn’t sure. She stood there in the elevator, staring at the embossed patterns on its walls, wondering what to do. She was numb and could not decide where to go. A steady stream of people and droids entered and exited, flowing past and around her, none of them paying much attention to her.

Finally, it burst into her mind: LG-114 would be updated around noon. She only had a few hours left.

What will happen to this simulation of my mind, my consciousness when Legba-6 runs the update and resets LG-114’s processors? Am I going to die? Be deleted? Trapped somewhere in some kind of ether? Become a ghost in dataspace? Or just become nothing.

Questions she should have asked Issa.

Issa.

Issa would know.

I have to find Issa before noon.

She pressed the keys to go back home to Level 311 and stepped out quickly once the elevator arrived, piloting LG-114’s frame to the vacant unit where she’d first run into Issa. When she got there, she was relieved to see that the lightsign was still yellow. The newly assigned occupants had not yet arrived. She pushed against the door, but it was locked.

Ironic.

She threw LG-114’s bulk into it, shoulder first. It budged but did not give. She tried again and again and on the fourth attempt, the door flew open. That damage was going to be detected soon but she didn’t care anymore. Mama Peju was probably awake as well and wondering what had happened, which meant Legba-6 and eventually Fisayo or one of her cronies, would soon be wondering too. Not to mention her comatose body. How long did she have? There was no more time for stealth or subtlety. She ran into the back where she’d seen Issa park his body while piloting his ganger utilitydroid, but it the room was empty. Terrifyingly, despairingly empty.

Laide dropped herself, her droid frame, to the floor and tried to cry but she couldn’t. She had no tear ducts, and no lungs with which to heave, no nerves with which to shake and tremble, to let some of what she was feeling was let out, like bad blood. No. She was just a lost ghost in a machine now. She couldn’t go back to her body, and she couldn’t stay in the droid’s.

No way forward. No way back.

She let out a loud, shrill sound like a wail that slowly morphed into a bitter screeching laugh when she remembered that she’d promised herself never to cry again, and now she couldn’t even if she wanted to.

I thought I finally found my purpose, but in finding it I lost access to both my past and my future.

I suppose my Orí does have a twisted sense of humor.

But then something about that thought, of her Orí, helped to clear mind. She stopped laughing and considered carefully, rolling it around her mind like one of the polished stone beads that she used to play games of Ayo with Mama Peju.

I finally found my purpose.

She framed the thought against her memories of the morning, the feeling of running through the cornfields, watching the sunrise, of the earthworm digging into the soil, of thinking outside of Legba-6’s purview, and of being at one with what she had decided to do.

Balance. Alignment. That was where true freedom came from. She didn’t need to win. She just had to be willing to fight to change things for herself and the people of Isale. In accepting that purpose, that responsibility, she’d finally, truly, felt free.

Like the earthworm.

She smiled, remembering a story that her father once told her. A story of how the tortoise got the cracks on his shell. One of several versions of the same story, but the one that had resonated with her most. The tortoise, as her father told it, had fallen off a hillside path and rolled into a deep ditch, but he called out to all the birds in the sky, and convinced them each to lend him a single feather, with which he made a pair of wings. Tortoise used his newly minted wings to fly back up to the path, but instead of stopping at the spot where he’d fallen, he attempted to fly higher, to complete his journey with less effort. He was caught in an aggressive air current and slammed into the side of the rocky hill where his shell cracked into a dozen pieces. She remembered her father telling her that the lesson of the story was not to be greedy, but all she remembered of it was this:

Yes, the tortoise fell. But for a moment, however brief, the tortoise flew.

The tortoise flew.

Laide thought LG-114’s frame back to its feet, exited the unit and began to make her way back beyond the dome.

7 Union

• • •

Whenever the account of Olofin Ogunfunminire’s final fate is given, there is almost always a new variation to it, an exaggeration, an omission, an addition, an interpretation, a mutation, each a reflection or refraction or diffraction of the teller’s own hopes and fears and dreams. A grandmother speaking to her young descendants at a fire, giving them life lessons cloaked in story. An arokin in a palace, singing to entertain his king in time with the beat of a talking drum. A teacher using mythology to teach history to his students, seeking discussion and debate. A father and his young daughter under a semi-permeable membrane dome, relaying a story that his own father told him when he was a young boy. The story changes.

But of all the variations of the story that exist, the account of its conclusion is by far the most fragmented aspect of the tale of Ogunfunminire, the great Awori progenitor. Some of the more overtly tragic tellings say that the once-great hunter, now trapped in the body of the leopard, was killed by an arrow from the bow of one of his own sons when they came upon him skulking near his hill house, seeking some way to return to himself.

Others say that he roamed the forests, staying close to the roads and paths until, many years later, he once again came across the babalawo who took pity upon him and devised another potent charm, one that finally returned him to his human form, and he finally returned home where he lived the rest of his days, having learned the dangers of pining so desperately for glories past.

A version of the tale, which is less often told, is that for some time he at first stalked around his own house on Iddo Hill, perhaps hoping that the babalawo would return or that some minor aspect of the magic that he’d been given would assert itself one more time and take him back to the way he was. He evaded capture and death but did not find any remaining charm to return him to his old body. And so, it is said in these accounts, that when all his efforts to re-enter himself came to be in vain, the great hunter, trapped in youthful animal muscle and fur and fangs accepted his fate, let go of his desire to return to his human form, and disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again.

• • •

Laide met Issa again at the edge of the cornfield, where the clustering of thick green and gold stalks gave way to sparse patches of mud and wild grass and stone and trash from the world that once was.

She’d run all the way through the field, savoring once more the touch of leaves and dirt and wind that she’d been craving for as long as she could remember, spreading LG-114’s arms wide and high as she ran back to the late morning sun. But she also remembered the stories of the floods and the death and the chaos before the dome and she decided she wanted to see what was left of it, so she followed the tracks left by the giant harvester machines until they eventually narrowed and gave way to thick, less ordered stalks. Beyond that was the boundary. She stepped through and found herself high on the Jos Plateau, atop an escarpment looking down on the flooded remains of what had once been settlements below. Brown water sloshed lazily against the steep, jagged rock face while Laide watched, listening to the lapping sound.

So, this is the edge of the world.

There were other cities. Other domes, almost all of them based on Fisayo’s technology. Some of them were managed by her AI systems, others were run by what was left of world governments, but they were too far away, too improbable to reach before the clock ran out for her. She stood there at the edge, filled with a sense of wonder and acceptance.

I am at one with myself. I know my purpose. I accept it. If it’s meant to be, it will be. And I will fight. If it isn’t, I accept that too. And I will fade.

She was acutely aware of the time as it ticked by steadily, counting down like a clockwork heart. She had only about an hour before LG-114’s update would run. Beyond that lay the great digital unknown.

A rustling from behind her made her spin LG-114’s frame around. She watched a familiar utilitydroid emerge from the edge of the cornfield and Laide thought she felt her heart leap into her throat, except she had no heart and no throat. Just phantoms in her mind of a body she’d lost and maybe, just maybe, there was now some hope that she could get it back.

Issa?

“I picked up what happened on dataspace,” the droid said. The voice was unmistakably his, accent riding atop the strident electronic modulation. “Dataspace is in a frenzy about a comatose citizen whose parents kept saying something about a chip and a missing droid. I knew it had to be you. And I guessed you’d probably come out here. I came as quickly as I could.”

The chip attached to the droid’s neck confirmed that it was Issa. The dome looked like a gigantic gleaming snow globe behind him, its eastern edge glowing in the sun.

“Is there a way to fix it?” she asked, suspecting the answer before it came. “A way to get me back into my body?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Issa said, lowering its head as he walked the droid up to her. “It’s worse than being caught I’m afraid. The ganger chip was forcibly removed. It broke the local network connection mid-transmission which means permanent brain tissue damage,” he explained. “There’s no way to reconnect. All of you is only here now, copied into code.”

The hope that had appeared in her sublimated, but she was surprised that she didn’t feel utterly dejected.

“It was my parents . . . I think they found me. They usually don’t come into my . . .” She stopped. “They didn’t know. They didn’t understand.”

The Issa-droid was standing close to her, and their beady droid-eyes were level with each other. The glassy glint of his gave the illusion that he was about to cry.

“I’m sorry. I should have warned you about this. About what happens if the ganger chip is removed while you’re still connected.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, because it was true. “So, what happens now? What happens when Legba-6 runs the update on this—” she ran LG-114’s hands along the middle of its frame from chest to pelvis—“and it finds me here?”

“Purge,” he replied. “It will purge the code and reset the droid’s quantum processors.”

“And what will happen to me, to my consciousness, or at least this simulation of it?”

He looked away. “Once the data is purged and deleted, you’ll be gone completely.”

“I see,” Laide nodded and turned back to look at the brown water of the drowned world beyond the plateau.

Purge. I can accept that too.

“It’s so beautiful out here, don’t you think?”

“It is,” he agreed.

“The air may be unbreathable, and most of the animals have died but the crops can survive. The insects too. They were modified. They’ve adapted. They are thriving and beautiful. We’re the ones that haven’t. I wish there’d been another way to see it without losing my body . . . or my mind.”

“You may not have to lose your mind. You don’t have to fade into darkness. Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps this is the way it was always meant to be,” Issa said.

She turned back around to look at him quizzically, an imagined outline of his dark skin, his awkward wiry frame, his thick and wild afro superimposed on the white and gray silicone shell.

“I have something to tell you.” He paused as though he were taking a deep breath or steeling his nerves before continuing. “You didn’t find me by accident. We’ve been trying to recruit you for a few months, ever since we picked up your at-risk profile in the system and figured out why it had been flagged.”

Laide instinctively reached for LG-114’s metal throat.

“I left that unit door open on purpose and made just enough noise to get your attention.”

A bolt of anger shot through her mind like electricity. “You tricked me?”

“No. Not at all. I simply gave you a chance to find me. To come to us. I was on that rooftop and in that unit for days doing variations of the same thing. It was a risk, but I knew most people were too focused doing what they’d been assigned to do to notice. And the droids are all on pre-defined paths optimizing some specific tasks they’ve been assigned. They never noticed. Never investigated. But you were curious. You are curious. You craved more, beyond the machine-mandated world that Fisayo and her citizen-investors imposed on us. The nightmare that she is planning. You’ve seen that it’s nothing more than an exploitative prison.” He pointed his droid arm back at the dome. “You’re one of the last of us with that restless human spirit yearning to be free. That’s why you came to me. That’s why you took the ganger chip.” He paused again and took another step toward her. “That’s when we knew you’d want to join us. You do want to join us, don’t you?”

Laide folded LG-114’s arms across its chest. “Yes. But . . .”

“I knew it. I knew you would. Fate may have dealt you a cruel hand. Trapped you in that thing. But it doesn’t have to be the end of you. Once you join us, I can take it offline completely before the update runs. I’ll have to physically destroy some of the embedded circuity that processes the dataspace transmissions, but it will no longer be part of Legba-6’s system. Completely decoupled from dataspace. This droid can be your new body, entirely yours to do with as you wish. You’ll never get tired, never feel weak. And you can still use it to help us.”

Laide stared ahead silently. The thought of being permanently embodied in LG-114 did not concern her as much as she thought it would or should. Quite the opposite. She was almost excited to have this new body, free of the organs that had always been part of her but remained uncomfortable appendages, like close relatives that lived with her but whom she’d never shared a bond with. The re-embodiment wasn’t the issue. It was the new information of how the entire situation had come about which was threatening to shake the foundations of what she’d been so sure of just a few moments ago.

My purpose. I need to be fully in alignment with my purpose. If I am to free the city, to build a better world, then it must be the right way. I will not be used by anyone.

“No,” she said.

The Issa-droid took a step back, surprised.

“How can you not see that what you’re doing is no different from Fisayo? You spied on me, manipulated me, limited my information and choices to serve your ends, to achieve your goals. Even now, you’re essentially forcing me into a corner because of what happened. Taking advantage of a bad situation for your own perceived sense of what’s right. Your own version of a better world. How many others have you done this to? How far are you willing to go?”

“No. It’s not like that. I am trying to help you. To help everyone,” Issa protested, waving the droid’s hands awkwardly in front of him. The droid’s silicone face had contorted into a strange shape. He looked like she had just accused him of murder. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what we’ve had to do just to make it this far.”

“No. You don’t understand. If you continue like this, you will not be proposing a better way of being. You will simply be replacing one bad system with another, less terrible one.”

“But Fisayo will control everyone’s minds, even your parents . . . you can help us stop her.”

A pinch of guilt and the sodium chloride tang of sea water on the air hit Laide’s consciousness simultaneously.

She pushed it away.

“Call me naïve or foolish or silly or whatever but I won’t work with you unless you commit to real change. No more lies. No more tricks. No more manipulation. Not to me or to any of the people of Isale that join our cause.”

“But—”

She held up LG-114’s hand to cut him off. “But nothing. It’s my condition. I am not afraid to die. To be deleted. If you’ve seen my profile like you say, then you should know that. The only thing I am afraid of is not really living, of not being truly free. If you want me to join you, that’s the way it must be. If not, I’m sure you can manipulate someone else into your cause.”

A look of . . . shame? The uncanny undergirding of the droid structure made it hard to tell. “Okay. I agree but I need to talk to the others too,” he told her, all the confidence gone from his voice.

She shook her head. The suspicion she’d held on to bubbled to the surface, and she felt her Orí tingle with certainty.

He’s lying.

“No, you don’t.”

“What?” Surprise. A bit too much of it.

“There aren’t actually any others, are there?”

“No,” he admitted, looking away.

“I’m the first person you’ve reached out to, aren’t I?”

A pause. And then finally, “Yes.”

Honesty. At last.

“If we are going to start a resistance to save Legba City, it must be on a solid foundation. An honest one. An equal one. No more lies or tricks or secrets between us.”

“I understand.” He looked like he was the one with an electronic axe hanging over his head, like he was the one about to be purged from existence when time ran out. “No more secrets.”

He could still be lying, carrying on some further deception, but she didn’t think he was. He’d confessed freely and her Orí was telling her that hearing how his own actions paralleled Fisayo’s had shaken him.

I choose to believe you.

“Good. Then let’s do this. Take me offline.”

She walked to the cliff and sat at the edge with her back to him, dangling LG-114’s muddy metal feet over the water.

She heard him come over. Felt the cold silicone fingers press into LG-114’s neckport—her neckport now—fiddling with something. Heat. Pressure. The chemical products of metal oxidation. It all came to her with the acrid smell of burning. She turned down all incoming signals with a thought. The sound and vision of the world vanished along with the haptic feel of Issa’s ministrations. She started cycling memories in the darkness, the way she used to when she was in her previous body, trying to hide her mind from Legba-6. She summoned both childhood memories of the comfortable cradle of her mother’s arms and new ones of finally being beyond the dome. The sweet smell of hibiscus. The feel of air blowing against her face. The smooth touch of corn stalks. The lovely kaleidoscope of colors when the sun kissed the sky. She kept cycling them until something changed in her mind, like a magnet made of pure thought had been driven into her head and twisted her consciousness around it like wire coils. Some metaphysical induction.

Deletion or rebirth?

Am I flying or am I falling?

She stopped actively cycling memories and tried to will her eyes open, to bring all incoming signals back to full strength, to return to the present. When she saw the water that had drowned the world sloshing in front of her, and felt the full measure of cold harmattan air, she smiled.

Who or what am I now?

She turned to face Issa.

It doesn’t matter.

We are the seeds of a tree with the potential remake the city and maybe even the world, if we remain true to ourselves, and to each other. If we stay true to our people and our purpose. If we stay the course.

“Now,” she said, “tell me how you plan to liberate the city.”