I hate to bring the British into this, but it’s unavoidable. To understand the future, we need to understand the past, not just as context, but as the seeds of catastrophe.
During the British Empire’s halcyon days in Nigeria, a document created from the delirious ramblings of a priest with malaria wound its way to Whitehall. It had two hundred and fifty-six pages.
The writings first found their way into the hands of the Lander brothers, John and Richard, while they were charting the course of the River Niger, and they brought them back to the UK with them in 1831. John took them to the Custom House in Liverpool without reading them. When he joined the patronage of Lord Goderich of the Royal Geographical Society, he brought the papers with him to London and read them one evening when he was sad of heart, missing his brother Richard, who in 1832 had returned to Nigeria, where he would contract the lung inflammation that would ultimately kill him. After reading a third of the papers, John immediately called on Goderich to report what he had found. Goderich took them to Whitehall the next day.
It is unclear what happened exactly, but copies were made. One was sent to the British Museum in Bloomsbury under seal, and this is, sadly, the only extant copy.
The priest’s name was Marinementus, and he is a character to whom we shall return, but he died in a rainforest somewhere in the west of Nigeria. This was his first death, I believe. The document was a rather accurate set of prophecies. It predicted the sinking of the steamship Lexington, the Opium War, the death of American president William Harrison, the brilliant work of Ada Lovelace on the first computer program–it is said that faint shadows of code are replicated in the prophecy–and the blueprints of a machine that Babbage worked on at some point, the cannibalism of the Donner party, the Irish famine, the cholera outbreak in London, vaccination, air flight, various eclipses, lunar and solar, the two world wars, the loss of colonial power in Africa, and the descent of a meteorite called Wormwood in 2012, after which the prophecies stopped abruptly.
After a year or two of predictions better than Nostradamus’ Delphic shit, the British government hired a tight-knit staff to see how the Lander document might benefit the Empire. This tradition led to dire consequences for the village of Arodan, which was mentioned by name in the prophecies.
The writings contained the blueprint for a machine, an engine that… well, didn’t seem to do anything, according to the scientists who pored over it, but there remained the possibility that some context was missing. In 1956, they shipped over a scientist called Conrad, along with soldiers and assorted security types. They spent the first weeks on their bunks with amoebic dysentery, shitting their bowels out. When they recovered from this, they got malaria and several of them died. It’s one of the reasons the whites did not wish to visit the interior. They were the first Caucasians my ancestors had seen close up, and they were amused to find that their shit also stank. Literally and metaphorically.
It took two months for Conrad to get healthy enough to start work. He was a tall, skinny, dark-haired, intelligent man with sunken eyes and no appetite for food or wine. He also had no other carnal appetites that anyone could discern, but white men were known to be insane, so this was not commented on as much as it would have been if he were black.
He built prototypes and scribbled notes and built others. He had dynamos set up from various bicycles and had the wheels elevated. Vehicles that went nowhere. Did I mention that white men are insane? The women were more sensible. They often stayed indoors, avoiding the sun that burned and peeled their skin. Conrad fiddled, tinkered and adjusted, to no avail. The machine grew to the size of a house, parts for which he had brought in on rails by box car.
If Whitehall had known what the machine was, they’d have sent a whole battalion of scientists. As it turned out, Conrad really was insane. He was sent home in 1960, when Nigeria became independent from Britain. He was committed to the Hanwell Asylum on Uxbridge Road, released in the 1970s, and subsequently died by suicide.
The machine languished and decayed from neglect for decades, until one day my father came upon the box car that housed it. He never knew Conrad’s history and I didn’t find out until much later. There was a photograph of Conrad with the boys who rode the dynamo bicycles to nowhere, with “bicycle boys” written in cursive on the back.
Throughout my childhood, until I was eleven, my father worked on this strange engine. At times we would go to Ilesha or Ibadan to buy spare parts or electronic components. Understand that Rosewater did not exist at this time. Wormwood had obliterated Hyde Park and was hibernating, growing, thriving, but it had not decided to travel in the Earth’s crust to Nigeria. None of us in Arodan cared that a meteorite had landed in the heart of London, because it was so far away.
I would come in and sit near my father, “helping”. I did my homework, set for me by my father or mother. I could not go to regular schools. For one thing, I was smarter than everybody else, and this kept me apart from my peers. I did not think they were stupid; just unfocused and… childish. I knew too much to endear me to my teachers, and while I understood the difference between slippers and court shoes, grooming was not my priority.
“She will not marry if she keeps this up,” said an elder to my father one day.
“I won’t marry,” I said. “I’ll never leave home; I’ll live with my parents for ever.”
The elder was scandalised but my father shook with laughter.
I read books, for my father did not trust the electronic words. He said you remembered less when you read off a screen, something to do with using multiple senses like tactile and olfactory when you handled a book. I never got to test his theory.
My father corrected the blueprint of the Great Engine, but when he activated it, nothing happened. Except once. Whenever he failed, we’d go looking for new spark plugs or resistors or brand-new cables. It made no difference. My mother saw it as his hobby and did nothing except check my sestinas and my essays.
I was learning something from my father’s work, but I didn’t know what.
Anyway. He activated it one day, one time I wasn’t there.
Boom.
Explosion.
His body completely obliterated. Nothing to bury.
I refused to believe it. I still do not. I did not attend his funeral and refuse to speak of him to anyone even now.
…
…
What’s important is that I inherited his obsession. I had to learn English first, which I did using an English–Yoruba dictionary and a Yoruba bible, both written by Bishop Samuel Ajai Crowther in the 1880s. As you can imagine, it lent my speech a certain archaic affectation. I don’t mind, although I think interactions with others have cured me of this.
I figured out what the machine was meant to be, although I had to get a professor of theoretical physics to confirm my ideas before I acted on them.
It was a time–space machine, of course.