It’s not hard to remember, I don’t think; it’s just… well, it’s not the same. The past is somehow not what it was when I experienced it, when I lived it. It’s like watching a movie ten years later and having a different experience because the you is different. But, no. No, the facts are slightly different, slightly modified, slightly simpler.
At the age of eleven, I am even more isolated from my peers. They think I’m some weird savant who knows everything. I do know a lot, but I am lonely. I don’t have playtime because I have no one to play with. My mother, perplexed at my father’s obliteration, and never that close to me to begin with, does not know what to do, so she indulges me. She lets me.
My mother is one of those people, the ones you meet and you just know they have steel instead of calcium phosphate in their spine. You don’t know of any exploits and you’ve never heard anything, but there is a look to the eye, an edge to the words, a clarity to the body language. She teaches me how to shoot using my father’s rifle. A part of me remembers this as a shotgun, sometimes single-barrelled, sometimes double. She scrapes out targets on the trunk of the iroko tree and I shoot at it. I have the knack. Bisi’s father spends a lot of time telling us the tree is sacred, and I think my mother says, “So is my poop,” or that may be new past. I spend a lot of my afternoons targeting raptors and I pretty much kill all the ones over Rosewater. Over Arodan, I mean. Rosewater comes later.
I start rebuilding the machine from boredom. I wasn’t born smart, but I was socialised to love knowledge and my curiosity is unfettered.
When I am almost done with putting the engine together I lose my nerve and check Nimbus at the post office. I look for professors of theoretical physics and engineers. My English is not good enough to be understood by emails. No. It’s good enough for basic conversation, but I have not mastered enough for scientific discourse and I come across like a Yahoo-yahoo boy on cough syrup. I have to go there to physically convince them (no pun) by showing them the plans for the engine.
I find Professor Aloysius Ogene at the University of Lagos, languishing at the Akoka campus. His work on alternate dimensions, quantum realities, wormholes and black holes is competent, although lacking in any real imagination or oomph. He breaks no new ground, but he plods along, abiding, being, an academic determined and destined to be unobtrusive.
I change his destiny; I turn him into a mass murderer.
When he sees the blueprints, he thinks them an artefact in and of themselves, the layers of writing from Conrad to my father to me. I cannot communicate easily, so I coax him away from his comfortable, non-homicidal chair to Arodan, to see the engine. He gasps in its presence, but not because of the complexity of the thing. He sees the pillbox building, the dozens of bicycles embedded in the concrete–from which Oyin Da gets her nickname–the Frankenstein’s monster of an engine, the layers of age all as an artefact just like the blueprints.
He makes some notes adjacent to the blueprint–he will not sully such a thing with his handwriting. He has an almost religious reverence for it. He works for hours in the dark, dank building while I take pot shots at cyborg observation hawks. Back then there were no arthro-drones. Miniaturisation keeps improving.
My mother drags Professor Ogene away when it gets dark, and I follow. I am so hungry, I don’t even taste the food my mother lays out. I cannot, to this day, remember what it was. Every time I visit there’s a different thing on the table.
I sneak out when everyone is asleep and hyenas cry and laugh. I apply all of Professor Ogene’s modifications by gaslight. When I activate it…
One thousand, one hundred and seventy-five. 1,175. The population of Arodan village. In a single moment they are translated into light, and so am I.
We are in the pillbox building, looking out, looking at what I cannot describe. I can tell you that at that moment, I see myself, and I see versions of myself, ghosts, detaching from the main me and floating off into alternate futures. This keeps happening until the original, all used up, begins to fade and is consumed by the divisions.
When you don’t look at the passing lights, the colours, the shapes, you can almost forget you are moving through time and space. Almost.
We begin work immediately, budding out from the back of the pillbox and building a new village that is in the perpetual motion of potential existence/non-existence. The first men who try to build in the unlight of eternity all go mad. We start again, slower, because we are blindfolded, and because the best builders went first.
Professor Ogene is blamed for the killing of my entire village, but the Lijad, as we now call it, has different plans. We swing back into the time stream and pick him up. That was when I needed the entire village to travel with. The prof named it the Lijad. I didn’t want to call it anything.
I should tell you about one of my selves that separated at the explosion. I follow her, and see the alien, Wormwood, and I see Rosewater, and the biodome it calls home. The biodome is diseased, and being eaten by cherubim. The city itself smokes, its high-rises broken and burning, the people scattered. Arthro-drones swarm like their insect lookalikes, and COBS bob from structure to structure, carrion birds that lase targets for higher-altitude autonomous drones. The smell… burning crude oil and singed flesh. This is the future.
Even then I knew it was not fixed, not the way I know it now, or the way it is untethered, but I knew I could interfere, make a better future. At twelve I knew this. I still know it now.
I tell my vision to Ogene and he writes it all out, asking questions and clarifying it even more for me. Living in the Lijad is timeless, but Ogene and I find that we cannot go into the future beyond burning Rosewater.
“Maybe we will die there?” I say.
“No. Your mind is fixed. There’s more to it than we’re seeing.”
“We don’t even know what this city is. You see no landmarks that you recognise. It’s not on Nimbus, I checked. What if it’s alien? Not even on Earth at all.”
“Then why are you there, Oyin Da?”
I shrug and turn my back on him. That’s not the real question. The real question is, where is Ogene in the vision? Where is Arodan? Where are its people? Are they all dead, and do I wander creation alone looking for other life?
When we pick up supplies, we attract desperate people and we take them in.
One day, on a food run, we pick up Kaaro Goodhead. Okay, that’s unfair. I should call him what he wishes to be called, which is Kaaro. No surname.
I am in my early twenties and I’ve never had a boyfriend. There is something lost about him, his nature struggling against himself, or so I thought at the time. He is… not intelligent. Not hard to look at, and possessed of the charm of borderline bad boys who stay just this side of being delinquent. I do not know whose side he is on, and I am prepared to shoot him with my shotgun.
I don’t. I… fall for him a little bit. Not so much. I mean, I only masturbate to his face a few hundred times, that’s all. That stupid face with the feigned ignorance and the… and… yes. That face. Once you look past the face, the whole of him falls apart. He loves these stupid designer clothes, pays the mark-up and advertises for the person who made the clothes.
Okay, I fall for him a lot, but I never tell him. He would be insufferable. And, at the time, he was discovering his powers, his ability to read minds. I was with him when the alien came to Nigeria.
Kaaro and I are sent in by the government to make contact with the alien in the hope that we’ll win it over to our side, although the meaning of “side” is somewhat ambiguous. Kaaro goes because he is coerced in some way; I go because I’m looking for a place for my people. Understand that this is after the Nigerian government has sent in attack helicopters to kill the alien without success.
The main alien is underground, what we call Wormwood. I know. Biblical. Wormwood has a humanoid proxy, Anthony, a body built from the blueprints of a real human long ago. He interacts with the people scattered around the forest where we found him, healing them, talking to them, generally being benevolent until the second government attack. It had become a settlement with vagrants, malcontents, religious refugees, exiles, women fleeing matrimonial violence, runaways, and mainstream society’s detritus who had found peace around Anthony.
There is a second attack, which starts with a sniper shot, aimed at Anthony. Kaaro, in the most selfless act I have ever seen, dives in the path and takes the bullets.
At that moment I feel stupid. I should have told this boy about my feelings and done something to keep him safe. I have no experience with such things, and now he will die. The settlement’s militia return fire around me, but I’m in a fog. Kaaro is on the ground, still breathing, froth bubbling out of his chest wounds and his nostrils. Anthony stares at him, an expression of confusion on his face. The alien seems unconcerned by the gun battle around him, or the flashes of light from within the darkness. There’s a keening from the homunculi, smaller pilot-fish aliens who inhabit the woods and are a hivemind.
I am holding Kaaro’s hand and trying not to notice the breathing slowing and the skin cooling.
“Did he just sacrifice himself?” asks Anthony. “To save me?”
My cheeks are wet and I cannot bring up words.
“Why would he do that?”
“Does it matter?” I say.
“No.” Anthony looks around and takes in the battle around him. “I’m tired of humans running around, trying to exterminate me with their tiny weapons and, as usual, ending up hurting each other. This happened in London too. That’s why I left.”
I stuff fabric in Kaaro’s wounds, trying and failing to keep the blood on the inside. “I need medical attention for this man.”
“Oh, right. Step back, please.” Anthony crouches, and touches Kaaro. “And try to hold on to something. I’m going to make some changes.”
“What do you mean?”
I soon find out. Kaaro’s wounds expel their bullets, then close. He starts to breathe, then cough, and the warmth returns. At the same time the ground starts to change: rocks push out, organic tentacles uproot trees and clear space all around us. The settlement gathers closer and a wave of soil, wood and rock radiates outward, stopping the gun blasts short.
“You should leave,” says Anthony.
“No, I’m staying, and I’m bringing people with me.”
“And him?”
Kaaro is stirring, but not awake.
“I’ll talk to him.”
Kaaro is tempted, I can tell, but he elects not to stay. It feels like a stone dropping into my heart, which is absurd, but I forgive myself because it was my first crush. I watch the dome form around the settlement, organic sheets that form a wall, the meeting of the walls, first translucent, then opaque. For me it is watching Kaaro disappear. I see him with burned black helicopters behind him, framed in smoke, looking lost.
I signal Professor Ogene and the Lijad takes its final journey into the biodome where we live while the town, then city called Rosewater grows around us.