I bang on the metal wall, needing more coffee. The port opens and I reach out for the mug, but nothing happens, so I push my hand further, eyes still on my board. I encounter skin, soft, and whoever it is recoils from unexpected contact, as do I.
I look. Framed in the metal gap is a little girl. She screws up her face because I have poked her in the eye. She has unruly natural hair in a black cloud around her head, no earrings, big eyes that remind me of my own. She could be my sister. She’s about ten.
What?
“Who are you?” I say.
“You don’t recognise me?” she asks, but looking unconcerned.
“No. Where’s my coffee?”
The girl turns her face to the side and yells, “MUM! Mum, she can’t remember me any more, and she’s asking for more coffee.”
“What’s going on here?” I ask, but she just shakes her head and puts a finger to her lips. She doesn’t even look at me. A hand pushes her head away and a woman takes her place.
“I know you,” I say. “You’re the woman who visited Arodan that time. You disappeared.”
“Oh dear. Is that all you remember?” She seems amused and serious at the same time.
I am awash with a feeling of unfamiliarity. The room, the chart on the wall, the empty mugs of coffee, some on their sides, even my own body, all seem… contaminated and unreal.
The voice of the girl punches in. “Let me see, Mummy.”
“Shush! This is not a game.” To me, gently, the woman says, “Where do you think you are?”
“I… This is my workspace.”
“Yes, but where is that workspace? And when do you think this is?”
I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, and it’s as if I never thought to ask myself before.
“Oyin Da, do you remember going in there?” asks the woman.
“I don’t.” I’m feeling some anxiety and it affects the pitch of my voice.
“All right, farabale. I want you to come out of there.” She speaks in a calm, reasonable voice, and I do find her comforting, but.
There is no door here. I’m in a metal container with a single port, and frame bars travelling up to a ceiling. There are screens and key holograms and devices that I thought made sense but that now seem nonsensical conglomerations of wires.
Why would I seal myself in here? Did someone else do this? Is it to protect me or lock me away from others? I probably should not be too hasty about coming out, even if I knew how.
“I can’t come out,” I say, but it sounds weak, like a lie.
“Oh, for the love of… Stand back,” says the woman. She looks behind her. “You too, darling.”
Four fingers appear against the lip of the port and she pulls. The metal screams and rends. I press myself into the far wall. What manner of woman is this? The tear extends downwards and sunlight pushes into my workroom. She bends the flap outwards, then pulls the other side, tearing a crude opening for me. Beyond her, I see the kid. They are standing on black volcanic rock.
“Come on. Ma’a bo. Jade n’beyen.” Come out of there.
“Who are you people?” I ask, not budging from the safe place.
“I’m Nike. This is Junior.”
Junior waves.
“Are we… are we related?” I ask.
Nike and Junior exchange glances. “Yes, you might say that,” says Nike.
“Come out,” says Junior.
Because she looks like me, I trust her and I step out.
We’re on a plateau, maybe in Jos? I look back at the structure I’ve been ensconced in; what looks like an eight-foot-high metallic bubble constructed from scrap. Plates, strips of street lamps, car doors, gold ingots, ball bearings, a chain-link fence and other bits I cannot recognise. The sky is cloudy in a dense, uniform way, and it is windy, but not cold. There are mountains here and there, close and distant, but not snow-capped.
“Before you ask, this was your choice. You chose to be here,” says Nike. She and Junior are holding hands. “Do you want to go home?”
“How can you tear metal, Nike? Who are we to each other?”
The two of them step towards me. “That was not metal, honey, and this is your daughter. As for me, I am your wife.”
Walking through the rocky landscape, I think that this family thing, this has happened before. A wife forgets her husband and daughter because she is no longer the thing they think she is. She is a god. Alyssa to Koriko. I remember this, but have somehow forgotten to anchor myself when travelling in time.
“Don’t worry,” says Nike. “This has happened before.”
“Many times,” says Junior. “It’s boring now.”
“Junior.”
“It is.”
Nike, at the front, shakes her head. “She takes after you, you know?”
“We’re going home. Whenever you get infused with this heroism, you brood for a while, and then you isolate yourself, and then… well, you build a big metal nest and wall yourself in.”
“What heroism thing?”
“You’re trying to save the world,” says Junior. She is casual in her speech and her footing.
There is a descent to the footpath, and a drop-off to the right, a sheer wall of rock leading up into heaven on the left. We have no climbing gear or breathing apparatus. Given the clouds…
“This is impossible. We should have equipment for this climb at this altitude,” I say.
“We’re not at altitude,” says Nike.
“If we take you home too quickly, you get… funny,” says Junior. “Funny mummy.”
“We’re here,” says Nike. Her voice changes in timbre. It’s subtle, but I pick it up.
We have stopped at a metal door set in the rock face. No hinges, no handle, just a rusted surface. I touch it. Warm.
“You have to go in there,” says Junior. She actually yawns as she squats, her back against the rock.
“We’ll be with you,” says Nike. “But you have to go first, my love.”
She kisses me on the head and lifts my right hand and pushes against the door, which gives slightly. I complete the push and the door falls into black space. I follow.
The blackness turns into Arodan at night. I know when I am too. This is just after the engine exploded.
I am in the centre of death. The air is full of ozone and the smoke smells like burned rubber. Bodies surround me, some charred, some untouched. In the periphery, dozens of COBs: hawks mostly, but pigeons too. They are dead and inactive. I start when Nike touches me. She points. I see the body of a young girl, Junior’s age, burned, but with an unmistakable necklace, a thunderstone set in a gold pendant. I finger my own neck, and the necklace is there with an identical stone, identical setting, identical chain.
“Am I… dead?” I look to Nike.
She has a pained expression on her face. “No. She is dead. As for you… It’s more like you have never really been alive.”
“Are you saying I’m some kind of mimic? A doppelgänger?”
“No. You, me, Junior, none of us have ever been alive. We are ghosts in the xenosphere, repetitive information patterns.”
“How can that be? I have… I took these people in… What about the Lijad? I have touched people. I have smelled things. I can still smell them right now.”
Government vehicles arrive and troops begin to take bodies away, and bury others.
I begin to remember, though.
“This is the point, the time of your birth. From what I can tell, you have a powerful will to exist. You are the most powerful xenosphere ghost I have ever seen. You being oblivious added an extra dimension. Did you know that solid objects are mostly empty space? Through the xenosphere you can manipulate people’s perceptions and make them sense you–hear, touch, taste, smell and see. You, Oyin Da, do it without thinking.”
I don’t know why I’m hyperventilating. If what Nike says is true, I don’t have lungs, I’m just echoing the idea of overbreathing. “I’m not real.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t real. I said you weren’t alive. There’s a difference.”
I know her at that moment. “You are what I was seeing in Kaaro, aren’t you?”
“Oh, honey.”
When we kiss, my entire body remembers hers. My mouth and tongue respond from muscle memory.
Circling us playfully, Junior gags. “Can we go home now?”
It all comes back to me.
The xenosphere is a thoughtspace connecting all humans to each other by way of alien bioengineered neurones in the atmosphere. The aliens use it to store the entire history of mankind, including the biological history, with contextual feelings, everything. Some alien consciousnesses are in there as well as some copies of personalities of dead humans. Ghosts. Like me.
The problem of the data is the problem of memory. Things remembered are revised. Memory is changed by the living, and without regular error correction, events drift. The general shape may seem to be the same, but the details shift. False memories can be implanted and disseminated. And this is why travelling back in time is so hazardous. That same autocorrection facility can and does erase my memories. Well, no, it erases my recall. Not the same thing.
All that time when I thought I was in a craft called the Lijad, I was swimming in the xenosphere, travelling back and forth in time, seeing companions which were quasi-ghosts, having conversations with my memories of the people of Arodan. I was in supreme denial. Maybe the pain was too much for me.
Human consciousness time-travels all the time, albeit at a low level. Sensory input that arrives in the brain can have multiple interpretations, and the brain has to choose a “reality”, which takes about half a second. Once it has chosen, it does a temporal shift of awareness back to the moment of sensory perception. I do this same thing on a larger scale in the xenosphere, which, among other things, is a vast data storage of human sensations.
Home is a house made of bamboo, alone in a clearing surrounded by palm trees. I am sitting on the veranda watching Junior leap from rock to rock. She is nimble and fearless, like a goat. The light is from everywhere, and bright. There is no sun. The sky is violet and cloudless. We lack for nothing because we do not need anything.
“What’s the actual year, like now?” I ask Nike, who is beside me.
“2068.”
“And the aliens are still embedded?”
“Yes.”
“Can we do the future?”
“The future hasn’t happened. To go there is extrapolation. You have done this, and it sent you scurrying back to the past to give warnings to your favoured humans.”
“Kaaro?”
“Yes. And Jack Jacques.”
“I remember some of that. I didn’t do anything. I told Jacques to wait. I don’t remember what I did with Kaaro.”
“Do you remember what you saw that made you tell him to wait?”
A vision of Rosewater in flames, razed by Nigerian automatons, children, elderly, infirm, all liquidated, the biodome pulsing with the dark energy of its death throes as it is choked by an extraterrestrial vine. Wormwood dead, the dream of a city of the future gone.
“Surrender didn’t go well for Jacques,” I say. “Or for the rest of the city.”
Nike looks out at Junior. I see a smile form around her mouth. “You intervened with Kaaro. You said if the mercenaries entered his house he would have died in a friendly-fire incident.”
“Really? I don’t remember that,” I lie. “But it turned out all right?”
“He killed six innocents.”
“Mercenaries aren’t innocent.”
“They were innocent of trying to kill Kaaro.”
“Have we had this argument before?” I ask. “Because it feels like we have.”
Nike waves to Junior, who waves back. “Are you going to continue this crusade?”
“I don’t think the aliens are good for humanity, Nike.”
“But we’re not human, honey. We are human patterns, but we’re stored in and maintained by an alien organic infrastructure. Among other things, the xenosphere is a data server, in which we live, and where we can interact with human consciousnesses if we choose to. I suppose it’s normal to be loyal to your origins, but you have a particular difficulty letting go, which is why we have this recursive argument every time you go gallivanting.”
“You think I’m wrong to do this, to help free Earth.”
“I don’t care about that. I have perspectives on life. I was a sex worker. We’re pragmatic. You have not thought of everything. You only think you have.”
I lean forward. “What have I not thought of?”
“That destroying the aliens might mean destroying the xenosphere. Which means Junior and me and the love that we have will be gone if you succeed.”
I have no answer to that, but this is just another problem to solve. How to save the world from aliens, yet keep their infrastructure.
“You know, after the British left, we kept the trains,” I say, mischief in my voice.
“You always say that.” Nike rises and walks into the house, but I don’t hear her footsteps. I do hear her yell at Junior to come in if she doesn’t want monsters to get her.
I stay outside and yearn for my metal nest.