A person is talking, but I have missed the words because I am distracted by the fight I had with Nike. It seems like the words were directed at me because everyone is looking in my direction, expectant.
“What?” I ask.
“Are you feeling okay?” asks Femi Alaagomeji. “You don’t seem your usual sharp self, and I can’t use you if you’re distracted.”
I am not okay. I have just found out that I am some kind of data ghost in an alien information network, a copy of a dead person’s brainwaves.
“I’m fine. Repeat the question.”
It’s a meeting. Femi does not have an office yet, so she has adopted the Hilton suite as a temporary base of operations as long as the FG continues to pay, which it does, although the guilt must be finite and come to an end one day. Invited and present: me, Femi Alaagomeji, Eric Sunmola, my rebel scum compatriot, Tolu Eleja, and, holographically, Kaaro. I have to keep reminding myself that this is 2068, and it is real time for the people around me.
Eric sits by himself on a sofa, with his tentacle coiled around his trunk, smelling of honey. He seems sullen, and I notice he stares at Kaaro a lot, while the latter ignores him. Kaaro is different, a lot more serious, and a lot more scared. The signal is not great, and he fades out at times. He and I are the only ones not physically present, although nobody knows about me. They think I teleport with machinery worked into my forearms and thighs. They think I time-travel. I used to think this too, but now that I focus on it, it’s impossible. Power supply considerations alone make it implausible.
Femi stands in the middle of an ornate circular Persian rug and slowly turns when she speaks to each person. Tolu is to my left. Behind him is a buffet. The insurgency must be well funded if there’s a buffet.
“Let’s start again,” says Femi. “Pay attention this time. For our purposes, Rosewater is not a breakaway nation in the middle of Nigeria. Rosewater is a beachhead, and we are being invaded by Homians. From the perspective of my paymasters, our mission is to destabilise the government, to soften it up for a future attempt to bring Rosewater back into Nigeria, but it can’t be done in the open, so this is off the books. I see my mission differently. We are Earth’s defence, people. We are it. We have to stop the Homians here or billions of them will replace the billions of us.
“You each have your own abilities and some of you have already engaged in the fight, but at this point, we need suggestions. Nothing is too stupid, just go for it. This is where I turn to you, Oyin Da.”
I clear my throat to buy time. “I can tell you how to think about the problem, but I have no ideas right now. There are four sources of the problem. Wormwood, the reanimate–Homian hybrids, the xenosphere and the home world. We can attack one or more of these four, or we can take the fifth solution.”
“Which is?” asks Femi.
“Avoidance. Evacuate the Earth.”
Everybody groans at this.
“I’ve only just got a sofa that I like,” says Kaaro. “I’m not moving.”
“I’m just putting all the options on the table. Let’s start with Wormwood. It has a different strain of xenoforms than the ones that make up the xenosphere. We can’t bomb it, because that’s been tried before and it didn’t work. It’s bigger now, and if we were to try a more powerful bomb, it would kill everybody in Rosewater.”
“Millions versus billions, Oyin Da,” says Femi.
“It won’t work. Even something with a nuclear payload won’t work because it’s resistant to radiation. And it’s not the only one of its kind, even if we did kill it.”
“Poison it? Infect it with something?” says Eric.
“Wormwood literally heals all diseases. There is nothing we can throw at it by way of pestilence that it can’t handle.” I want to say that’s a stupid suggestion, but I hold my tongue. This is why I don’t work in groups. It takes too long. “Wormwood is not the answer, people.”
Tolu pipes up. “Can we nuke their home world?”
“We don’t know where their home world is,” says Eric.
“Besides, interstellar travel is unproven and takes too long. Ships have gone out, but we won’t know for decades if it worked or not. And think of this: not even the Homians used any kind of space vehicle to reach us. Think of how far it must be, how many millions of light years.” Femi sucks her teeth. “But I like how you’re thinking. Destroy the reservoir of aliens, then mop up here. Good, good. But we need something else.”
“Someone just took out two thousand six hundred people with a toxic waste dump and a few bombs,” says Kaaro. “It’s thought to be alien action. Synners. They might be stepping up their own transfer rate by killing humans.”
“I’m not hearing a suggestion.” I turn to him, though. I know what he’s about to say. Slow, slow, slow.
“Attrition. Kill them with guns, fire, bad breath, whatever we have,” says Kaaro.
“One at a time, if we have to,” says Tolu. “They are hard to kill, though. The ammo required would be phenomenal. The healing is in the way. Perhaps if we directly targeted Koriko.”
Femi shakes her head. “No, that would become open war. Once we move, we have to do it fast, or one or more of us will fall, and the scheme will become known.”
“Besides, it would not work. We don’t have enough information,” I say. “We need to understand the enemy better. We need to know the past and the present. Surveillance of some kind.”
“I can keep tabs on them in the xenosphere,” says Kaaro.
“No, we can’t use the xenosphere for this,” says Femi. “They’re watching you watching them.”
“Hack the drones?” says Tolu.
“Eighty per cent of them went down when the floaters had their murmuration. We’ll be noticed by Jack’s people,” says Kaaro.
“Don’t you mean Aminat’s people?” says Eric.
Kaaro gives him the finger. “Fuck you.”
“Let’s be civil,” says Femi.
“I’m serious, ma’am. Kaaro is in bed with the chief of security. How do we know he’s not pillow-talking us into failure?”
“Because he said he would not and I believe him,” says Femi. “We are of one mind.”
“I don’t trust him,” says Eric.
“No, you don’t like him. It’s not the same thing,” says Femi. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Surveillance of the aliens. Workable ideas? Anyone?”
“I may know a guy working on a thing,” says Kaaro. “Leave this to me to research.”
“Then that’s your job.” Femi looks at me. “You mentioned the past. You’re a time-traveller. I need you to find out if there are weaknesses we can exploit.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m not finished. You once told me you could go anywhere.”
“I can.”
“I want you to go to America.”
Interesting. In the silence that follows I start to think of the real question: can I cross the Drawbridge protocol?
I say, “I guess I have my homework.”
“You do.”
Tolu raises his hand in honest-to-God schoolchild fashion. “There’s something else.”
“Go.”
“My cousin in the University of Lagos is working on something that might be useful. A way of screening people from the xenosphere that doesn’t require thick layers of antifungals, but might also be able to expel aliens from human minds. I don’t fully understand the work, but I’d like to go check on him.”
It makes sense. At this point in history there are no more pristine brains, brains without xenoform contamination. An artificial brain can be created clean and tested under different conditions of exposure and proposed cures. Instead of screening a contaminated brain, you start from a different direction.
I wonder at Tolu. I saw him in my extrapolations and excursions into the future. This is the reason I went to save him from detention with S45 in the first place. But I didn’t know why exactly; just that he was important to the resistance. Since that time he has been… adequate, but nothing Earth-shaking. He obeys instructions, he goes on raids, he monitors Koriko. He works as expected, a good soldier. I confess to some disappointment. What if he’s here not because of himself, but because of his cousin? But if his cousin’s device works, why haven’t I seen it?
Femi turns to Eric. “Go with him. I’ll get you both checkpoint passes.”
There are more words, more suggestions, but I have tuned out. I can tell even before the speaker finishes that the ideas will not work. My mind is on that great big barrier that keeps the US unknowable to the rest of the world, and how I’m going to get past it. I have thought about the problem before, of course, but that was before I knew what I was.
“Someone has to keep the pressure on Rosewater while I’m away,” says Tolu. “The resistance factions have to keep going otherwise they’ll know something’s up. They’re quasi-autonomous, but they need direction.”
“I’ll coordinate and provide hardware and support,” says Femi. “But I won’t kill people. I’ll degrade infrastructure and sabotage things like power.”
I say, “It wouldn’t matter if you did want to kill. We’ve found that killing people is no longer easy in Rosewater. The healing field is formidable.”
“I’m formidable too,” says Femi.
After the meeting I go back in time to check on details and I find something that wasn’t there before, or rather, that I hadn’t noticed. I travel three times in the data stream to be sure it isn’t some psychological projection of one of us present. That does happen sometimes, and causes the alteration of memories.
Femi says, “I’m formidable too.” The meeting breaks up soon after that when basic logistics are decided. I see myself depart and I see Femi drink red wine from the bottle and fiddle with the in-house entertainment. I hear a knock at the door, and a man comes in without being invited. At first I think it’s a sex worker and I don’t want to see that, but this man is not beautiful or even vaguely attractive. He looks both brutal and brutalised and he has a permanent frown etched into his features. He also looks familiar to me.
“Are you ready?” asks Femi.
The man nods.
“Did you get the funds and equipment?”
The man nods.
“Good. Go and show him who’s the older brother.”
“I’m the second twin,” says the man.
“It’s a shame that people have forgotten our traditions. Your name, Kehinde, is a short form. It’s meant to be Omokehindelegbon, which means ‘the second twin is older’. You sent your brother out to taste the world because he recognised your authority as elder. I’ve reminded you. Go and remind him.”
Oh, shit.
If this is the twin I think it is, Rosewater is about to have deeper problems.
And Femi is even more devious than I thought.