Koriko sits on a roof with her serpentine moray, playing with a grasshopper that is probably just trying to eat. Ordinarily, grasshoppers won’t come this high, but the vegetation on the buildings in Rosewater is enough to induce odd behaviour in all manner of arthropods.
Kids amuse themselves by climbing the vines that grow along the sides of buildings and jumping from one building to the next. Watching them, a stranger might think them brave, but they are just foolhardy because they know they will be healed. It’s Rosewater, after all.
These teens do not know that if they fall, if they break limbs, they will have to heal the hard way, with bonesetters and antibiotics, and that’s if there are any qualified doctors or nurses left in the city limits. Koriko almost wants them to fall, just to see how it would play out. The shocked looks on their faces. Then she reproaches herself. She is not like this. She’s just angry that she cannot do her job.
“Maybe people are just scared of you because you are so powerful,” says the serpentine. “You can control your appearance. Maybe you should look more human and dial down your demonstrations of power. What do you say to that?”
“I refuse,” says Koriko. “I have a function, a purpose. They are getting in the way of it.”
“But you don’t know if it’s the humans,” says the serpentine. The AI has improved vastly since the repairs.
“There is no other explanation,” says Koriko. “But Lua is looking into it.”
One of the teenagers loses his grip and falls, scrambling for a handhold ten feet up. He grabs hold and hangs by one hand, body swinging into air. He laughs, truly unaware of the danger. A whole generation of children will have to learn how to deal with day-to-day hazards, and understand that there are such things as infections and tetanus. It occurs to Koriko for the first time that the people of Rosewater are spoilt and will struggle to live anywhere else.
She tentatively checks for the xenosphere and it is absent. She examines her link with Wormwood; it functions, but the footholder is still silent, giving the barest indication of being awake.
Why won’t you talk to me? Because of you I’m having to talk to a machine. A human machine! Speak!
Wormwood does not respond.
“The mayor is giving a speech,” says the serpentine. “It’s a broadcast. Do you want to hear it?”
She does.
She knows what it means, and switches off her pain receptors.
She talks to Wormwood.
Kill the flow to all of the ganglia. Right now. Overload the ones with converters.
Koriko jumps off the side of the building, hurtling past the startled teenager, and lands on the asphalt, cracking it, breaking her pelvic bone, both her femurs and her right tibia, but healing them automatically. The serpentine slithers down somewhat slower, and Koriko waits until it curls around her body. She allows her pain receptors to start functioning again, and adds a complement of anandamide to soothe herself.
“Where are we going?” the serpentine says.
“For a night on the town,” says Koriko.
Nigerians are used to having power cuts several times a day. Not so the people of Rosewater. In the distance Koriko can hear the explosion of a nearby Ocampo inverter blowing up. As the sun descends, darkness covers a city where people don’t even buy candles except for votive or sexual purposes. The floaters appear, seemingly from nowhere, and they’re on the hunt for flesh. They seem to know not to bother Koriko. The night breeze brings the smell of ozone and rotten eggs from their gasbags. Already she hears the cries of the taken. This terror won’t last long, though. An adult floater can kill many humans, but cannot eat more than a few kilograms of meat in one sitting. And they only kill to eat. Some of them will prey on the stray dogs and hyenas. It rains blood from the ascended creatures feeding. Koriko is smeared in it as she walks the streets.
The new sounds, the thump of discarded carcasses, are like a percussive backdrop. The floaters will blow away like an ill wind, settling somewhere to digest their meals. A gunshot or two, humans trying to discourage attacks. Futile.
The loss of electricity means the self-drive AI goes offline, and cars, vans and lorries run into each other and into buildings. Fires break out, but since the fire service uses the driverless cars, they can’t reach even minor blazes. Structures go up like torches, lighting the night.
A human bumps into Koriko, confused from the darkness and an attack. The human is two humans, but somehow not. The first is a pair of legs and an upper torso, split in such a way that the second seems to grow out of it. The second human has wasted legs that hang out of the first as if seated, and arms that are full-sized. Only the second has a head, and he looks terrified. He screams at Koriko and is lost in the winding streets. He flings himself into a small crowd of humans that Koriko was not aware of. It seems they are following her, about fifteen, twenty people. How are they even doing this in the dark?
“What are you hoping will happen?” asks the serpentine.
“The reports of this carnage will reach Jack Jacques, and he will reverse whatever he has done to the xenosphere.”
“What if he is telling the truth? What if he does not know?”
“Stop speaking, please.” She enjoys the serpentine, but is not in a place to brook further disagreement. Inability to harvest the humans is putting her in a bad mood. She can see the discarded bodies of half-consumed humans–she does not require the visible electromagnetic spectrum to see–and she has a sense of waste. They will decay before they can be healed and used. The robot is wrong. Koriko needs to display more power, not less. She needs to demonstrate to the human leadership that she is serious.
She lets Wormwood know what she wants. It responds immediately.
I do not want to do this.
“I don’t care what you want!” A part of Koriko’s mind registers the following humans cowering. One or two of them kneel and start praying. To her.
Do it now.
It starts with light tremors and a distant rumble. Both of these begin to rise to a crescendo, loud enough to be painful to humans and rattling their bones. Cracks appear in the ground, paved or not. The earth quakes and splits open. Buildings break, collapse in disorganised heaps of masonry all over Rosewater. Thick clouds of dust rise to choke the lungs.
Pseudopodia of Wormwood’s body emerge from the cracks like a giant’s fingers. They rise to six, seven feet and stay in position, monuments of anger. There are so many that even if Rosewater’s vehicles worked, they would not be able to drive.
More people have come out on the streets now, lost, confused, trying to avoid further damage, wondering why their hurt has not been healed as usual.
Her old self, the human part of her, would have been distressed by this. But she has purged what she can of Alyssa Sutcliffe. She feels nothing for the humans any more. She does not wish to feel anything for the humans.
But.
The sight of burned and broken bodies stirs something in her. Maybe she has overreached. And maybe the humans did not mess up the xenosphere.
Then who—
“Hey!”
Behind her. Aminat.
“How did you find me? Have you come with a message from your leader?” asks Koriko.
The human smiles. “You know, I liked you when you were new here. Little girl lost, alien Jesus, trying to find her feet. Because of that… person, I’m going to give you one chance to do the right thing here. Stand down. We don’t need your fucking electricity or healing if you don’t want to give them, but destroying our city is an act of war. Stand down or we will fuck you up.”
“Aminat, stop. I know you destroyed one of my predecessors, but he was sick and depleted at the time. I am not Anthony.”
“I know you’re not Anthony. I liked him.” Aminat stands on rubble, a higher level than Koriko, armed with weapons that can harm humans.
“I remember our last encounter, Aminat. Your brother burned that body of mine. This body isn’t susceptible to flames.”
“Oh, I’m not going to kill you with fire. So, that’s a no, then? Last chance, your greenness. Stop what you’re doing.”
“Your bluffing does not—”
“Bye-bye.” Aminat activates an app on her phone.
Koriko expects some kind of air strike, but the serpentine… it… its body unravels, splits off. Something underneath, gelatinous, contained in a membrane, which ruptures and sprays her.
“I’m sorry,” says Aminat. “I warned you.”
Wormwood senses whatever it is and withdraws itself so rapidly, it causes tremors that send Koriko to the ground. But her body…
“What have you done? What is this?” Her bones crumble under insignificant weight, blood spurts out of her eyes, the stones on her skin fall off. She is melting.
The last thing she sees is her worshippers wailing and raging at Aminat, then her consciousness is yanked back into Wormwood’s bosom, where she waits to be rebuilt.