“All those times you visited Earth, the time I followed you into the Lijad, the time we went to get Tolu together, this is what you’ve been seeing?” Kaaro asks me.
We are standing on a hill overlooking the city, but the image is overlaid with lines of energy, with the life force of Wormwood, and with the xenosphere, like a map of the superstructure of reality. Everything alive, lit up in yellow and green hues, with the alien a deep glow from underground, and the mine engine penetrating one edge of it obscenely, chugging and pistoning night and day.
“I thought everybody saw things like this,” I say. “Before I knew I was dead.”
“It should be confusing, but it’s not,” says Kaaro. He is looking at his hand, turning it this way and that. I can’t see what he sees, but the hand, the whole of him, is made of electrical impulses in the xenosphere. He has moved from what Anthony called an extrapolator to a ghost. Like me.
“We need to go to Arodan,” I say. “They’re waiting.”
“Lead the way,” he says.
The world changes at my command. The physical, the wind, the trees, the ground that was beneath our feet: they all disappear, and the xenosphere is emphasised, the currents only we can see. Even our bodies are converted to light and broken up in the branching pathways. We are aware of movement, but not in the way of people in a moving vehicle. It’s more in the way of thinking, knowing that there is a stream of considerations, of locations you do not wish, and locations you do.
And you stop. The ground forms beneath you, the air starts to flow, the lightning settles, your body returns to existence and you automatically start the residual actions like breathing and swallowing spit, even though you don’t need them.
“Welcome home,” says Kaaro.
Arodan is a graveyard, of course. Overgrown vegetation has covered some of the scorching, but it is nothing but a husk. I head for the hangar and Kaaro follows. Even before we arrive, I can see the disturbed earth and the amateurishly hidden tracks. I send out impulses to negate any observers from seeing us, and Kaaro does the same.
Inside the hangar, I am startled by the sight of a hulking spined suit walking among the people. Kaaro seems relaxed.
“That’s Bad Fish,” he says. “He’s my friend.”
About a dozen young men and women fuss about connecting machinery, starting up a generator, bothering the suit Bad Fish has on. It is an almost religious sight. Somewhat to the side, Femi, Tolu, the professor and Eric watch with the same kind of bemusement I feel.
Eric sees us first, or rather, his tentacle does. It unwinds and probes in our direction, and Eric follows like a hunter, and knows.
“We’re not alone,” he says.
Kaaro and I expose ourselves at the same time.
“It’s just us,” I say.
“Kaaro, is that you?” says Bad Fish. “You seem younger. And neither of you has ID chips, ghosted or otherwise.”
We catch up. I find out that the young people are disciples of Bad Fish, and he is a kind of Nimbus messiah. Kaaro says he ended the war by destroying the alien plant, using a death ray from the orbiting space station. “It’s more of a heat ray through particle acceleration,” he says. “I can’t help it if the government leave their toys lying around.”
And just like that, something clicks.
“We can… I… We take it to their planet… We should… Now.” This thing happens to me sometimes. I can’t get words out fast enough. I know I’m not making sense, but I can’t stop myself, I’m so excited.
Femi says, “Easy, easy. Breathe. Tell me what you’ve got.”
I sit down.
“Bad Fish, you are proficient with viruses, right?”
“I am a virus. I am the beginning and end of viruses.”
“Humble too,” says Kaaro.
Bad Fish raises a bulky middle finger.
“Can you write a virus for a system you don’t fully understand?”
“What do you want it to do?” asks Bad Fish, clearly intrigued by the challenge he can smell.
“I want it to destroy the data on unfamiliar servers, but in a very short time.”
“How many servers?”
“I estimate about six billion.”
“Sorry, what?” asks Bad Fish.
I address all of them now. “You’re going to write a virus. We’re going to find a way to insert it into the professor’s brainoid. We take the brainoid to Rosewater, in a dead body. They reanimate it and infuse it with an alien consciousness. Only the pathway will carry a little surprise. Because entanglement works both ways. Our virus hitches a ride to Home’s moon. You infect one server, you infect them all. Boom.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” asks Femi.
“Can this be done?” Tolu asks the professor.
“Theoretically, yes. But it will take a lot of work. I’ll have to convert the data from the virus to encode it in the DNA, and somehow ensure it will activate at the right time. I’ll need to compile a biological virus to transfer the data. I may need to bring in other people with more expertise. Mrs Alaagomeji, this might be months, even years of work.”
“The aliens can’t possess human bodies if there are no alien minds left to do the possession,” says Eric. “Worth it.”
“Excuse me,” says Kaaro. “Why is nobody talking about how this is fucking genocide?”
He is looking at me when he says this. He is accusing me.
“It’s them or us,” says Eric. “I choose us.”
“They are not really alive,” says Femi. “They are not even ghosts. They are data, stored because of faulty philosophy, bodies long gone.”
“We are all data, Femi,” says Kaaro. “You may be wet data in a moist medium, but you’re data all the same. Like me. Like them.”
“Let’s say they are alive,” I say. “Let’s say we consider them alive. Billions of souls. Those of us here, we have to swallow the guilt of killing them all. For the sake of humanity. If we do not act here and now, we’re dead. Humanity is gone. There is no chance at all. There is Wormwood, invincible, and there are more like it on Earth. Whatever we do, they will just activate another footholder and pipe their people down from Home.
“Now we know that reanimates are alive, that their humanity comes back. Imagine what it’s like. You’re alive, but your body is not yours to control. Stuck there for whatever lifespan the Homians have. There are thousands like that already.
“Kaaro, they did not hesitate. If they were in our shoes, they would not. I am sorry, my friend. I know what this will do to us, to all of us. I am putting rot in our souls for all time, but this moment is our best shot at stopping the pipeline, our time-machine moment, our travel-back-and-kill-Leopold-II moment.”
“I can’t,” says Kaaro. He transforms into the gryphon in front of everybody and implodes into himself. Gone.
“Fuck him,” says Eric. “We don’t need Kaaro for this.”
Femi speaks to Bad Fish. “You’ve been quiet. Is this something you are willing to do?”
“Willing? I’ve started. I’ve already written twenty-five per cent of the code,” says Bad Fish. “Why are we still talking about this?”
Going after Kaaro is tricky and dangerous. The xenosphere is full of things that like to swallow other things or thoughts that like to overwrite others. It’s an ecosystem. Kaaro was such a skilled sensitive in life that dead he is one of the biggest creatures in here, maybe the biggest, because he gives even Molara a hard time.
Still I search for him. He thinks I am a monster, and I don’t disagree. I have contemplated a monstrous thing. People before me have done the same. Oppenheimer. Is Oppenheimer a mass murderer?
I wonder if I find this easier because I am not alive in the same sense that Femi or Eric is. I pass through lava tubes, still smelling the gryphon stink. I am expelled by steam bursts and find myself among the memory of stars, watching the birth of a black hole. I love this. Kaaro must have seen a documentary or something.
“Kaaro, I just want to talk,” I say. The black hole draws me out and I emerge under the sea, in the headlights of an angler fish.
“Hi,” it says.
“You look ridiculous, Kaaro.”
“I always do,” he says.
He transforms into a man. The sea draws back and we seem to be back at Arodan, but not in the hangar.
“If you can think of any other way, tell it to me,” I say. “I will consider it, and if it works, if it scans, we will do that instead.”
“You’re the smart one. If there was another way, you’d know it.”
“I don’t feel smart. I feel cruel,” I say. “And while I was in there, it seemed like a good idea, like inspiration, but the analytical part of me thinks it isn’t going to work.”
“Well…”
“I can’t make you do anything, Kaaro, but remember the people you killed? During the war?”
“I had to; they were coming for me, and for Aminat.”
“Yes, and even though you found out later that they were not, you don’t lose sleep over it.”
“I’m not blasé, if that’s what you think.”
“I don’t. I’m just saying that, on a smaller scale, you did what had to be done without hesitating. This is the same thing, but with a multiplier.”
“Big damn multiplier.”
“But the same principle.”
“Fuck the principle, Oyin Da. It’s still immoral. It’s still death.”
“They aren’t alive.”
“This is circular logic.” Kaaro transforms into a gryphon again. Around him, a hedge of dry twigs forms a seven-foot-high nest. I sense him curling up his wings and sitting. “Leave me alone. I want to think.”
I contemplate going home and bringing Nike back with me. Probably be awkward when Junior flies at Kaaro, trying to kill him. She is shit at taking instructions.
Instead, I go back to the hangar and help where I can.