The Rosewater Redemption Read online

I play I. K. Dairo, starting with “Salome”, sing along, nod my head.

  I think.

  Finding You in the Hole You Crawled Into

  Dahun, unlike most people, is content.

  His house is in Niger, on the Sahara side of the Great Green Wall, where the air is fragrant and the heat is pleasant. The nights are mystical and the ambient voices are in variants of Arabic. On a clear night, he can hear throbbing music from the one dance club, The Disco Inferno. He sits on his veranda, toasts the full moon and reads about the stock market. He doesn’t know anything about it, but he aims to become an expert, seeing as he has the cash from the last job. He wonders if he has retired from the contracting business, because he cannot feel any will to put himself behind a machine gun or in harm’s way for whatever sum.

  He drinks his gin in one swig, pours himself another.

  He is unsteady by the time he finishes the bottle, and makes his way to his bedroom. He gets an impulse and decides to take a walk instead, clear his head. It’s still early; maybe he’ll walk all the way to the village, talk to actual human beings who are not on the other end of electronic media. He puts on a hood–it’s weird how cold the desert can be at night. As soon as he’s two feet away from his home, the security protocols activate.

  He walks down the drive and turns left on the dusty, shrub-lined road. He feels an oddness two seconds before something twists over his mouth, around his throat, and pins his arms to his sides. It’s like a python or boa constrictor, organic, muscular, unyielding. Dahun tries to bite, to no avail. He falls to the ground, cursing himself for getting soft, and notices the man who seems to control the snake.

  “Caleb Fadahunsi,” says the man. “Keep calm. I’m taking you into custody.”

  The man’s outline is odd, even in shadow. He’s wearing some kind of hooded jumper and tight dark trousers, but the thing that holds Dahun down seems to extend from the man’s right arm, like it’s a part of him. He knows Dahun’s first name, which means they’ve done their homework, whoever he works for. Dahun is sensitive about being called Caleb. A car approaches, too convenient to be a coincidence. It’s a blacked-out jeep, vaguely military, closing fast. It starts to slow twenty yards away, which is when Dahun’s pursuit drone drops a mini missile on it. The man starts, as Dahun does when he realises the car is intact, armoured most likely.

  “Do not engage,” says the man.

  This is unwise, because the drone will start firing in a few seconds. It’s keyed to Dahun’s ID and will hit everything but him. It has just cleared the roof and races towards them. The man is calm.

  “The bullets are armour-piercing,” says Dahun. “Just walk away and we’ll call it a night.” But his words do not make it out unmuffled because of the snake.

  The drone is chased by two shadows, and in the full moon Dahun can see that they are flapping. Owls. Cyborg observation owls. They close on the drone, which tries, too late, to compensate and change target. Between them, the owls bring the drone down without making a sound.

  The tentacle–and it is a tentacle, not a snake–loosens. The car bounds forward and stops by Dahun’s side.

  “Get in,” says the man.

  Dahun stands. “You only caught me because I decided to go for a walk.”

  The man places his hand over Dahun’s head as he steps into the car. “And who do you think put that thought in your head?”

  The car is driverless, electric, probably government-issue. The man applies handcuffs and straps Dahun in. Fair-skinned and some kind of grotesque, definitely from Rosewater, which is confusing because the Nigerian government controls the COBs, the Cyborg Observation Beasts, and there’s the military car. Dahun parted on good terms with Mayor Jack Jacques at the tail end of the war. Jacques paid generously, and on time. Why would…

  “Who are you?” asks Dahun.

  The man’s face remains within the darkness of the hood. The tentacle curls and slaps the seat like Satan’s tongue.

  “Who do you work for?”

  More silence.

  “Are you from Rosewater? Are you reconstructed?”

  The car hits a bump, and the man rolls against the seat belt. “Stupid.”

  “What?”

  The man inclines his head forward, but the gap in the hoodie makes it seem like a yawning abyss. “You are stupid. But don’t worry, it’s not just you.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “My mother was a lawyer and she used to tell me that every single person arrested in a free, or nominally free, country has the right to remain silent. But do they exercise that right? No. Every fucking time, they have to open their mouths, hey? Like the police are your confessors. I mean, they’d like to be, but they aren’t. Everyone wants to tell their story, but in the telling is incrimination. Caleb, shut the fuck up. You have no idea who I am or why I’ve taken you. Anything you say could help me.”

  He sounds South African, that weird not-Dutch thing they do with their English.

  “Am I under arrest then?”

  But the man from South Africa takes his own advice and does not speak.

  While You Slept

  Kaaro’s phone wakes him, unknown number. Aminat’s side of the bed is cold.

  “You need to come to the prison, Mr Kaaro.” It is the voice of a stranger.

  “I’m not allowed in government buildings any more. And it’s just Kaaro.”

  “Your restrictions have been lifted for this occasion, and precautions will be taken.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have to do what you say. I don’t work for the government,” says Kaaro. “I’m retired.”

  “Femi Alaagomeji has asked for you, sir.”

  Kaaro glances at the absence of Aminat, then says, “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  That Bastard Locke

  “I’d like to go to Hannah Jacques for a response to that,” says the host.

  Hannah does not hesitate. “To explain this, I’ll give an example that’s universal, whether you’re in Rosewater or Ojuelegba, Lagos. Take a person, a woman of forty years, Shakespeare’s forty winters. She has a car accident or falls from a height. Either way, she gets a brain injury, a severe one, but she does not die. After a period of intense medical and surgical intervention, she lives, but she is no longer herself. Her personality has changed. Take this same woman, no accident this time, but forty years later, she has Alzheimer’s disease. She is no longer the person she was at forty or even fourteen. Now, same person, no accident, no dementia, but she has a stroke and has problems understanding and expressing words. Not like she used to be. I could go on. Schizophrenia? Post-traumatic stress? Dissociative amnesia?”

  “You have to answer the question, Ms Jacques,” says the host.

  “Personhood cannot be limited to a person’s memories. We are to believe that in death the reanimates lose their selves, and when resurrected by Wormwood, they are just bodies, biological vessels waiting to be filled by alien presences. It’s like a nightmare built by the ghost of John Locke. You’ve got these stupid but technologically advanced aliens who stored the memories of their people and then murdered them. Locke would of course say the memories are the people, so each one, stored on a server trillions of light years away, is still alive in that sense. He would also say the reanimates are not alive as they appear to have no memory of their previous lives. The use of reanimate bodies as hosts for Homian dead would be as easy and ethically challenging as putting on clothes from a charity shop. In actual fact, using reanimates is salting the wounds of the bereaved.”

  The host raises his hand. “I’m afraid I’ll have to interrupt you and direct you to the question: do you consider Homian reanimates people?”

  “I consider the bodies into which these memories are inserted to be people. Humanity is not just about memories. Selfhood is embodied, and a reanimated Hannah Jacques is still Hannah Jacques, just like a Hannah Jacques with dementia is still Hannah Jacques.”

  “Who, then, is a Homian?” asks the host.

&nb
sp; “The Homians are all dead from an act of auto-genocide disguised as a desperate gambit for survival. Here’s a question for you: when they download their selves into the human vessels, does a copy remain on the server? Then which is the Homian, the copy on the server or the one inside the human body?”

  “That’s all we have time for. Ladies and gentlemen, Hannah Jacques.”

  When the applause dies down, and the mics are no longer hot, the host whispers to Hannah, “Your husband isn’t going to like this.”

  “Your eyebrows are inexpertly plucked,” she says, and walks away.

  Soledad Sister

  Femi squints when they come for her. She is usually in darkness for twenty-three hours, solitary, on bread and water, a bucket in the corner being the whole extent of her facilities, with the added humiliation of knowing she is watched from the infrared camera in the ceiling. She stopped counting the days, but she knows she has been in detention without trial for eighteen months or thereabouts. Her periods stopped after the first six months: malnutrition. Every month she gets a physical from an indifferent medic. Every day, in her one hour of sunlight, she checks the state of her sores, her nails, the colour of her skin, just to see how far the vitamin and micronutrient deficiency has progressed. The bread is often mouldy, and she hopes the penicillium species produces low levels of antibiotics and perhaps some useful minerals.

  Her mind.

  At one point, Femi was sure she had lost her mind, but she has since revised that opinion.

  She has not been interrogated, she has not been tortured, she has not been molested. Technically, this kind of detention is seen as torture by the United Nations, but who listens to them any more? The UN descended into infighting once the US left and the UK wasn’t strong enough to hold China or Russia in check.

  Are you afraid?

  No. Sure, they have control over my body, but my mind is stronger than all of theirs put together. I won’t break, if that’s what you mean.

  What about death?

  If I die today, I die no more, as the song goes.

  I need you to live.

  My dear, I do enjoy our talks, but I cannot guarantee my own life right now. Maybe they’ll see me talking to thin air and take me to a mental hospital.

  I still have a lot to tell you…

  If she has to, Femi can take solitary confinement. Not that it would be easy, but she can do it. She has the advantage of knowing exactly what her strengths and weaknesses are, and this bothers other people, because she cannot be flattered and is rarely uncertain or embarrassed. The truth is that she has had an unexpected visitor in the cell, a regular one, and this has made the months more bearable. But her captors do not know that and she imagines them confounded by her calm.

  It’s not time for her one hour of exercise and fresh air, so she’s confused when they come for her. The light is also brighter than she’s used to, because this is mid-morning. Usually her hour is in the evening. Perhaps Jack Jacques has grown the stones to order a summary execution? Femi isn’t ready to die, but there are many things she has not been ready for, and done when they presented themselves.

  They put her in front of a meaningless bureaucrat with pretensions of grandeur, who tells her she is to be freed the next day, but not why. It is an exaggeration to call it freedom, as she is to be in permanent exile from Rosewater.

  “I want to speak to Kaaro,” she says. “Not on the phone; in the same room. Today.”

  Taking_Exception

  The query is for her name.

  “Lora Asiko.”

  They want to know her age. Options: factual/flippant. Flippant.

  “A lady never tells.”

  Laughter.

  Query for her occupation.

  “I’m executive assistant to Mayor Jack Jacques.”

  Query for her favourite food.

  “Chocolate ice cream, no sprinkles.”

  Query for where she was born.

  Retrieval error.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get that.”

  Query repeated.

  Retrieval error.

  #Risk_of_recursive_loop

  Guess/lie.

  “I was born in Lagos, like the mayor.”

  Query about why she is anxious.

  “I’ve been away from the mayor too long. He needs me to run his office and his life. I am keen to get back.”

  Query: square root of 8936.

  “94.53.”

  Query about the meaning of “Mo beru agba”.

  “Yoruba phrase, literally means ‘I fear my elders’, but really speaks to a fear of supernatural entities like wizards, wise men and witches. It’s also a back-door wish for respect or fear when one grows old, or an entreaty towards good behaviour while one is young so as to have a quiet senescence. I think.”

  Query about—

  #Interrupt.

  #There_is_no_further_need_to_answer_queries.

  #They_know_you_are_functional_and_operational.

  “I no longer wish to answer questions. I wish to leave.”

  Query—

  #Interrupt.

  “I’m leaving. Goodbye.”

  She Knows

  I know what Eric is doing. I know the exact strategic value of the mercenary Dahun as a bargaining chip. I had known how much time I would have with Femi, but it still wasn’t enough.

  “I know too much,” I say to the hollow space. My voice seems to leave my mouth and stop a few centimetres in front of my face. “Ooooooohhh! Awwwwwww!”

  No echo.

  “The Woman Who Knew Too Much!”

  I get serious and update my board.

  Attire

  Bad Fish finds Kaaro again. Software update was the problem. He confirms visually, using the nearest cameras.

  What the fuck is he wearing?

  Spaceman

  Rather than take precautions to isolate him in space, the prison asks Kaaro to wear a body suit with a visor that lends the world a faint green tinge. He looks like an astronaut, but thinks that apart from isolating him from the microbes that constitute the xenosphere, the suit is meant to disguise him. It’s hot and uncomfortable, especially in the armpits, elbows and crotch, where the material bunches. He is also sure the air tank attached to it is old or depleted, because breathing is an effort and what makes its way into his lungs is not fresh. He probably should have used the loo before putting it on, because now he wants to piss. He wonders where they got the suit from.

  Two armed guards lead him through the bowels of the facility, hands at his elbows to keep him steady as the suit makes him clumsy. At least it means he cannot smell the grime.

  He does not see any other prisoners, although at intervals a guard or two comes out of his peripheral vision to startle him. There may actually no longer be any prisoners, some used as vessels for the aliens upon death, some freed after serving as soldiers in the War of Insurrection. Kaaro was forced to fight in that war, lost friends, learned new abilities, and experimented with homicide.

  They finally deposit him in a room, ten feet by ten, single naked unlit bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling, spider’s webs in the corners, wall gecko chilling at a forty-five-degree angle to the horizontal. Yoruba people won’t kill a wall gecko because it is believed to protect the integrity of a structure, and if it dies indoors the building may collapse. Two wooden chairs, dusty, arranged side by side, yearning for a table. Kaaro drags one into a face-to-face position and sits. It creaks under his weight.

  He doesn’t have to wait long for Femi to appear.

  She’s gaunt, blue jumpsuit hanging off her frame like curtains, short hair, sunken eyes, thong slippers on her feet, not the person he knew eighteen months ago. The guard stays by the door while Femi slouches and sits in the empty chair. No jewellery, no make-up; the beautiful woman she is lies hidden under months of deprivation. She is undefeated, though. The iron in her eyes, the hard gaze, the determination undiminished. Was she tortured?

  “What did they…
do?” asks Kaaro.

  “Not important. Kaaro… it’s good to see you, albeit through a space suit. How’s Aminat? You were my favourite agent, you know that?”

  “You don’t have to flatter me, Femi.”

  “I’m not. I wanted more for you, but you were focused on your penis.”

  “Do you need a lawyer? I can—”

  “I do not. Listen, I need you to take that helmet off.”

  “What? If I do, the xenoforms on my skin will—”

  “Form a network in nanoseconds and you’ll be in the brains of me and that moron by the door. Yes.”

  “And that’s what you want?”

  “I don’t remember you being this slow or daft. Pay attention because I don’t know how long I’ll be free to speak to you. Read my mind, and do it fast. Read everything, or everything you have time for. Go.”

  Kaaro begins to work off the helmet, counting the seconds before the guard will realise what is happening and either raise the alarm or attempt to stop him. In Kaaro’s head –

  The earliest hangings were from trees, especially if Jesus came down from the cross and accused you of insubordination when your team loses the last seven finals. The hanged may defecate, and their legs might be smeared by faeces. Dynamic Rosewater athletes dying on rail tracks while trying to outrun trains as training. Geddit? Training? Read the attached paper every day for five years, and watch as your hair turns white and your brain goes to mush. People will come to view your hair. The line will back up out of your garden, down the street, where it will finally cause a traffic jam. An upright neighbour, an acolyte and sycophant-in-chief to the prime minister, will snap and machine-gun them all till they are dead. The neighbour will herself be executed by bouncy castle after due process for defacing number plates on cars parked outside zoos.

  – Which does not matter. By the time Kaaro can adjust to his new mindset, he is lying on the floor, handcuffed and held down by shouting people, his cheek losing heat to the floor, dust in his nose, staring at Femi, who is likewise cuffed and staring back at him.

  “Don’t worry,” says Femi.

  Kaaro can feel his eyes become heavy with tears.