“Nothing,” I said, starting to walk again.
I was sweating and looking at my feet. The networks of fine metal filaments woven around the heavier central structure gave my joints a flexibility that even made walking in sand easy. And the sand would sift right through. When I walked in mud, because of a special polymer sealant, the mud would slide right off. My feet couldn’t slip on ice, get stuck in muck, stay wet, and I could walk over hot lava and the metal wouldn’t melt. The joints were silent as the wings of an owl. I could jump fifteen feet in the air and land like a ballet dancer. My feet could grip even the tiniest crevice, so I could climb as well as a mountain goat.
So though my legs looked like the skeleton of a half made robot, I was marvelous. Doesn’t matter if my parts came from Ultimate Corp, I thought. I kicked a small mound of sand. When I first got my legs and was recovered enough to actually try them out, I’d crumbled to the ground, and it took three nurses to get me back into the hospital bed. I was closely monitored for weeks because my legs could have set me on fire during the nerve regeneration and fuse phase. All it would have taken was one misfire. It was one of the reasons so few of the disabled opted for even one cybernetic leg transplant, let alone two.
There was a reason I was such an angry child at fifteen. Not only was I full of hormones, ambition, curiosity and zeal, but for most of my fourteenth year of life, my nerves were also almost constantly on fire, and it was because of some freak car accident. That year was like a rebirth. The old me died when my legs were crushed and a new me was slowly reborn.
At first, the hospital bed swallowed me, I was so skinny. With each day, I disappeared more. And I wanted to disappear. Just fade away into the sunshine. Because I was sure that something clearly didn’t want me on this Earth. It had made a mistake in bringing me here, and it was doing everything it could to right its wrong.
My bed was beside the window, and my parents made sure that I was in the sunlight every day, the AC in the room keeping me cool and comfortable. I’d sit there, my pain numbed, flattened, and made strange by drugs, and stare at the dust floating about in the sunbeam shining on me. I wished I were one of those specks of dust. Insignificant, clean, free. However, as time progressed, it was as if I passed through a wall of fire. I told my doctors to take me off the drugs. My parents didn’t even realize it because I told them nothing about it, and I seemed quite normal. Better than normal. I was making progress.
I began standing up on my new legs, to my physical therapist’s delight. Then I was taking steps. Then I was walking around the hospital. My physical therapist couldn’t wait to tell my parents how I’d walked all the way to the end of the parking lot on the gravelly median between the cars. Uneven surfaces were the toughest. All this I did while enduring pain so intense that it was like existing close to a white hot sun.
There was no way to adjust to my cybernetic legs without enduring the pain as the nerves regenerated. That’s how I became so adept with my legs and later my arm. My doctor verified this for me. She said that it’s something they don’t like to tell transplant patients like myself, that in order to truly master usage, you had to die another death by pain. This is why most with cybernetic parts can move better than any organic human but few truly master the technology’s potential. What doctor would tell their patient that they have to endure pain three times worse than childbirth, a pain that lasts for over half a year?
By the time I was sixteen, I understood so much about myself and the darkness that life can bring. I wanted to dwell in the light. Not as a speck of dust, but as a raging teen interested in touching everything. And I never forgot the pain of that awful year of life.
* * *
—
A flare of a headache hit me so hard that I stumbled and screamed. “Ah, here it is again,” I groaned, grabbing my head. DNA rushed to me and when I looked at him, it was as if I were looking through a cascade of blood. Everything was tinted red and pulsing like my heart’s beat. And I was smelling it, too. Coppery and sweet. Am I bleeding?
“AO, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know! My head . . .” I opened my mouth and took in as much air as I could. It tasted of blood.
“We’re close to my village. About a mile,” he said. “Can you make it?”
I was sinking. Into the ground and into my head. I was only half aware of him helping me climb onto Carpe Diem. The breeze. Carpe Diem’s momentum. DNA jogging in front of us, I felt like I’d descended further into wilderness.
Up ahead, all I glimpsed through the red haze was more desert. If his nomadic village were nearby, it must have been very very small. I’d been looking ahead into the distance, beyond DNA when it happened. Now everything was going dark and quiet and calm.
* * *
—
I heard myself exhale, then the red veil lifted. And the headache . . . no, the headache didn’t stop exactly. There was a rupture in my head and it was followed by a feeling of liquidy warmth. An almost sweet sting. Then a looseness. Gradually, I felt better. I twisted around and rested my chin on Carpe Diem’s furry head. “Oh,” I whispered, looking ahead, past DNA walking with GPS. “How did I not see that?”
CHAPTER 8
Village
The nomad village was about a mile in diameter. Low Bedouin style goat skin tents set up not too close but not too far. It was nearly upon us now. A minute ago, when I’d looked up, I hadn’t seen a thing. “Oh good,” he said. “You look a lot better.”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. “I don’t know what the hell that was.”
We started encountering DNA’s people and, from the start, it was strange. But before I get to that, let me note how these people lived. I’m used to concrete towers and sprawling buildings. Of course, much of Abuja, parts of Lagos and all of New Calabar are green with government-maintained swaths of peri grass. Most of the lower half of Nigeria is green with it to some extent. And drones and AI-run robots peopled the streets and the air like insects and birds. Their cooling fans are fluffy with dust and dirt, some are missing parts because people pull them off to sell in the black market.
Though I hadn’t lived in wealth, I’ve always lived in relative comfort. Both my parents were gifted and ambitious engineers who were most interested in creating innovations for Nigeria and least interested in participating in strikes or protests. My parents were the two engineers behind the solar roadways and parking lots that powered so much of Imo State.