“You don’t know me anymore,” I said.
“Men attacked you in your local market while you were shopping and you killed them all with your bare hands in front of thirty-one people. Oh I definitely still know you.”
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” I said. “I’m not a murderer. Those men would have killed me.”
“I know.” He paused. “I watched it several times, closely. But what happened to you?”
DNA and the steer were back at Force’s outdoor home. For the moment, we were all safe. It was time to face what I didn’t want to face. I groaned again, and even then I knew that they heard. “They always hear now,” I said, curling over myself. I pressed my face to my hard knees. I curled my arms around myself. And I wailed. For the first time, I accepted it, opened myself to it. I wailed into my knees until my lungs burned, my organic intestines turned, my human heart beat so hard that I felt dizzy. When I opened my eyes, everything was blurred.
Force’s hands were on my shoulders, gently pressing me down. “Shhhh, AO, shhhh, calm down.” He sat back and reached for something on the floor. Then I felt him reach into my shirt. “Don’t move,” he said. I trusted him enough to not tear his head off. “Sit back. Breathe. If I think what’s happening is happening, your life depends on it. Breathe. Deep breaths.”
I could feel my heart slamming in my chest, everything was crowding me, I opened my mouth wide. “Inhale,” I heard him say. “Like you are the Red Eye itself!” I inhaled. “Your blood pressure is class three,” he muttered. “Calm yourself.”
I breathed. My mouth wide. I imagined the chaos of the Red Eye. Wind moving in every direction. Suctioning my thoughts like one of its many whirlwinds. Whoooooooooooooooo. Then I exhaled a storm. Haaaaaaaaaaaaa.
“That’s it, my love, that’s it,” I heard him say. I could hear his fingers tapping. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was typing on a large tablet. The beat of my heart simulated on its screen, along with my blood pressure and other diagnostics. At least ten minutes had passed because he said, “ I analyzed that footage of what happened in that Abuja market. You coughed, like in that moment, you had a hard time breathing.”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”
“I just put a diagnostic tab on your chest,” he said. “And now I see that what I suspected was correct.” He put up a hand. “Relax, you’re better now. Don’t let this, uh, surprise you too much but your blood pressure is just shy of a full on heart attack. But you’re better now, you’re better now.”
Heart attack, I thought. “Is that why I feel my pulse so strongly in my ears?” He nodded. “And the headaches,” I said. “Like a drum beat.” When was the last time I had my blood pressure checked? Or maybe it got bad when I killed those men. I kissed my teeth. What did it matter? “I think . . . I can talk to them.”
“Talk to who?”
“The AI. All of them. Around the world, in space, all the programs, software. Even the Hour Glass’s AI Maiduguri.” I paused. “And I think I can make them do what I want.”
He didn’t believe me. Even after I told him how DNA and I escaped the warehouse, Force chose to believe his theories and logical scientific explanations, instead. He said it was all just my high blood pressure and coincidence. The high blood pressure and stress interfered with my perception of what was happening around me. In the meantime, the corporation decided that a public execution of someone as damaged as me was bad press. He was sure that the Nigerian government may have done something to me, and they’d ordered the corporation to back off so they could retrieve their specimen.
Anything but me being a living wireless connection, simultaneously human and machine; the result of an abnormal amount of flesh to machine wiring, some random glitch caused by the combination of violence inflicted on my body, and subsequent rage.
“It’s been too much for you,” he said still looking at his tablet. “All of it. Years of it. The surgeries, the artificial parts, what comes with all that. Look at these numbers. Your heart is still flesh, it can die.”
“I don’t CARE.” We were quiet for a moment. I felt better now. I took more deep breaths. Those definitely helped. Steady even breaths. I took a bit more time. Then I went in . . .
Dusty dirt roads . . .
Some paved with fresh black asphalt, but mostly dusty . . .
Few cars, even fewer autonomous vehicles. It was locating the small Ondo state town I still remembered that led me to the building I sought. The mosque didn’t look like a mosque and the church across the street looked like someone’s modest home. There was a small shop down the road from the mosque where you could still buy goods like chewing gum, incense sticks, and cigarettes with actual cash. And Force’s family’s palace was right beside the mosque.
All this I showed Force on the screens around us that were normally used for lectures, surveillance, and programming. Screens that Force had control of and that I, according to him, didn’t. “I still remember the name of your town. That’s why I can show it to you. I tell them the name and they find the satellite images. What I’m showing you is your town a few years ago. When I thought you had committed suicide and your family told me they didn’t want me at your funeral because your death was my fault.”
“They told you that?”
“Yes.” I opened my eyes and glared at him. All around us was Ikare, Ondo State, Nigeria. There was the palace where Force was born, where he had apparently never gone when I thought he had. I made the images move a bit as if we were walking on foot through his home. I watched him as I did this, it was that easy. The Control. “I’m doing all this. I ask and they obey me, indulge me, whatever.”
“Okay,” he said, a blank look of shock on his face. “So who is obeying or indulging you? Who is ‘they’?”
“They’re a sentience, the Internet? No more than that. They’re digital and ubiquitous. In my mind, they look like eyes, fruit, a pomegranate.” I glanced at him and then quickly glanced away, not liking how he was looking at me. I shook my head. “I can’t explain.” I switched the image to my face, as if I were looking at him from all around, five of my faces from the various angles of the cameras in the room, looking at him. I could feel the drums in my temples, and I took a deep breath. “Whether you believe me or not, I can do this,” I said.
“Okay,” he said again. “Stop, for now. Your heart rate is increasing.”
I stopped and sat back, breathing deeply.
“How?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s easy?”
“Minus the risk of heart attack, yes.”
“What about your herdsman friend, DNA? Is he involved?”
“That part is strange coincidence.”
He shook his head. “No.”
I shrugged.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re safe here,” he said.
“I’m not safe anywhere.”
“Yes,” he said. “But if what you tell me is true, if you can do this . . . this thing, they’re going to want you.”