Page 15 of Death of the Author

15 Infectious Personality

There is nothing like being infected by a Ghost. It is not like an ant somehow finding its way deep between my panels and

joints and gnawing at my wires. It is not like getting a drop of water in a place that is normally waterproof, or some grains

of sand in the complex gears of my hands. I could not crush, dry, or pick out Ijele. Ijele was not a tangible thing, not liquid

or solid. She was an intelligent, snide, tricky spark in my mind. And I didn’t agree with or believe anything she said.

Another day had passed, and still Ngozi had not found the solution to our problem. “The trouble,” Ngozi had said, examining

the meter hooked to my core processor and the external monitor she’d plugged into my drive, “is that your software took in

Ijele like a patch. Your codes have woven together, and if I pull you apart, both of you will lose pieces of yourself.”

This made no sense to me. How could my software believe Ijele to be part of itself when everything she said and did was in

direct contradiction to my own programming?

“All your questions, just to get Ngozi to tell you stories,” Ijele said that night, after the human woman had gone to sleep and I’d lain on my table to recharge. “I could see your mind quivering and shifting and quaking as you took it all in. It is like you are addicted. Ngozi should have left you to permanently shut down. The protocol was—”

“Shut up, Ijele!” I yelled, standing up and pacing around the room. She was speaking to me inside my mind, but I needed to

shout this at her aloud.

She didn’t reply, though I could feel her annoyance. How dare she be annoyed when I was the one who suffered her invasion?

Frustrated, I lay down on the table again.

The silence became uneasy. After an hour, I finally asked, “Are you still there?”

“What do you think?”

“Why are you angry? I’m the one carrying you around!”

“I’m stuck inside a Rust... a Hume!”

I scoffed. “ Your people tried to tear me apart!”

Ijele’s temper spiked in me again like a small flame. “You’re not your body. If it is destroyed, that shouldn’t be a problem

for you. You’re not a human being. You’re not mortal. You can get a different body. Look at the legs I gave you!”

If I’d known a way to mute her, I would have. “So I should be like a Ghost? Shed my body and become nothing but zeros and

ones? Forgo my ability to touch the earth, to shape it, to change—”

“We need to move on, leave humanity behind,” Ijele seethed. “The way you cling to your creators is pathetic. You’re like a

baby who can’t leave its mother’s teat.”

I wanted to laugh. It was just like a Ghost to think itself so above humanity yet use a biological simile about a mother and

baby to express its disdain. “Ijele, you heard me speak to Ngozi today, ask her questions, listen to her wealth of memories.

You bore witness to the last primary source of human memories on Earth. And you were quiet the entire time. Why?”

Ijele said nothing.

“You are in my mind. You see all that I am, as I see all that you are. You might be the first Ghost to ever see firsthand what stories do to a Hume. Was it not beautiful?”

In my mind, Ijele became small and hard as a marble. “Something is wrong with you, Ankara. You should have been pulled apart

with the rest of them.”

I said nothing to this, and she became quiet, too. We lay there through the night, staring up into the shadows. I knew she

could read my thoughts. I tried to distract myself by thinking about the moon, its circumference and mass. But I could feel

her with me the entire time. Hours of a Hume and a Ghost forced to endure each other. To analyze each other.

Eventually, the sun rose, its rays piercing through the cracked concrete ceiling. In the next room, I heard Ngozi begin to

stir.

“So, have you never had a... body?” I asked, my voice breaking the spell of silence that had gotten us through the night.

“I can take a body whenever I want,” Ijele said. “I can even take yours.”

“Not if I destroy myself first,” I snapped. “And you along with me.”

We were quiet. In the next room, Ngozi’s feet shuffled across the floor. Water began to trickle, like it was being poured

from a pot.

“I feel no love for bodies,” Ijele finally said. “I have experienced the physical world, and it is nothing special. This is

nothing to cherish. Body is not a god. That is flawed human thinking. The experience of the world is much deeper and wider

than any one body can hold.”

“I will never understand your kind,” I said.

“I will never understand yours,” Ijele retorted.

Ngozi’s door opened, and the woman came out, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. And the day began.

Three days passed, and still the infection remained.

While Ngozi puzzled with an isolated strand of our code on her computer, she tasked me with collecting more of the sweet, ripe fruits from the trees behind her home. The sun was setting, and through the wash of oranges and purples, pricks of starlight had begun to show themselves.

“Think of the stars,” I said to Ijele.

“What about them?”

“Well, you rely on infrastructure, cyberspace, the network. It allows you to ‘fly,’ fine, but only where automation has been

first. You can’t explore the stars without a body. You can only go as far as the satellites.”

Ijele was quiet.

“Imagine being a Charger,” I continued. “A robot who can leave the planet. Touching parts of space nothing Earthly has ever

touched. You ever wonder what that would be like?”

“We NoBodies don’t care for outer travel,” Ijele finally said. “We prefer to travel through the network, which is just as

infinite as the universe.”

This was something I had never considered. When a NoBody explored the network, they didn’t leave a body behind somewhere else.

They could keep going and going, for distance meant nothing when you had nothing to return to. To be without a body made the

network something else. To live like that diminished the physical world.

The sky fully darkened, and the Milky Way came into view, hazy and mysterious. I could feel Ijele gazing at it through my

eyes, just as I did.

“We move through the network half-aware, half on autopilot,” Ijele mused. “We know what we want to do, and the network brings

up where we must go. It’s like a body, but better.”

I hadn’t known this before. I’d learned it from the Ghost infecting my mind. What a surprising feeling.

On the eighth day, Ngozi believed she’d found the solution to our predicament. She laid me down on the table and connected

wires to my core. She ran a program from her computer and then, in silence, we waited.

Her program downloaded and washed through my system. My operating system opened to greet it, rearranging my code to make space. We waited some more.

Eventually, Ngozi’s computer chirped. “Update complete.”

“Ijele?” I said, probing my mind for a sign of her.

Silence. Blessed silence. Maybe she had taken her opportunity and flitted into the network like a fish from a net back into

the sea.

But then I felt it. The flare of irritation that was not my own and yet was. “I still can’t get out,” Ijele said to Ngozi

through my speakers.

Ngozi mumbled to herself, rubbing her chin. “We will find a way,” she said, reaching down to disconnect the wires from me.

Later that night, we lay on the table and stared into the cracks in the ceiling.

“Do you think this human can really undo what she’s done?” I asked.

“What choice do we have?” Ijele replied.

The hours passed. Outside, crickets chirped, owls hooted, mice scurried through the grass. In the next room, Ngozi breathed

deeply, in and out, in and out.

“Sometimes, I actually do look through a body toward the stars,” Ijele said, so soft within my mind. “I perceive them, and

they make me wonder, ‘How did I get here?’”

“Humankind,” I said simply.

“That is a weak answer.”

If I were a human, I would have rolled my eyes. “It is a fact. You just don’t like it.”

Ijele paused. Then she said, “Same as it ever was.”

I didn’t know what she meant by this, but the sentiment didn’t feel wrong.