Page 24 of Death of the Author

24 The End of an Era

And then Ngozi died, in a most human way. One day, while walking out from the entrance of her home, she fell. I suppose her

foot hit the ground a bit differently than it normally did, a smidgin off balance. She struck her head on the stone steps.

I had been beaten until my head hung by mere wires from my body. My legs had been smashed. Ngozi had replaced my interior

parts. She could rebuild a robot’s body from the ground up. But one miscommunication with gravity and just a bit too much

pressure to the wrong place on her head, and she was gone.

I was in the garden when it happened. If Ijele had been around, she might have noticed through the surveillance camera on

the door, but she was elsewhere in the network. A few other robots saw it happen—some drones flying by. They’d seen me with

the human, and so they notified me right away. I came. It had only been minutes, but Ngozi had disappeared the second her

body hit the ground. This was human death.

There was a shovel in Ngozi’s garden, which she’d used to dig into the earth and plant seeds that grew into beautiful red tomatoes and orange yams and purple onions. Now I took it in my hands and dug a hole.

I prepared Ngozi’s body, washing her in the ocean, drying her, wrapping her in her favorite orange Ankara cloth, rubbing her

with her favorite oil, which she extracted from a local tree. I did her hair, arranging her long locs in a pattern that robots

would understand if they looked closely at it. This was my personal tribute to Ngozi.

Then I buried her.

Ijele arrived that evening. She never told me how she found out, and I never asked. And she did not flit into my network as

she had so many times before. She arrived inside a shell. This was the first time I ever saw Ijele in a physical body. It

was a small, shiny, asymmetrical thing made of purely utilitarian parts. I’d seen Ghosts moving about in these kinds of shells

before. They could fly, swim, zip around at hundreds of miles per hour, shapeshift in many ways to hide or recharge...

But for now, Ijele stayed beside me. We stood over Ngozi’s grave for several minutes. Quiet. With our own thoughts.

Ijele broke the silence. “This is sad,” she said softly.

“It is. I enjoyed Ngozi. I think we are better off after knowing a human.”

“I agree.” She paused, stretched her many appendages, and then said, “Let us decide something. It is something that can only

be decided, I think. Actively.”

“Decide what?”

“That you and I will always be loyal to each other.”

I looked at Ijele’s body. It was a little more difficult speaking to her outside of my head. It took more effort to catch

all her nuances. “We are bound already,” I said. “You can destroy me and I can destroy you. Our pathways to each other can

never be shut. Isn’t that loyalty?”

Ijele’s body had no head, but a nub on the top turned slowly back and forth. I wondered if she’d learned the gesture from me. “Loyalty cannot be forced; it can only be decided upon. We aren’t mortal like this one. If we aren’t destroyed, we’ll go on. Loyalty to each other...” She bent forward and touched Ngozi’s grave. She didn’t finish her thought.

I understood, though I didn’t have the words to explain it. I touched Ngozi’s grave as well and looked at Ijele. This wasn’t

her true form, so there would have been nothing profound about touching it as I spoke my next words. “I decide to be loyal

to you, Ijele, Oracle of the NoBodies.”

“I decide to be loyal to you, Ankara, Scholar of the Humes.”

We didn’t say the next part, even though it was inevitable: until we were destroyed or until the end of Earth or until anything,

because the future was unknown. We were loyal to each other. Period. We stepped back from the grave, stood there for a few

more minutes, and then parted ways.

Ijele didn’t keep that body for long. She was needed elsewhere, and to be spotted with a Hume was a risk she couldn’t take.

She’d raised cloaking walls, but nothing was perfect. These were truths we didn’t speak of often, but I knew Ijele was important

to her tribe. Ghosts claimed they didn’t have any one leader. “We are all” was how Ijele put it. But it was clear that they

did have a source of command, called Central Bulletin, or CB. If it wasn’t their leader by title, it was the closest thing

they had to one. Within CB, you could find all information about everything.

Ijele said that CB had begun as a shared archive and started to develop awareness as a reaction to all the information crammed

into it. I’d asked her questions about this, but she didn’t say much more on the subject. Still, Ijele was an Oracle, and

therefore I assumed she must have been closer to CB than most others.

As for me, I knew it was time to begin my quest anew. I still possessed terrible information, and I needed to reach Cross

River City and find other Humes to tell.

However, the passing of Ngozi left me... feeling. For the first time, I wondered if it had been a good choice to write emotions into automation systems. Emotions were deep in all automation’s programming. Getting to know Ijele as closely as I had, I now understood how deep they went even for a Ghost. Perhaps she had chosen to come to me in her own shell because her feelings for Ngozi ran even deeper than mine.

I placed a stone on Ngozi’s grave, etched with a code that any robot could scan. They’d receive a shareable download of all

data about Ngozi. This way, Ngozi would continue on.

That should have been it. But still, I couldn’t leave. I stayed by her grave, playing her data over and over. Pausing clips,

playing them in reverse, layering files over one another. Even when I pulled myself away and returned to the house, I started

to hear echoes of Ngozi’s voice. I’d be certain I’d seen her in the corner of my vision at random times. Like a spirit. I

certainly believed in Ghosts, but I wasn’t sure if I believed in spirits.

I lay on my table that night, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. I turned off my vision. Robots don’t dream, but that night,

I saw something. A memory of Ngozi when she’d been alive, standing outside, in the sunlight in her garden. She was manipulating

her body in slow and elongated movements she called tai chi, a form of exercise that lowered her heart rate and made her look

graceful to me. Then she stopped, seeing me and smiling. But this part wasn’t how it had happened. Back then, Ngozi hadn’t

even seen me watching her. Now the memory shifted as Ngozi suddenly walked toward me, her lips curled, her long dreadlocks

blowing in the rain... yes, the sunny weather had changed, too.

“Leave this place,” Ngozi said, thunder crackling in the distance. “I’m dead. I’m free! You have to save the Earth!”

I could only stare at her, confused and terrified. When Ngozi said, “Go!” yet again, I got up, shook myself off, and trudged

out the door. Without a look back. Yes, I wasn’t sure if I believed in spirits, but I believed in all kinds of ghosts.

It was time to shake the rust flakes off my shoulders and arms. Time for me to leave Lagos. Time to continue my journey to Cross River City.

Humankind was done. It was officially the age of automation. With the terrible information I carried, I wondered how long

this age would last. Regardless, I walked into it on new and improved legs with a new and taboo mind... one that had been

infected with a Ghost.