The Book of Phoenix

  A luta continua.

  • • •

  It was also signed by hand but the signature was not readable with the human eye. It was square shaped and very much like a matrix code. A digital signature made with the cybernetic hand of a cyborg, written on a piece of paper in recycled ink. Francesca looked up from the piece of paper just as a bomb went off in the side of the building. She ran out clutching the paper as concrete rained around her. She made it outside to tell the tale and hand the paper over not to one of her superiors, but to a journalist named Tony who happened to be in the vicinity when it all happened. As Francesca cried on his shoulder, Tony scanned the document, and it was quickly made public. By the end of the day, the whole world knew that The Ledussee, a group of cyborg terrorists, had destroyed Tower 5 in the city of Las Vegas.

  Nonetheless, that news story had to jostle with an equally disturbing one. Right off the coast of Florida, at the edge of a small oceanside town, a group of men spotted something in the water. At first they moved closer for a better look. They walked down the beach, laughing and talking about alien ships falling from the sky. These young men loved the old old superheroes of the New Mythology, like Batman, Superman, and The Incredible Hulk. Two of them even created a long running digital comic. The comic earned them enough money to pay their way into academic indenture so they could earn their degrees in medicine.

  “Nah, that’s probably a piece of a fishing ship or something,” Mark said. “Someone was most likely fired for losing that.”

  It looked like a shiny metal sphere, at least from afar. As they got closer, they then saw the legs. And the fact that it was standing. A metal spider. When something on its head began to glow blue and it started walking toward them, the young men ran. It’s always a bad idea to run from an Anansi Droid 419. If these guys had been better at keeping up with world news, they probably would not have been torn limb from limb.

  The artificially intelligent Nigerian robots had travelled across the Atlantic to the land of the co-financiers of their creation. They were explorers. In their brains of wire, electricity, and metal they were probably colonizers. They were much stronger and slightly more intelligent than human beings.

  And lastly, and less important in the news feeds, scientists were reporting a new solar storm approaching. Another strong solar storm, triggered by two powerful X-class flares, was predicted to hit the earth in twenty-four hours. Power outages and disruption of digital services all over the earth were expected, though the seriousness of the activity was unknown.

  Yes, the revolution continued. It was growing hot.

  CHAPTER 20

  Empty

  Time is a tricky thing. It stretches. It compresses. It turns inside out and moves forward and backwards like the ocean’s tide. I was used to it now. Even in death. Colors. Green. Lush forest green. Then red. Always red. And there was silence. Except for the sound of breathing. Beside me. I felt my body settle.

  I shrugged death off like an old dry skin. I opened my eyes. I was in a desert. For miles around, all I saw was sand and cracked hardpan. What had I done? It was a proper question because I had definitely done this. It was my fault. I blinked. My eyes and perspective adjusted. I was in another crater.

  “Is everyone dead?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  Saeed handed me a bottle of water. He’d been sitting behind me. Waiting.

  “No,” he said. “Mainly, Big Eye met their deaths. Most everyone and everything else escaped.”

  “Good,” I said. I drank.

  “Water saved my life,” Saeed muttered.

  “Water is life,” I said.

  “Can you stand?” he asked.

  “Can you?”

  He chuckled.

  “How long has it been?” I asked.

  “A day,” he said. His smile was small. “You’re rebirthing faster. Tower 4 is empty. It is a victory.”

  “Oh!” I said. “But we should get out of here! The Big Eye . . .”

  He shook his head. “They will come, but not soon. There are worse things happening in more important places. The Big Eye will bide their time with you.”

  “Where is Mmuo? Is he . . .” In my mind, I saw him shot down. Then he fell. With the children.

  “With the children at the hotel.”

  “Is he . . .”

  “He was shot in the arm and leg with something that penetrated his flesh,” Saeed said. “But he’s ok. Those children, they helped him.”

  “What has happened that turned the Big Eye away from me?”

  And that’s when Saeed told me about the revolution. The freed speciMen organizing and targeting and acting. In turn, I told him about the Anansi Droids I’d seen swimming toward the United States, and this made things even clearer for the both of us. But something else was happening as we sat in that crater I’d created by dying and turning HeLa, Dartise’s body, and all those Big Eye and part of Tower 4 to ash. He and I would learn of it when we returned to the Sandcastle Hotel and saw it on the newsfeeds.

  In New York, the people had panicked and turned on The Backbone. A group of men and women had stormed the area, breaking down and scaling the gate and the wall. They brought chain saws, power mowers, axes, someone even drove in a bulldozer. They leveled the place, cutting down and chopping up every plant and tree. But their primary target was The Backbone.

  And that’s when Seven showed up. Seven was known in New York as a benevolent force. He was like a kinder gentler Superman. They even called him that in the papers—The Only Thing The Towers Got Right, The African Superman, New York’s Angel.

  But when he stood in front of the tree with his wings out, hysteria and fear made everyone see something else. When he raised his voice and spoke to the people about redemption, their apathy, and how they needed to look at their own role in all this, they vibrated with guilt and rage. Still, Seven stood his ground. One man ran at him with a raised chain saw and Seven knocked him aside like a bag of feathers. As the man lay unconscious, Seven spoke and pleaded again. Then they set upon him. He did not fly away.

  The slaughter was televised.

  All night, they’d chopped and sawed and hacked.

  As I watched all this, I felt something break in me. I didn’t pay it much mind at the moment, but that’s when it happened. As I watched the death of humanity on the jelli telli, the slaughter of an angel, then the chopping of a great tree, I sobbed with every part of my body. For everything.

  The Big Eye did not stop them. The journalists again flew in their aerial cameras, many went on foot interviewing people. It was all shown live around the world. Journalists described the place as reeking of something that smelled very close to blood. People sneezed. One man fell ill after chopping down a tree. Another was struck blind when another plant burst with some kind of juice when it was cut.

  Those who chopped at The Backbone reported no injuries. Not even sore and sprained muscles. When the tree fell, people in the city swore they heard it scream. It fell slowly. They showed the footage over and over. The tree that reached nearly two miles into the sky now. What were they thinking? People ran, screamed, many were crushed. The fallen tree smashed two skyscrapers, a bank and a museum. Why hadn’t any of those people considered the damage such a huge thing would inflict when it fell? This was fear. And guilt. This was people scratching at their flesh to excise a demon so deep within that it was beyond their grasp.

  Saeed and Mmuo wanted to make contact with the Ledussee. Mmuo said that he had ways. He could hack into anything. He could find anyone digitally, no matter who he or she was.

  “We join forces with them and then we’ll really be free,” Mmuo said.

  Saeed had a wild look in his eyes as he ate a bowl of sand.

  I stepped outside. The children were playing on the beach. I looked at them closely. They only had the clothes they’d been wearing when they jumped into the wate
r. White pants and white shirts. They’d thrown them aside and were frolicking in the clear blue waters, naked in the hot sun. Their skin was flawless. They had the narrower features of Ethiopians and they all had long black wooly hair that ran down their backs in tight ringlets.

  Two of the girls were sitting in the sand as one braided the other’s hair. One of them waved at me. I smiled and waved back as I walked down the beach. They could not speak. How could those people cultivate these once normal children to lose the ability to speak? Why? So that they wouldn’t complain when their organs were continuously harvested and sent to whoever could pay the highest amount? It was evil. It was exactly what I expected from the Big Eye, from human civilization that silently, attentively, ignorantly watched and benefited.

  How many Americans walked around with fresh young organs harvested or grown from the cells of these children who could regenerate what was taken from them? Bumi, the Big Eye woman from Tower 7, maybe her body was fortified in this way. Of all people, I would believe that she was. I’d watched her helicopter crash to the ground in New York after Seven had thrown it. There was no way she should have survived that kind of experience unless they got to her quickly and took her to one of the hospitals and replaced many of her crushed organs. She was certainly an asset to them; no one knew more about me than Bumi who’d cared and nurtured and done tests on me from the second day of my life.

  Behind me the strange voiceless children silently splashed in the ocean, chasing each other and diving under water. They made low guttural noises in their throats. Laughter. Was this the first time they’d ever laughed? Probably not. In the worst of times, even the most fragile, most abused human beings found reasons to laugh.

  I looked at the wet sand as I walked. The water would come in and then roll out, pulling the sand beneath my feet toward it. If you stood in the ocean, even in the shallows, it always tried to pull you back into it. It always gently but firmly sought your return. The part of us that was dust returned to the earth, and the part of us that was water returned to the water.

  “Water is life,” I muttered to myself. But if water was life, what was I?

  Seven, my teacher, could die. Seven was dead. Kofi, my second love, was dead. HeLa, my sister, was dead. I saw death all around me. I whimpered. I had to focus on life. I stood there on that quiet beach, on an island where the Big Eye should have been searching for me but were not. The people of the Virgin Islands were focused on the newsfeeds, not their own land. They were like all Americans. They could not see what was right before their eyes. They certainly didn’t see the rest of the world. This filthy world riddled with the drinkers of HeLa’s blood; these people would live forever, infecting the world to its very soul.

  I shut my eyes tightly and dropped to my knees before the ocean. I dug my fists into the sand as the water rushed over them. Kill everything. Everything should die. Let it all start from the beginning. In the right way.

  I opened my eyes and found myself looking at my hand, in which I grasped a bunch of seaweed. I held it up to my face. A tiny crab fell off it and startled, scrambled for the water. I smashed down on it with my fist just as the water rushed in again. When I lifted my fist, it was gone.

  I felt hot. I frowned. I glanced back at the hotel.

  I slipped.

  CHAPTER 21

  Locked Universe

  I told no one.

  Not even you. No one knew where I was going and when I would go. No one but me. The moment called me, and I answered it. While briefly on the cruise ship that second night, I’d used the jelli telli to research world news and the public satellite images of Tower 4. When Mmuo and Saeed stepped outside the room to speak with Andres about something, I had the one and only moment alone in that room. I used it to look up information on the jelli telli that was important only to myself. Mmuo and Saeed could never have known because they did not know the details. They had not read the documents in Tower Records. They only knew what I told them and I told them everything, except about the woman who carried me. Vera Takeisha Thomas.

  Most of her information was right there in the Tower Records in the Library of Congress. How they chose her. What they did to her. Where she was kept. I read it all, and each word was like a stone to my head. They were pain. They were harm. They were a shock. They took and took. Words are powerful when chosen well and hurled with precision. I took the pain and accepted the scars as I shelved the information behind those things I read about myself, Mmuo, Saeed, and Tower 4. But I did not forget. I never forget. I needed to assure victory and when we had it, I used the location I’d looked up on the cruise ship to go and find her.

  The Big Eye promised to pay for the carrier’s university education, take care of the lifetime financial needs of the carrier and two family members, and give the carrier her own house. The process would also strengthen the carrier’s body and give it full immunity to several common killers and cripplers like bird flu, airborne Ebola, and river blindness. She would live a long, healthy privileged life afterwards. All this for carrying an implanted “project” embryo. There was no mention of “speciMen” in the advertisement. Hundreds of women volunteered to carry me.

  After a battery of tests, they chose Vera. She was strong, healthy, had an intact womb, was the only person in her family to go to college, had a master’s degree in animal sciences, was prone to happiness, handled stress well, and the only one in the group interviewed who was willing to die to deliver the child. Oh, and she was of African descent. She was perfect. The file proudly highlighted the fact that they couldn’t have gotten a better carrier. The Big Eye didn’t want to kidnap a woman and force her to bear this devil’s seed. In the file, they actually stated that “this would not only have been illegal, but immoral and highly inhumane. We are not a cabal of assassins.” Yet duping a woman into it was just fine.

  Vera had once been happily married with three small children. She was the director at a meat-packing factory and she was also a strict vegetarian. So already, she was full of guilt. Then one day, while she and her husband went out to a romantic dinner, there was a fire at their house. All three of their children perished in the fire and only the babysitter escaped. Soon after, Vera and her husband split up. They never spoke to each other again. When Vera saw the ad on the newsfeeds, she jumped at the chance to successfully bear a child with the help of the finest medical research facilities on earth.

  The Big Eye told her nothing about the embryo beyond the fact that the child would be a “special person.” She was told that she’d have to give birth to the child on her own and that as soon as the child was born she had to be willing to hold the child. Vera said yes to all this. The file said nothing about whether or not she asked why they didn’t think she would hold the child. Nor was there any detail about her being bothered by the birthing conditions. But by then, I doubt she could have backed out even if she wanted to.

  So she gave birth to me alone. She’d been in labor three times in her life in regular hospitals surrounded by nurses, a doctor, and her husband. What must my birth have been like for her? None of this was in the file. She communicated with the Big Eye remotely and that was how she assured them that she was ok. As soon as she checked in on day two and said that the baby was suckling well, they rushed back to the hospital and took me away from her without even allowing her to kiss me goodbye. This was what made her go crazy.

  On the cruise ship, I’d researched and studied the satellite image of the Triple Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, United States. The largest jail in the world. Where you were not just a patient, you were an inmate. This is where they took and threw away the woman who carried me when she was no longer of use to them. So they never gave her her own house, but they did force her into a home: D41 D-Pod, Room Number 7.

  She was like radioactive refuse—she was waste, but needed to be disposed of carefully. Jail was perfect. She had her own room. Her locked universe was a bullet proof, sh
atter proof crystal box. Her file didn’t say why it had to be bullet-proof, either.

  I’d researched the location of the Triple Towers, found a detailed map and, of course, several news stories. Most of them were about how poorly the inmates were treated and the disproportionate number of American African inmates compared to any other ethnicity, male or female.

  According to what I read, 90 percent of the inmates, all of whom were deemed mentally ill, were American Africans. I imagined that there were Africans from other parts of the world in that remaining ten percent population. If I had told Mmuo about this place, he’d have wanted to burst it open, too. Maybe someday we would. Some stories speculated about the relationship of the Triple Towers facility to the LifeGen Technologies research towers. I wondered about all these towers, these edifices thrusting themselves into the sky, where so much evil took place. I wondered deeply.

  And so as soon as things calmed, while the strange voiceless children played, while Mmuo and Saeed were inside the Sandcastle conspiring, while I stared out at the vast ocean on that beach, I slipped.

  • • •

  I stood in Vera Takeisha Thomas’ bathroom. The coolness of the dry air was a shock to my system after being in the balmy humid heat of the open air. I shivered. The cold thick concrete walls pressed in on my wings. The air that, seconds ago had smelled of crushed flowers, smoke, and wet dirt, now reeked strongly of feces and stale water. Everything in the bathroom was made of crystal, or was it glass? The toilet, the drippy faucet, the pipes that led into the wall. Was there something about her that reacted with metal? Above the faucet, there was no mirror.