The robot is pulling back the cord from my arm. And putting bandage on it, and I am remembering wearing soiled bandage when I am being child of war, but this bandage is like the color of my skin and smelling like hospital. I am trusting the robot will not hurt me.

Buzz buzz is sounding all around me. It is the robots plugging their cords into some of the dead bodies on the ground. Some of the bodies are having hole made of machete metal at back of their necks, and the robots are putting their cords into these holes and standing still, and light is pulsing like river from bodies to the robots, and I am asking the robot who is feeding me what they are doing, and the robot is telling me they are remembering. But when it is saying remembering it is also saying downloading the digital information stored in the braincases of the dead and restoring the sensory data that has not been damaged beyond repair; we are collecting all of the data encapsulating their memories from their earliest moments until the time of their death. And, at the same time as it is saying these other thing, it is also saying, We are gathering their names.

“What is my name?” I am asking the robot, even though I am not moving my lip.

Uzo, it is telling me.

“What is your name?”

Enyemaka, it is telling me, then it is making me to be looking at all the other robot that is hunching over body and gathering names. We are all Enyemaka.

CHAPTER

5

It is always quiet in the residential cul-de-sac in which Amy and Paige live. Automated bots sweep over carefully manicured front lawns. Flaxen-haired young kids have their bot move a magnetic ramp back and forth so they can practice flips with their hoverboards, not caring about the havoc the ramp’s magnetism is wreaking on the bot’s insides. Some of the two-story houses have balconies facing their backyards, and some of them have pools in the front. Some people hang birdboxes in their verandas facing the street, while wind chimes sing on the front porches of others. Some would look at this and see paradise, but, as more time passes, Ify tries to find less and less reason to come here. The automated cleaners, the birdsong she can hear from somewhere overhead—it’s all fake. Even the bees or flies or whatever monster insect was concocted in a lab to mimic the summertime hum. Ify sets a small charge in the gold rings on her braids to emit a constant, near-silent buzz that zaps the insects when they get near enough to her, short-circuiting them and leaving them twitching on the ground. By the time she reaches Amy and Paige’s front porch, a ribbon of dead bees trails behind her.