When he is turning to face me, he is limping because I am seeing that one leg is standing badly. He is not showing pain on his face, but he is moving slowly and I am seeing that this is making him to be angering. Is not good for child of war to be moving slowly. That is how child of war is getting bullet or getting chopped.

I think I am expecting Uzodinma to be sadding, but his eye is not sadding. We were created. We were never born.

“What color is this remembering?” I am asking him. I do not know why it is important for me to be using my red-blood voice, but I am wanting him to hear me like we are both being red-blood. “Is it blue? Red?” Maybe if he is having rememberings like I am having rememberings, he is knowing that some of them is belonging to someone else.

You are wanting to tell me that you are having mother once and she is loving you. He does not sound like my friend when he is saying this. He is sounding like someone who is not caring if I am being happy or sad. But I watch you fumble through your mind, trying to hold the right rememberings in your hands. They are still a mess in your head, no matter how you are sorting them. Scattered like pieces of metal on the shoreline beneath a bridge. You are looking for a woman and calling her Mother and seeing woman after woman after woman, but none of them have a face like yours. None of the women in your rememberings have done for you what you expect mothers to do. Because we never had mothers.

When he is saying we never had mothers, he is also saying we are never having mothers.

But it is a lie, because when I am waking up from nightmare-remembering, Xifeng is holding me and talking to me softly and with love. And she is waiting for me in the other room. And I am calling her Mother.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

In the mech, on the way home, Xifeng looks out the window. And I sit across from her. The other synths downloaded the memories from the external hard drives at the facility, the ones the government and the Chinese were preparing to eliminate upon completion of the mass cyberization, but Xifeng says that I don’t have to. I think she is worried about me.

“What am I?” I ask her.

When she is looking at me, there is many thing in her eye and I am not wanting to sit in her silence, so I talk some more.