“It’s possible that . . .” Ify fights her way to the words. “It’s possible that the memory erasure Xifeng spoke about—the programming the Nigerian government instituted after the war—infected some of the synths somehow. And it’s spreading among the cyberized children. Right now, it’s probably attacking the very machines treating the human children as well. Soon all the children, even the ones in a coma, will lose their memories.” It sounds so much more dire now that Ify has said the words aloud. When Ify looks to Grace, she doesn’t see fear of the impending apocalypse on her face. She sees evidence of a mind furiously at work. “Grace?”

“I’ve heard of synths. I knew they existed. I’d never seen one in person.”

Ify stops herself from calling them abominations.

“How do they happen?”

“Putting the body together is the easy part.”

“But they’re not just droids. They’re . . .”

“They possess memories. The memories of others. Humans exist as a hierarchy of forces operating in a continuum of feedback and feedforward streams. Habits, our ability to communicate, et cetera, all existing in the larger life environment. How we see and feel a tree, for instance. The mind hacks the meat, and the meat hacks the mind. Put enough life signals together, superimpose those forces on top of each other, then you get a neural stew out of which rises consciousness. Memories carry our experience of the world. Download enough memories into a meat package and sentience happens. Touch the air for but a second and face a level of complexity sufficient simply to become.”

Grace brings her mug of Ovaltine to her lips. It must be cold by now, but her face doesn’t show her registering that fact. “How do they know who they are?”

It’s not the question Ify expects. She stammers for a response.

“Uzoamaka contained memories of your . . . your sister. And others, presumably. Yet she claimed another identity. She was a separate person from her memories. How did she know which memories were Onyii’s and which were the ones she developed after her . . . after her creation?” It’s like Grace steamrolls over those strange and painful realizations—that Ify had a sister who fought in the war, that beings were created out of the flesh and neural data of others for no other purpose than war—to get to the end of her questions. Admiration thrums through Ify. “Are they capable of organizing their neural data? By force of will?”

Ify starts. “They shouldn’t be able to. They’re not programmed to do that. That’s like a computing device’s self-replicating algorithm deciding to change on its own.”

“But if the computing device is based on DNA . . .”

“Then it can change.”

Grace’s words speed up. “If the government’s memory-erasure coding affects all cyberized brains, Uzoamaka shouldn’t have any memories of Onyii. Yet they’re all intact.”