It was a series of moments, a cascade. Someone taking her face in their hands and lowering it and blowing softly on her forehead, and Ify realizes that she is hearing words or more than words. She is experiencing synth speech. Because she feels hands gripping her face, but they are not just Uzo’s hands, bringing to life that moment on top of the site of that abandoned detention center in Kaduna State, and not Onyii’s either, during a moment when Ify felt the humid air of their camp was suffocating her. It is both pairs of hands and neither. It is past and deeper past, reaching into her present.

Ify feels the warmth of a fire on her arm, and when she looks at it, she sees her arm turn to Onyii’s metal one absorbing the blow from a shockstick, and at the same time, she’s seeing her own arm as a child as a mutated mosquito drifts off with too much of her blood. So many moments, braided together so that it feels as though she’s experiencing everything for the first time but always has, in the back of her mind, a memory of the same.

Then she looks back up at the multiplying rings of fire, and that’s when she realizes she’s not looking at a wall. She’s looking at a floor. Floor tiles.

DNA tiles. The sentences are units of DNA. The building blocks of being. Uzo’s words-thoughts-feelings are what made her. Ify’s words-thoughts-feelings make her. Onyii’s made her. This is why Uzo always speaks in the present tense. Everything she experienced is still happening to her, ossified into the present tense in her memories. Happened becomes happens and remains is happening.

In the dream, Ify grows suddenly like a giant, and the three-dimensional column of memory-units, interlocking rings of black fire, sits in the cup of her two hands, and for some reason, Ify thinks of a gosling, small and furry and poking its head out from the fold of skin by her thumb to gaze into her face, the very first thing it sees after being born. A feeling of wonder and love and gratitude thrills through her as she looks at this structure growing in her hands. This is Uzo’s memory of the gosling. The gosling was a thing that happened to her, Ify realizes, a burst of understanding twinned with an explosion of love in her heart.

This is it. This is the coding. This is what is living inside Uzo’s braincase.