Where Trees Don’t Die

There’s no such thing as a free lunch…

                                        -Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Nala was dead. She really was, lying there all still on the low temperfoam, bloodsoaked, her mouth slightly agape, eyes staring into nothing. Nala was dead, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Kofi turned to the baby in the cot. Exhausted, he simply let the scalpel slip between his fingers. He went to the cot and picked up the child. It was not crying, which was abnormal, so he pinched it so it would. The child cried, at least in the strictest sense of the word. No sound came out of its mouth but it cried. No sound but a wheezing, little veins bobbing against the leathery skin of an oversized head, threatening to burst every time it tried and failed to scream.

Brotherly, your wife’s going to die, the physician on 21 Pa Joe Street had said, two months into Nala’s pregnancy. Cancer’s metastasized means you’ve got to be ready for an on-the-spot C-section. And bro, I can even upload a surgical role play into your console for just five bitons.

Kofi shut away the painful memory. He had done his best, performing the emergency C-section three months on, with as much expertise as the cheap console drilled directly into his temple could afford him. And though Nala had screamed her consent at him when he kept asking if it was ok, Kofi knew she would not make it through the process. How could she? The gods will call me home today, Kofi, she’d told him earlier this morning, looking like a corpse and vomiting blood, I just know it. Kofi, you have to save him. He’ll die if you don’t. His wife had looked as malnourished as he was. Worse, even, with all those cancer cells flourishing off her lifeblood.

Presently, the baby squirmed in Kofi’s arms, crying out through a premature trachea. Kofi blew cool air on its reddening face like his own mother would, and put it back in the cot. He cleaned the blood from the floor with a mop and a bucket of water. When Zuri tried to help him he sent her to the corner and told her to put herself to sleep. He wrapped the soaked sheets around Nala and heaved her delicate frame into the night. Outside, Kofi put her down carefully, then he set to digging. He dug for hours, determined to bury her as deep, and therefore as safe, as possible. Kofi lived at the outskirts of the Mesh, a few miles away from the South Wall and a few more from the radioactive dunes beyond àfonìfojí òkú, a popular burial site for those who did not want their graves defiled and their organs stolen for the black markets; those who preferred the peace of absolute death. But Kofi dug.

He would not make Nala suffer the indignity of being flung into a ditch of rotten corpses, her beautiful black skin melting away and/or feeding the demonic hyenas that prowl the brown wastes south of the Mesh. And so he buried Nala there, down in the deep, dark hole, the stars she’d always loved wheeling indifferently above her. When he had finished, Kofi could barely stand. His eyes would not focus and his head was spinning. Was that his father scowling at him from behind that rusted groundcar? No, his father was long dead, the bastard. Everyone was long dead. When he tried to take a closer look Kofi’s legs gave out under him and he crumpled in a heap over his wife’s grave, surrendering to the darkness that suddenly enveloped him.

Kofi slept on the grave and woke up to a night that did not want to end. The stars were really out now, clustering magnificently in the inky sky. Kofi struggled to his feet feeling bruised, his grief settling acidly between his joints. He tried to say an Ife prayer his mother had taught him, but laughed himself hoarse until he dropped to his knees again, crying and bloodying his fist in anguish against the unfeeling earth. Nala had loved her silly fantasies — life after death and salvation and gods. She had always picked her own reality, Kofi thought, stroking the grave. She’d done it the very day they met: him a rowdy skinhead cutting purses for the next virtual fix; she a hollow-eyed cancergirl living on borrowed time, choosing to love him away from his own self destruction.

There was only one God in this new, painfully real world, Kofi decided. Only one that could offer salvation from pain, suffering and death, and its name was The Collective. Kofi had always known it, but to deny it any longer would be to deny what was right in front of your nose. Nala had called on her gods all her life and none had been able to save her. He would call on a real God. He would find his way into New World and seek The Collective. He would leave the Mesh and its broken homes and broken people. Kofi was done being a Low-ender, penniless and disease-ravished, just another almajiri, some dreg of society. This time, Kofi would choose his own reality. Kofi picked himself up with a surge of energy. He threw his shovel on the grave, along with a good luck charm Nala had woven for him ages ago, and went back inside.

Zuri was hunched over in the corner. Power was fickle in the Mesh, so she’d plugged herself in before sleeping. Kofi noted how willful the android was, almost never keeping strictly to instruction. He woke her up, his mood dark and resolute.

“Tell me about The Collective,” he said to Zuri.

Zuri looked at him, cocking her bald head to one side. “Might I ask why, sir?”

“You may not,” Kofi said pointedly.

“Of course, sir.” Zuri smiled, locking her fingers.

“Now, tell me about The Collective,” Kofi said again.

“Gladly, sir. A hundred and fifty years ago,” Zuri said, “just before the nuclear holocaust, of course, scientists at the—”

“Stop that. Keep all data relevant to New World immigration,” Kofi said, impatient.

“The Collective makes High-enders,” Zuri stated primly, her voice dripping with irritation at being interrupted.

“How does The Collective make High enders?” Kofi asked, making a mental note of getting rid of the android.

“The human brain and consciousness is copied into— and replaced, of course—by a biomechanical orb roughly the size of a chicken’s egg.”

“Are you being funny?”

“Not at all, sir,” Zuri answered in falsetto.

“What does the orb do?” Kofi asked.

“A great many things. Within a few hours of installation, for example, the regenerative power of every cell in the human body is exponentially increased.”

“How much money are we talking about?” Kofi said, bracing himself.

“Not a penny, sir.”

“Not a penny,” Kofi repeated, incredulous.

Zuri smiled from ear to ear. “The process is part of a new outreach by The Collective, sir,” she said, “not unlike the AAG giveaway where you acquired me.”

“There must be a catch,” Kofi argued.

“Two, in fact.”

“Oh, just two?”

“To be sure, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Firstly, The Collective is looking to come out of its rather political approach to consolidating the human race,” Zuri explained. “In the fifteen years since it opened its simulation clouds to the Mesh, only five hundred and twenty-seven Low-enders were seduced into immigration, actually leaving the Mesh for the New World. On the other hand, at least ten times that number died from surfing addiction—a death toll that greatly reinvigorated anti-Collective sentiments within the Mesh.”

“You’re saying immortality is much more conclusive,” Kofi said.

“Just so,” Zuri concurred, not hiding the surprise from her voice. “The success rate of The Collective’s new symbiosis programme, I might add, has been tremendous. Over twenty percent of the Mesh’s population—mostly youth like yourself, of course—has undergone the procedure in the past year alone.”

Kofi did not find this very hard to believe; the Mesh was the last refuge for the staunchest old world believers, but every new generation seemed to believe just a little less. The numbers, however… “I think I would’ve noticed if a fifth of the Mesh became turncloak humanoids overnight, Zuri,” Kofi said.

“On the contrary, sir, you wouldn’t. The procedure is off-Mesh, you see, all the way in New World. And few, if any at all, ever come back.”

Kofi was quiet for a moment. He could hear the child wheezing across the room, no doubt crying for its mother. It terrified him that he felt nothing for it. It was as though all love had been drained from him, down through the shovel and the packed earth, into the deep, dark hole.

“I guess they wouldn’t come back,” Kofi said, crossing the room to the child. Watching it cry, a memory forced itself to the surface of his console’s wave-cloud, the images poorly rendered behind his eyelids. It had been ages ago and a group of tall, brave Alarinkiri had just returned home from one of their raids on the outskirts of New World. They had brought with them a dozen varieties of young trees, most of them green as sin. The trees had caused a big ruckus, every child in the Mesh wrestling for a chance to water a moringa, an acacia, or some alien-looker called baobab. The joy had lasted for about a fortnight, until the poisoned soil of the Mesh strangled every last sapling. Kofi had cried for days. The Mesh was a black hole that swallowed everything good, Kofi would later understand. It was boys and girls wasting away on Virtual Couches in the neon niches of Silicon Alley, shitfaced and half-dead, couch electrodes jacked into sockets in the back of their skeleton necks as they surfed simulations of New World, ghosting across green cities where trees don’t die.

“Shall I continue, sir?” Zuri said, her voice like some distant ghoul’s.

Kofi answered by thumbing a button on his console. Zuri was instantaneously immobilised, her pupils disappearing. “I’m sorry, old girl,” he said, knowing he was killing two birds with one stone. “The baby won’t last two days outside a cryopod, and you’ll be worth more on the black market with a clean ROM.”

“Reasonable enough, sir,” Zuri said gracefully, and Kofi could not help but feel slightly ashamed. “But might I have a moment before the reset, sir. Just to remind you that there were two catches to The Collective’s program. The second, it turns out, one might even term ‘costly’.”

“Good grief! You said there was no cost!”

“There is no cost,” she reiterated. “Not monetarily, of course.”

“Then it doesn’t matter,” Kofi said. “I’ll do anything to leave the Mesh.”

“Of course, sir,” Zuri agreed.

A steady deluge had started both outside and inside the house. Dozens of holes in the asbestos leaked acid rain, the soft blop blop of water collecting in buckets creating a rather soothing ambiance. In the dreamy quiet, Kofi watched the android watching him. He marveled at the hypocrisy of the Mesh, wondering if these things were really the only good man ever did to the earth, and by extension, himself. We tried to kill the earth, Kofi thought. They’re trying to heal her.

Kofi pressed the same button as before, running on fumes. “Tell me what it will cost,” he said, sitting on the temperfoam, hands draped over his knees.

Zuri blinked her pupils back into existence.

“That’s right, sir,” she said, sitting right next to him. “You’ll want to sit down.”

~~~

Kofi stood before a behemoth of art.

In the final moments between the setting of the sun and the Hour of Commitment, he looked upon this human depiction of The Collective, the artificial mind that controlled every aspect of human life here in New World. The statue stood against the full height of Mount Kilimanjaro (well, three-quarters height, really; the mountaintop had been hit during the Holocaust, ten tons of hurtling uranium crashing into immovable stone). The statue itself was made of sparkly white stone, complete with a flowing robe that shadowed monasteries geo-anchored to the mountainside. The cluster of red clouds that danced around its head might have been playful little angels as they constantly crowned its head in glory. It was difficult to tell if the statue was a man or a woman but Kofi thought its face was benign, and its hands were outstretched, offering its sacred orb to all of mankind.

Somewhere out of the way, under the twilight-gilded leaves of a young podocarpus, one of many that guarded the “pedestrian only” boulevard leading into Main, Kofi and ninety-eight other Low-enders waited. The hour drew ever closer as the last rays of sunlight faded away from the sky, which Kofi saw was teeming with a dizzying number of floatcars, supersonic vehicles that darted back and forth the bubbling techno-green cities on either side of the mountain. All that light made him think of Nala: how there was not a star to be seen. Kofi mostly kept to himself, unable to partake in the reverent discussions of Scripture swirling all around him. Even among his kind Kofi was evidently alien, the Mod-1 Analytic of his cheap console unable to accurately render the common code of Scripture. The quiet tech-man at the outer perimeter had simply dumped the New World bible into their wave clouds, no doubt unable to comprehend just how cheap Kofi’s console really was, even when he stayed back to explain. But none of it mattered anyhow, Kofi figured. The group were all coming back out of Main soon enough—equal and renewed.

When the sun had finally tucked itself away for the night, the field-gates of Main powered down, its towering neon pylons taking on a blue hue. Soft-spoken High-enders poured out of the gate; casual pilgrims whose ornate cloaks and immaculate skin made Kofi and his group look like a mob of lepers.

Kofi swallowed, his heart beginning to race. Beads of sweat coated his forehead and his mouth tasted like he’d chewed a battery. But what was he about to do that millions and millions haven’t done before? Even Moremi from his mother’s old stories had been willing, and her God had not even been real. At least not real like The Collective; or the floatform pod hovering in front of him; or the anti-gravity well that suspended the floatform. Moremi’s God was certainly not as real as the child sleeping at several negative degrees within the floatform. To heal the Earth is to give it life, Kofi quoted from the Scripture, steadying his heart and his mind. It was now or never.

Over quiet, invisible speakers, an automated voice announced that Mesh immigrants may now enter. Kofi hurried the floatform forward, and head held high, trailed the straight procession into Main.

~~~

Main was the monastery deep at the heart of Kilimanjaro. Amongst the group it was rumoured to be the home of The Collective’s mainframe, but it was the intricate network of glass and stone, the vast rooms and changing murals that were really the eye openers. Kofi and the group enjoyed a supper ruined by that tangy taste in Kofi’s mouth, then a prophet received them under the echoing dome of the inner hall. The prophet’s voice was nonchalant and high-pitched, like every other High-ender he’d encountered in New World, and once again, Kofi noted uneasily, it would take a close examination to make out whether the prophet was a man or a woman. The prophet’s opening address was a blend of Scripture and the even less decipherable moan-pulse of High Code. How grand it must be to speak in a God’s own code, Kofi thought, switching on his Analytic. If he could speak the Code of Nala’s beloved gods, he imagined, what would he have said to them? Perhaps he would have said something poetic like, Bring back the woman who watched over your stars, oh wise and merciful gods. Or perhaps Kofi would have pointed at the gods and laughed, showing them what a real God could do. Perhaps he would have bid them watch as he defeated death itself, rising from the plebian religion that generations of his family had stubbornly endured. Perhaps for once, Kofi thought, I would have had the last laugh.

“Beautiful blue heaven has undertaken an arduous but close-to-complete revival,” Kofi’s console spat into his ear. Kofi struck the device uselessly, but the prophet’s address remained mostly jargon on his Analytic.

“One hundred years of no-grief,” the prophet continued airily. “Does the world of new man not owe gestalt condition to the orb and giver? Do all peoples not owe approximate worship to The Collective?”

Kofi flinched at the word worship, but quickly consoled himself with the fact that in a few hours he would begin a life where any worship The Collective needed would all be worth it. He would make a life here, a good life in a quieter part of this paradise. He would erase all memory of the child, another mercy offered by The Collective’s orb. He would leave a full life, for Nala and for himself, planting trees and watching over his wife’s stars.

“To heal the earth is to give it life,” the prophet called at the end, their arms spread wide open like the God outside.

“And all life is bound for the beyond,” Kofi chorused with the group. While he looked around for where the prophet had suddenly disappeared to, the others thumbed buttons on their consoles, floatforms of different sizes and shapes positioning themselves in front of each individual. Through the glass exterior of the floatforms, Kofi saw a thing that left him cold. Neat rows of men, women and children lay helpless within the devices, frozen below zero. The sight suddenly put everything into perspective for Kofi: he was performing a ritual, a sacrifice straight out of the old Yoruba myths. Some of the frozen people were Low-enders he’d seen in the Mesh. One Virtual Runner from Obi Alley stood over the unconscious form of her aunt, a vaguely determined look on his face. Kofi sensed his resolve immediately deflating like a balloon. He quickly thumbed his console but nothing happened. Panicking, he struck his temple savagely and thumbed the thing again. The floatform pod opened with a loud hiss. He’d thumbed the wrong fucking button!

The child thawed quickly beside him, puking synthetic supplements. It squirmed within the opened crib, no doubt sensing its fate. Kofi knew it wanted to cry, to scream for help, but could not. It wheezed without pause, hard and fast, its small, skinny body floating in some defroze liquid. In that moment Kofi thought it totally mad that anyone, let alone a fifth of the Mesh’s population, could ever go through something this inhuman. He looked into the jaundiced eyes of his child—his boy! —and saw the pain that racked its tiny body. More than anything, Kofi wanted to take that pain away. To take his child from this place and somehow, against all odds, correct its premature organs. But when it came to it, Kofi could not move. Something terrible and rational took hold of him, constraining every muscle in his body. It snaked itself around his heart, and in his father’s voice spoke to his reason, saying: Ɛbɛyɛ deƐn? What difference would it make? Zuri and the house were already on iTrade, sold to buy the cryopod that’s kept the child alive this long. But even if by some miracle he found just enough money and some sober Mesh physician to treat the child, what then? How would it grow up? In poverty like its father? And his father? And his father before? Would the rough hands of Kofi’s world mold his son in Kofi’s own image? Would they see each other as Kofi and his father had seen one another? Two mirrors, infinitely reflecting each other’s misery?

The questions swelled within Kofi’s mind and he wished there was a killswitch button on his console. He was in a dream, he told himself instead, just another simulation, another fix. He was in a dream and all he could do was watch as full-metal Angels descended over the pilgrims. Tall and solemn, the angels moved among them with a certain mechanical grace. One unfurled its great chrome wings as it approached Kofi, picking the child delicately from the floatform and into its arms. It dropped a canister to the floor, as did its brothers in a cacophony of metallic noise, then they flapped their huge wings, going up and up and up, far away somewhere beyond the holographic dome with the floatforms close behind. It was all a dream, Kofi insisted, even as the canisters decompressed and hissed something vile, and when he woke up from this dream—this nightmare—he would be more than his pain. He would be more than human.

He collapsed.

~~~

Life has never been more than a constant change on a subatomic level. Man and machine are separate only in the machine’s capacity for inhibiting destructive change. There is no concrete line. Kofi was not changing, even as he trashed and convulsed on the cold metal table.

Hold him down! He’ll disconnect the cords!

He was only becoming what he always was: Data flux. No past. No future. Only an instantaneous present that spread nuclear across a roaring path: some neural highway leading him into a never-ending grid of consciousness.

They’re more animal than sentient if you ask me. Undeserving of the Eden we’re sending them to.

His mind grew but his will shrunk, absorbed by the greater, infinite, whole. He could see his father and his mother in the grid, Nala too, holding their child. He could see a million souls, every one of them waiting to welcome him home. Reality had been a dream, Kofi thought; a place overrun by a better race. This was where he always belonged. He was home, so he smiled. And for the first time in Kofi’s life, the world smiled right back at him.

“Animals, yes. A fine assessment, Zuri.”

“Hah! To believe we would ever share New World with them!”

“Mankind had its time. Hey don’t mess around with that thing!”

“Hah! Why not? He won’t be needing it anymore. Odd-looking thing, don’t you think, Zuri?”

“You’re the expert. Well, Zuri, we’re done here. I’ll go put the orb with the others. You can burn the body.”