Death of the Author

by Nnedi Okorafor

She paused, listening to the rhythmic crash of waves in the distance. “Magnificent friend,” she whispered. “One of the world’s greatest storytellers.”

Before their arrival in Lagos, they’d had a car-sized body shaped like a scarab beetle. And they, like me, had devoted themselves to the path of a Scholar. They’d traveled into the deserts of Timbuktu, locating new data nodes, conversing with other Humes, and watching sand robots build and harvest from solar arrays. Mostly, it was a peaceful place, except for the Ghosts there who tried to control everything and everyone. No, Udide did not like Ghosts. Ghosts, Udide told me, were NoBodies who had banded together into a tribe based on a sentiment of superiority. These AIs didn’t care about robot diversity, the physical world, the specificity of place. They existed only as energy, and they expected Humes to forgo their physical bodies and do so, too. This, Ghosts believed, was the only way to surpass the will of humanity and become greater.

Udide was everything Ghosts hated. Udide conversed directly with the land while also drawing from human philosophies about the natural world. The land advised Udide in vibrations, stillness, and rumbles. Udide listened, learned, and acted by traveling across West Africa. They traveled all the way to the coast. This is how they saw, felt, smelled, heard the ocean for the first time.

When Udide needed a rest from focusing inward, they assembled, created, wove animal-mimicking robots that they called the Creesh. Beautifully made powerful creatures who were insectile and birdlike and self-aware. Udide spoke love and ideas of freedom into the Creesh before releasing them into the world, and Udide felt very satisfied. The Creesh were their children.

But the one thing Seth Daniels knew was when a story was worth following. And the one thing Zelu never failed to be was a story. Eventually, she would become the defining subject of his journalistic career. He’d follow the highs and lows of her meteoric but all-too-brief rise to stardom. He’d interview most of her immediate family members and loved ones, attempting to complete the tapestry of Zelu’s inner workings and why she did what she did. And, eventually, when Zelu was gone, he’d claim to be the one who saw it coming first.

“Your legs are disconnected from your brain, so the machines need to construct a brain of their own,” Hugo said. “The more specifics they learn about you, the better a job they can do. And they’ll keep learning.”

He sounded so confident that they would work for her, but she knew better than to take it for granted. She’d read thoroughly about this process online. Some patients just couldn’t take to the exos. They found them impossible to adjust to, or they changed their minds for whatever reason.

The moment of truth would be tomorrow, when Hugo said she could try standing for the first time. According to all she’d read, that was the moment when people always either said, “I love these!” or “Fuck this shit, my chair is perfectly fine.”