Death of the Author

by Nnedi Okorafor

My name is Chinyere. I’m the oldest. That’s a year older than Zelu, though growing up, most assumed she was a lot younger. I’m a cardiovascular surgeon. The chief of surgery at Advent Hospital. I’ve lived in Chicago all my life and I love it here. I’m married to a wonderful man named Arinze. He’s Igbo, like me, though both of his parents are Igbo, whereas only one of mine is. What’s interesting is that he was born in Chad. Long story. We have two sons.

I’m a surgeon, and suddenly I had all these months where I was staying home. My son wasn’t sleeping; I wasn’t sleeping. My husband was always escaping to work. I wasn’t upset with him, though; I’d have done the same if I’d had the chance. Being a woman is tough. Especially one who is a mother. We’re not all cut out for domesticity, even when we love our children.

I just got tired of him by the next morning.” “And you told him so.” “Yeah,” she said. “It’s funny. Guys like that are so entitled. But even more so when you can’t walk. They think you should be soooo grateful.” She giggled again, even harder.

“Zelu,

The reader decides what it’s about, right? Isn’t that what you said ‘death of the author’ meant?” Then he’d smiled a very annoying and smug smile.

Nigerians never knew how to deal with abnormalities, and Zelu had plenty of those. She was a thirty-two-year-old paraplegic woman with an MFA in creative writing. Her father was a retired engineer and her mother a retired nurse, and her siblings were a surgeon, a soon-to-be neurologist, an engineer, a lawyer, and a med school student. But not much had ever been expected of her. This was mainly due to her disability.

She wrote about those who weren’t human. She wrote a world that she’d like to play in when things got to be too much, but which didn’t exist yet. She wrote something else, something new. She wrote about rusted robots.

We Humes had a profound love of storytelling. But no automation, AI or machine, could create stories. Not truly. We could pull from existing datasets, detect patterns, then copy and paste them in a new order, and sometimes that seemed like creation. But this couldn’t capture the narrative magic that humanity could wield.

Stories were the greatest currency to us, greater than power, greater than control. Stories were our food, nourishment, enrichment. To consume a story was to add to our code, deepen our minds. We felt it the moment we took it in. We were changed. It was like falling. It was how we evolved.

But the one thing no robot could do was truly create stories. That was the ability Zelu withheld from them.

Stories contain our existence; they are like gods. And the fact that we create them from living, experiencing, listening, thinking, feeling, giving—they remind me of what’s great about being alive.

The sun was almost gone, but some orange rays were still shining into the water, and one of those rays caught the dolphin’s eye at just the right moment. I’ll never forget those eyes. They were large and black, with subtle wrinkles around them. Eyes full of wisdom and cunning. The moment was brief, but it was all I needed to understand that I was in that water with People.

The rusted robots in the story were a metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunctions, needed replacements, mistakes. What you were given. The finite. Rusted robots did not die in the way that humans did, but they celebrated mortality. Oh, she loved this story and how true it felt.

“An AI named Ijele,” she answered. “I’ve uploaded her into your network.” I froze, her words sinking in at the same time I felt it. There was something else living within me—not inside my physical “skin,” but in my network, my very mind! Losing my rusted body had been one thing. These new legs and bolts weren’t my own, but I still knew that I was myself. But this—an AI crawling inside my mind, opening my files, seizing control of my systems—was too much to bear.

I only sat there. I couldn’t run away from my own body, and trapped in it was a Ghost. “I’m infected,” I said. “And I’m surrounded by infection,” Ijele responded. Ngozi kissed her teeth. “For all your talk about being automation, you both sound like humans to me. Annoying ones.”

Her arms grew stronger. She mastered using a wheelchair, and when it came time to buy her own, her parents could fortunately afford a lightweight, expensive one. It was her favorite color—aqua blue—and she stuck colorful stickers all over it with images of the ocean, fish, Aquaman, Conan the Destroyer, Moomin, butterflies, and Godzilla.

“Write what you want, woman. Walk how you want. Love who you love. Speak your truth. Be good and roll with life. You can’t have or control everything or everyone.”

Zelu frowned, frustrated. If there was one person who knew what it was to be put in a box, it was her.

“Mom, you and Dad taught us all about how to face our fears, remember? You both came to this country with nothing but your sharp minds. You left your families, your cultures, all that you knew, to come to this complex place with its nasty history, maze of trials, and spectacular opportunities. So you could stretch. How are you going to be afraid of a piece of technology your child has been using reliably with no problems for years? Come on, Mom. Let’s go downtown and get your hair done. You deserve it!”

The day of the anniversary, Zelu was alone. Even Msizi was away, in Durban on important business. She felt excluded. She was always excluded somehow, be it because she couldn’t walk or because she was too famous or whatever. Zelu couldn’t help but wonder if her mother also didn’t want people seeing her “robot legs.” She could imagine relatives speculating that her being part robot was the curse of her fame.

“We Humes cannot achieve anything further on this Earth while Ghosts still prowl the network, plotting our demise,” Oga Chukwu told me. “Help us win this war, Ankara, and then we will defend this planet from the Trippers.”

Nigerians have a way of viewing people with disabilities of any kind as cursed, like someone did that to them because they’d been bad or someone wanted to do bad to them. Many fear the bad luck will rub off on them. You’ll never be viewed as sexy or desirable in Nigeria if your legs don’t work.

He stood where he was, looking sharply at her exos with a curled lip. He motioned to them. “They are unnatural.” “Would you rather I sit in a wheelchair?” Zelu asked. “Yes.” “Well, thankfully, it’s not about you, Uncle,” Zelu said.

There was no denying the protocol. The Ghosts had struck unprovoked. Not for the first time, I thought of that moment when Ghosts in robot bodies of various shapes and sizes came up behind me and started beating and tearing at me. How they’d used those bodies to drag me through the dirt and then crush my legs. My body was my body. To escape into the network as just my mind, an AI, would have driven me mad within hours. And then what? This is what the Ghosts had done to 87 percent of Humes. With their bodies dismantled, Ghosts had more than likely collected and enslaved their consciousness, using them for whatever purpose they needed.

This entire trip hadn’t been what she’d hoped for, but really, what had she expected? She would never have been treated like a typical “daughter of the soil,” even if she hadn’t had her accident. Now, whenever anyone saw her, they saw her exos first, and if they could get past those, when she opened her mouth, she only spewed “foreigner.”

It was warm and sunny and windy in the windy city. It was an event Zelu would remember forever, but not because it was a big, expensive affair that lasted all day. It actually took only a half hour for the ceremony and some photos, then they spent an hour giddily looking around the planetarium (not her first time there at all), and that was that. She’d remember it because, for the first time in her life, she’d done something she didn’t want to do because she loved the person who wanted to do it and it felt 100 percent right.

Death of the Author. My novel’s title carried Ngozi’s spirit, too. She was the one who started all this, by saving me and bringing Ijele into my world. Ngozi changed us. And then she died. She was the end of humanity. But she was also the beginning of something new. In order to write the second half of the novel, I shut down what I could only describe as the forefront of my processing and let the other parts that were usually quieter come forward. The result was unnerving, but also fascinating. And the voice in my head? I couldn’t tell where it came from. It was almost like Ijele’s presence, but this time it wasn’t a NoBody speaking. I was listening to myself.

And this voice brought forth my beloved main character, Zelu.

They couldn’t believe that automation had created a story. At their core, NoBodies desired to transcend humanity, and this novel both satisfied and pushed back on the foundational idea of that goal. This was proof that automation was evolving. For the first time, NoBodies were talking about humanity outside of the paradigm of hatred.

I’ve acquired a unique skill; dare I call it an art? I’ve proven to myself something that humanity could never bring itself to believe. Writing my novel taught this to me, as well: creation flows both ways.