Noor(3)

Anyway, as I said, most of the men and women in this market knew me. This was how I’d learned to live over the years. When you are someone like me, one who is always fighting for herself, against oppression, hate, misunderstanding, fear, you move about the world with care. You seek out those places where people will accept you and you nest there.

Why would I want to force my way into a place that hates me? I don’t have time or energy for that. When I moved here with Olaniyi, I tasted the environment. Once I decided it was okay, I gradually let myself come to know this part of Abuja and it came to know me. In this market, for over two years, I’d fixed their cars, repaired their phones, brought people relief, made people happy. I thought they understood me. As I thought Olaniyi had. Foolish.

I had a basket and a synth-fiber bag with me. I bought semi-ripe plantain from a man who’d just carried in and set down a bunch in his booth. He was happy to sell to me. He’d laughed after we negotiated the price, saying that I was both fair and a cheat. “I am impressed,” he said. “And I’m glad there is only one like you.” He had his mobile phone stuck to one of those charge belts and it was showing the days’ news. I remember what was on because the man’s phone was the size of a book, the volume was high enough for everyone in the cluster of stalls to hear, and the anchorwoman had those thick and braided eyebrows that only people in front of cameras had the nerve to have.

“It was a nightmare here yesterday as four Fulani herdsmen armed to the teeth stormed this small Nigerian village on the edge of the Sahel Desert, pillaging and raping as they went,” the anchorwoman said, her braided eyebrows raised dramatically. “For decades, these herdsmen have terrorized peaceful farmers trying to live their lives . . .” Then the man was handing me my bag of plantain. He’d looked me over, chuckled and shook his head. “You’re so pretty, but you’re too tall.”

I rolled my eyes and shrugged. “Can’t be everything,” I said, turning away. I lengthened my cybernetic legs, making myself a little taller as I walked away. My ex hated when I did that. The plantain seller thought I was out of earshot, but I heard him add, “See this demon disguised as a woman. May Allah help us all.” Some of the men around him laughed. It wasn’t the bad kind of laughter. I knew what the bad kind of laughter sounded like. So I merely rolled my eyes. He’d had one of those blue Imam Shafi Abdulazeez event flyers tacked to the booth wall behind him; they had the image of the imam pointing a finger dramatically upward as he spoke and at the bottom a circle and slash over a drawing of a generic robot. The event had happened yesterday. I shrugged it off. People would calm down in a few days, and there were other places in the market I could buy fine plantain.

It was when I was looking at the peppers. I remember because I smelled it. Sniffed it in the air. I’d sniffed and sniffed. I was looking at habanero peppers, yet I was sensing a different type of pepper over the habaneros. Something in the air was hot and charged; something was burning. I assumed it was my neural implants acting up again.

I groaned, wrinkling my nose, muttering, “Make it stop.” Nothing new, though. When you made changes there were always small unexpected results along with the larger expected ones.

I’d been building on myself for years. Why shouldn’t I? I’ve been doing it ever since I was legally old enough to make those choices. My latest augmentations were the neural implants I’d gotten six months ago. I was still getting used to them. Olaniyi hated them; he believed “enough was enough,” but who was he to decide?

I’d had memory issues since I was fourteen, because of the car accident. That’s nearly half my life. Long before I was a thought in Olaniyi’s uncomplicated mind. My memory issues got progressively weirder as I grew older. I started seeing things happening backwards. It was horrible and jarring. Imagine trying to cross a street and just before you make a run for it, you see all the cars and trucks driving backwards exactly as they would in real chronological time. It was like being psychic backwards.

I forget what the doctors called it; there was a scientific name. They said it was attributed to feedback from artificial neural connections in my arm mingling with the natural ones in my brain and the cellular and digital connections all around me. They are still studying the phenomenon. The moments wouldn’t be long, but when they happened, I always wanted to grab my head and start screaming. I refused drugs (drugs tend to cause new problems worse than the ones they fix) and no amount of therapy worked to stop it.

So I tolerated it. For years. Then when they reviewed my files and contacted me last year with the opportunity to get implants that boosted memory, increased my brain’s mental ability, and would stop my problem, I immediately said “yes.” The icing on the cake was that now I’d always be online, so there’d be no issues with upgrades, updates, or my cybernetic organs staying in sync with each other and my nervous system. My doctors also offered a much stronger connection for all this. I ok-ed it all. Olaniyi said he was fine with whatever I chose to do, but he also began to pick fights with me.

The implants made me better. Except that after I healed, the implants brought these vicious headaches and sometimes I smelled things. I’d been enduring them as the price I paid for normalcy. Since they didn’t hurt anyone else and only hurt me a little, I just accepted them as part of my new being. No implant or augmentation was ever free of aches, pains, or strangeness; these were a small price to pay for the ability to move about the world on my own terms. And they were better than having to take a drug to treat problems caused by a treatment. Of course, Olaniyi wasn’t interested in hearing any of this.