Future Tense Fiction Read online

  “I’m dead,” Anwuli muttered, using all the effort she could muster to get up. She threw her legs off the couch, planting them on the floor. Ignoring the blood soaking her bottom through the drenched towels, she pressed her fists to the cushions on both sides of her. Then she lifted herself up. The pain was far less than she expected, and she froze for a moment, glad to be on her feet.

  “Standing,” she whispered, her nose now completely stuffed and her eyes still watering. She sniffed wetly. Her insides felt as if they would plop out between her legs onto the blood-spattered carpet. But they didn’t. She touched her deflated belly. Then she sneezed so hard that she sat back down. In the kitchen, her baby was crying as the drone put her in a tub of water to wash her off. Anwuli pushed herself up again and took a step toward the kitchen. But as she took another, her chest grew stiff. She wheezed.

  She couldn’t tell if the room was blurry because it was full of pollen or because of her watering eyes or the fact that she could barely take in enough oxygen. And then she was falling. As she lay on the floor, she heard Obi 3 talking to her, but she didn’t understand. Her baby was crying, and if she could smile, she would have, because her baby was not sneezing. Then she closed her eyes, and it was as if the world around her was breaking.

  The floor shook, and Anwuli heard the walls cracking, shifting, crumbling. Her nose was too stuffed for her to smell anything, but she could feel pollen coating her tongue and blood seeping from between her legs. Things went black for a while. Mmiri’s cries faded away and stopped. The noise of things breaking became a low hum. The shaking stopped. Anwuli must have slept.

  She sneezed hard and wheezed, cracking her gummy eyes open. Everything was a blur until she blinked. She gasped. Then she realized that she could gasp. And the room was suddenly warm, like outside. She blinked several more times, wiped her eyes, and then just stared at where the broken window had been. Her daughter began weakly crying. The makeshift cradle the drone had began to gently rock, and Mmiri quieted a little.

  Still staring but slowly sitting up, Anwuli said, “Bring her here.” She took the baby into her arms as she stared at what looked like a smooth, shiny metal wall. So shiny that she could see the entire living room reflected in it. She remembered these metal sheets; Obi 3 had asked her to order them weeks ago. Something clanged, and the wooden wall beside the metal wall buckled in a bit. She turned and looked down the hall toward the front door, and there she saw another metal wall blocking the view of outside.

  “What’s…did you do something?” she asked. In her arms, baby Mmiri squirmed and nestled closer to her.

  “I did,” Obi 3 said. “Do you like it?”

  Air was blowing near the ceiling, the Nigerian flag hanging from a bookshelf flapping, and for the first time, Anwuli noticed something. The vent grate was gone, and the air duct inside was a shiny aluminum, not the dull steel. She pointed, “What is that?”

  “I built a duct to filter pollen from the air.”

  Anwuli glanced at the air duct again. And then she looked around the room. Then she looked back at the air duct. She sneezed, but doing so cleared the snot from her nose. She wiped her face with her sleeve and sat on the towel of blood, the coppery, yeasty smell of birth floating around her.

  For months, Obi 3 had requested things. Had it been since before Bayo left? Anwuli couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been paying attention. The last nine months had been crying, shouting, back-turning, embarrassing. Swollen ankles. The day she was in the supermarket and all those women had pointed at her belly and laughed. Swelling body. Her parents ignoring her in church. Wild cravings. Running to her self-driven car after turning a corner and walking right into Bayo’s wife. The heightened pollen allergies. And she couldn’t stop crying. And all that time, her house had been asking her to buy things.

  It would put the items on her phone’s grocery list. Nails, sheets of metal, piping, plaster, tool parts and, yes, two air ducts. She’d hear banging on the sides of Obi 3, sawing, creaking, but who could care about repairs Obi 3 made to itself when her life had fallen into disrepair? Who could care about anything else?

  “What have you done?”

  After a long pause, Obi 3 said, “Please, can you walk?”

  “Obi 3.”

  “Yes?”

  “What have you done?” she demanded.

  “Go to your room…please,” Obi 3 said. “I will tell you, but please take baby Mmiri Storm to your bed. The pollen outside just increased. I can’t…it’s time for phase 2, or you will die.”

  Anwuli got up. This time, doing so was more painful. She bent forward. “Take her,” she gasped. “I can’t.”

  The drone swept up, and as gently as she could, shaking with pain that broiled from her uterus and radiated to every part of her body, she took a step. She felt blood trickling down her leg. “I…should…wash. Can—”

  “Yes, but use the towel beside the bed to wipe it, for now, and just get into bed.”

  “Why?” Anwuli asked, stumbling to the back of the couch and then into the hallway to her room. She leaned against the wall as she stiffly walked.

  “There’s no time,” Obi 3 said.

  She took more steps. “Talk to me,” she said. “It’ll help distract…yeeee, oh my God, this hurts. Feels like my intestines are being pulled down by gravity.” She stopped, leaning against the wall, panting. “Talk to me, Obi 3. Tell me a recipe, recite some poetry, something.”

  “You are 0.8 kilometers from the center of New Delta.”

  “T-t-tell me what you did to yourself…and why?” She shut her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Just pushed out baby, she told herself. Pain is just from that. I’m OK. I’m OK.

  “I’ve listened to you,” Obi 3 said. “One day, you said you wished someone would protect you like you protected the baby.” Anwuli remembered that night. She’d been unable to sleep and thus had stayed up all night, thinking and thinking about all the weeks of being alone. Scared. She hadn’t been talking to Obi 3. Nor the baby. She’d just talked to herself, to hear her own voice. Maybe she’d been praying.

  “You were speaking and asking,” Obi 3 continued. “I did my own research and then engineered my plans,” it said. “I had answers. Every smart home watches the news, its central person, and its environment. Nearly one-third of all pregnant women will develop an allergy they have not previously suffered from, and the allergies they already have tend to get worse. You have always had bad allergies; you told me how they used to call you ogbanje. Also, remember the day your stupid, useless man left? You turned off my filter because he liked to have it on.”

  At this, Anwuli snorted a laugh, and she felt blood gush from her privates and a pang of pain strong enough to make her stumble. She’d been brash. No one turned off a home’s filter. Not after all the incidents of smart homes being too nosy and intrusive.

  “Ah, so you predicted I’d get Izeuzere?”

  “Yes,” Obi 3 said. “I used formal logic.”

  “Then you decided to find a way to protect me.”

  “Yes. I invented a way, then I built my invention.”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Anwuli said, with a weak smile. “Wow. Technology harbors a personal god; my Chi is a smart home.” She laughed, and her body ached, but a good ache.

  “I have decided to call it a ‘protective egg,’” Obi 3 said. “Is this all right?”

  Anwuli frowned for a moment. Then she shrugged. “It’s kept me and baby alive.”

  “Watching you inspired me. Your body protects your baby. Steelplated, impervious exterior, an air filter…” It paused, and Anwuli frowned.

  “Tell me all of it,” she demanded, entering her room. “Oh!” she said. Here, the window wall in front of her bed had mostly been fortified with metal except for about three by three feet of it. And outside, a blizzard of bright-orange fluff thick enough to mute the midday Nigerian sunshine. Never ever ever had the pollen been so thick. Towels had been placed on the bed and beside it.
Anwuli grabbed one, wiped her legs, and then pressed it to herself. “No use hiding it from me now,” she said. “We’re in this together, no? We have been for months. Is this why you haven’t tried so hard to get me to leave?”

  “Yes.”

  Anwuli chuckled tiredly. “Interesting. So interesting.”

  As Anwuli laid herself on the bed, Obi 3 told her all about what it called “Project Protective Egg.” And then, as she clutched Mmiri in her arms, watching her death swirl about outside, the entire house began to rise up. Obi 3 had rebuilt its own steel cushioning beams, used to support it above the delta swamp floor, into three powerful legs.

  “I can take us beyond the tsunami before the filters are overwhelmed,” Obi 3 said.

  “If we can make it that far, there is no peri grass in Abuja.”

  As it walked, the room gently rocking, Obi 3 hummed the song Anwuli’s mother always hummed when she cooked. Anwuli rested on the pillow the drone had pushed beneath her head, held Mmiri closer to her, and hugged herself. Yes, Obi 3 was like an extension of herself. Like part of my immune system who has just saved my life, she thought, staring at the window. Or my Chi. Anwuli hoped Obi 3 crushed the hell out of as much peri grass as it could on the way out of town, and maybe the house of her ex-fiancé…if they weren’t home.

  Baby Mmiri Storm cooed in her arms.

  Two miles away, Bayo sat in his study frowning as he looked out at the whirling pollen through the room’s triangular corner window. He was still thinking about Anwuli. Praying she was not dead. If she had finally decided to leave the house, she was out there in that pollen storm right now. He shook his head, frowning. “Please, let this woman be alive,” he muttered. “Please, oh, Biko-nu, Holy Ghostfire, laminate her life for protection, in the name of Jesus.”

  His wife was in the kitchen making peri cakes and fried fish, but he didn’t dare look at his mobile phone, let alone make a call on it. The house was listening, almost every aspect of its mechanisms tuned to his wife’s preferences because it was she who spent the most time here. Maybe I should have stayed home more, he thought. At the same time, he wished today weren’t his day off. Even with the noise of his sons and daughter playing in the living room, he knew he couldn’t call Anwuli. And if he got up to leave when the pollen passed, there would be trouble.

  Suddenly, the entire house rumbled. Then it began to shake, and the children screamed. As Bayo jumped up, he could feel it. The house was rising. And that’s when it all dawned on him, a horrid sense of doom settling on his shoulders: His wife…not only had she known of Anwuli all along, but so had their house, Obi 1. And neither his wife nor her house was the type to easily let things go. “Shit,” he said. “Why did I make these goddamn smart homes so smart?” He heavily sat down on the couch and held on for dear life.

  NO ME DEJES

  Mark Oshiro

  “You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

  Papá sits across from me, arms folded, all stoic steadiness, but his brows are knit together in an unmistakable knot. “I know what you’re doing,” I say. “I appreciate it, but…” I shake my head, and dread stitches itself to my ribs.

  He sighs loudly, reaches out to me with a calloused hand. “I’ll be right there with you the entire time.”

  “I know. It’s just…I’m starting to wonder if I’m in over my head.”

  “You can say no, Gabriela. It’s not too late.”

  A brief flash of eagerness crosses his face, a light I wish I could unsee. He wants to do it in my place. He has been nothing but supportive ever since Abuela Carmen chose me for the Transfer, but this moment skirts an uncomfortable truth. Why did she choose me over him? Why will I be the bridge in our familia, the one to receive abuela’s memories before she leaves us? The love between us isn’t enough to explain why Carmen chose me over her own son, but she has offered no other clue.

  “No, it’s what she wants,” I tell him. I tell myself.

  He lets go of my hand and leans back into the hard plastic chair. “You know, you’re going to have some strange memories in that head of yours.”

  A flutter of nerves rolls through me. “Like what?”

  “Well,” he smirks, “are you prepared to change your papa’s diapers?”

  “What?”

  “What if one of those memories gets through? Gonna be pretty weird.”

  I swat at him playfully. “Papá, come on.”

  His smile fades, but his deep-brown eyes are still warm. “I know this is all pretty strange, but…I’m glad it’s you.”

  My Papá. I step across that expanse of linoleum to plant myself in the empty chair to his right, then curl up against his body. He runs his fingers through my hair, plants a kiss on top of my head.

  The electricity of the unknown still courses through me. I am alight. I am unsure.

  This room is not built for the limbo of extended goodbyes. Nothing to read except for the flashy and emotionally charged animations advertising the Transfer that adorn the walls. Loved ones smiling at some beatific elder relative’s bedside, every one of them white, with a single phrase at the bottom:

  You never really die if you’re not forgotten.

  It’s not as comforting as I think it’s meant to sound, and it doesn’t stop the nervous quiver in my stomach. Soon, I’ll be laid out alongside Abuela Carmen, wired up to her mind, ready for her to gift me with her memories. They say it doesn’t really hurt and that the transferred memories basically separate out from your own after a few weeks. But I’ve been reading the reviews, following forums, in the week since Abuela made her choice. It’s disorienting, everyone says. You can’t control what will trigger the new memories you have. Sometimes, they just pop in your head when you’re showering. When you’re at work or at school. Most especially when you’re asleep. Someone else’s memories, someone else’s secrets.

  They’re about to be mine.

  They finally come for us more than an hour later, while Papá is in the restroom. When he steps out, clicking the heavy door shut behind him, his eyes are bloodshot and puffy, and the sharp worry wrinkles on his forehead stand out in a map of grief. It breaks my heart. This is his mother. After this she’ll be gone forever, even if her memories live on. All I’d been thinking about was myself.

  “I’m sorry, Papá,” I say into his chest. “This has to be hard.”

  “It’s OK, m’ija.” His breath is warm on top of my head. “Saying goodbye isn’t meant to be easy. At least we have the chance to say it this time.”

  The history rests unspoken between us. Mamá’s passing a few years back, before the Transfer was available, was sudden. There were no waiting rooms, no extended farewells, no exchange of memories. Just a mess of twisted metal and an ocean of grief that eroded the edges of what we knew of her. Mamá drifted further away with time; mi abuela would live sharply within me.

  He squeezes once more, then leads me away, out of the waiting room, into the sterile, gray hallway, past recruitment offices and Transfer agents, running their orientation videos for other clients. At the end of the hall, we enter an elevator to head up to the medical wing. The floor hums beneath our silence. How can we say all of the things that need to be said? How can we possibly untangle this knot of hope and fear and grief that sits like a lump in our throats?

  So we say nothing.

  The doors open. Another gray hall. Another phalanx of animations set flush into the wall, all extolling the virtues of the Transfer, as if we still need convincing, even now. Nestled between their bright promises are the procedure rooms, which are hidden from us: dark panes of glass and windowless doors. How many people are going through the Transfer right now? How many are waking up from that last goodbye, heads crammed with memories that are not their own? I get a sudden, absurd urge to break into those shadowed caverns and wrest the truth from them. To force someone into saving me from myself, from the mistake of staying. Or the mistake of running away.

  “You OK, m’ija?” Papá murmurs, putting his arm around me. �
�You’re not normally this quiet.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I manage. “Just feel weird, that’s all.”

  “As soon as you wake up, I’ll be there. You know, in case you have any questions about…well, whatever.”

  He’ll be the only one who can answer them. It was in nearly every review I devoured. The Transfer offers peace to those who are near the end of their lives; it allows them to choose when to close the door. But it comes with a cost: the Fading. As memories flow out of their body, they “fade” out of consciousness. Apparently, Abuela Carmen will only be around for maybe a few minutes after the Transfer. Then… that’s it. She’ll live on in my head, just as the ads promise.

  A door opens near me and a woman steps out, her brown hair clipped short above crisp scrubs. She looks so serious. Fear suddenly flares in me. I don’t want to do this. But she smiles at me and Papá, suddenly transformed with warmth, and my fear flutters into simple jitters as she ushers us into the room.

  Inside is mi abuela. Laid out in the bed like a resting saint, become a figure from those votivas that line the ofrenda in her bedroom. Her frail limbs are swallowed in a halo of sheets and blankets.

  She turns her head and her eyes lock on to me, and a smile rises on her like a slow morning. In her face I see the echo of my Papá, that etched forehead, that steady chin I love. The haze of my hesitation drifts away. If this is what she wants, then I want to do it.

  The woman who let us in guides me over to a bed set up parallel to Abuela. She sits me down and the techs seem to come out of nowhere to start fussing over me. I’m given a long white gown and asked to remove my shirt behind a short partition. Through the gap, I watch my father as he squeezes his mother’s thin hand, coos to her in a tone just above a whisper.

  Someone scurries behinds me, asks me to tie up my hair. After I do, there’s a buzzing tickle at the base of my skull. I knew they were going to shave the back of my head, but it’s so sudden, so careless. They probably do this all day. It means nothing to them. Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I’m blinking back tears when the woman returns to my side.