Noor

by Nnedi Okorafor

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk

Synopsis

From Africanfuturist luminary Okorafor comes a new science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria.



Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt . . . natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong." But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.



Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the "reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist" and the "saga of the wicked woman and mad man" unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable. Expect the unaccepted.

Release date: November 16, 2021

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 224

Sample

Ja Ido

I would never do this again. But for the moment, I survived. I went on.

I focused my attention beyond the soldiers, out into the open desert, where a Noor (Ultimate Corp’s famous enormous wind turbines) sat like the world’s most bizarre plant. Harvesting clean energy from one of the world’s worst environmental disasters. How poetic. The monstrous thing was about a mile away, where the wind began to roar wildly enough that I could hear it from here. Further into the chaos lived more of these fucking turbines. The evil things generated energy for the evil corporation from the whipping sands of the evil Ja Ido. Most use the language of our colonizers and call the enormous never-ending sandstorm the “Red Eye.” As I stood looking at its edge, I felt awe. I kept thinking, This isn’t Jupiter. This. Is. Earth.

Two days ago, I’d never have imagined I’d see any of this with my own eyes. In my mind, the Red Eye was a distant near-mythical thing like deep sea creatures or dragons. It wasn’t something I thought about often. Who could think about it often and be able to get on with their day?

Its dust will turn your eyes red within moments and kill you within minutes, clogging your nose and mouth, packing your lungs. The Red Eye has occupied miles and miles and miles of Northern Nigeria for nearly thirty years. Right now, its swirling proximity threatened the sun with its girth. It wasn’t a threat to me or him for the moment, though. Today, it was the beast who would watch me be a beast. “I’m not afraid,” I whispered to it, knowing it could hear me.

People actually lived in the Red Eye’s belly. People fled there. People who didn’t want to be a part of “This day and age” or who wanted to make their own day and age. They survived by using sand-deflecting devices, capture stations and super wells, weather-treated clothes, pure audacity, dust and grit. These were people who’d always been in the desert, even during the nationwide protests and riots, fires, droughts, floods, bloody massacres and global pandemics . . . when it looked like humanity was over. Nomads, herdsman, and desolation dwellers. Generations of people who understood and took issue with the agenda of false demarcations. “Non-Nigerians,” more popularly known in southern Nigeria and the rest of Africa as “Non-Issues.” If they could live in the belly of the beast, why should I fear that beast looming nearby?

I took a deep breath, letting it rush through my being, slowing my heart rate. I shut my eyes against the nearly blocked out sun, the rhythm in my head beating deep and heavy. It was so bright here, just before the enveloping shade of the storm. In this moment, I relished the dark redness of my blood pumping hard through my eyelids and the talking drum that was so so much like the beat my brother would play on his own drum. His playing used to bring everyone together, told them to come and listen. The rhythm in my head reminded me.

I remembered those wonderful festivals where everyone would put down their phones and tablets and windows and make a circle around him, and he would play and play. Feeding their souls, fortifying them, translating the strength of our ancestors into something we all could consume. In my teens, I could only lie there inside the house, unable to move, straining to hear his music. But I knew, even from out there with all those people listening, my brother was talking specifically to me with his talking drums, pushing me out to distant places to meet with my Ancestors and gods.

I rubbed my temples. My body felt different. From a distance, I heard a howl; something was about to die. Surprisingly, after all that had happened, I was still steady. It hadn’t been that long, but things were coming to a head. What a relief. Let it come. The darkness of looming clouds is worse than the storm.

I opened my eyes. I grasped the handle and pushed the cracked glass door. I threw myself into the arms of my fate, as I have been doing for decades. And this time I didn’t look back. Because to see him asleep on that old inflatable mattress would break my heart a second time in a matter of days. To meet his eyes and the eyes of the only two of his people he had left would make me weak. So I left them. I stepped outside and looked up. The whole world shivered into a new reality. One I could grasp.

CHAPTER 1What Kind of Woman Are You?

48 HOURS EARLIER . . .

It was late when I got home. I switched the light on in my bedroom and a startled gecko rushed up my wall and tried to hide near the ceiling. “Oh, not today,” I muttered. Then I spent the next hour trying to catch it. Thankfully, the thing escaped out the window. Wall geckos have always bothered me, and the thought of sleeping with one in my bedroom made me angry. On top of this, my headache was back. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well.

I drifted into normal sleep just as the sun was rising. I think. I don’t quite remember. I was in my bed facing the window, rubbing my temples. My headache wasn’t ready to let up, thumping its drumbeat as if it wanted my spirit to go somewhere else. I was gazing across the Abuja building tops, there was a go-slow in the distance and I remember feeling glad that I didn’t have to be in it. These days, I rarely had to travel on the highway, anyway, thanks to the auto shop being only two miles away. My world was comfortably small.

The sunrise was a warm one, the breeze wafting into my open window. I liked the heat; when it was hot, I felt languid, effortless, good. I slept naked, unbothered by mosquitoes. They never seemed to like me. A hawk soared past my apartment window. Or maybe it was a vulture. The beating in my head seemed to surge. “Ah,” I groaned, rolling over.

Then I was watching my ex-fiancé Olaniyi’s back as he walked out the front door into a lush undulating jungle, a fantastic drum beat rolling up the green, red, and yellow leaves of trees and bushes. I looked up and the sky wasn’t really the sky because I was dreaming. It was like looking at a sky that was a blue leaf under a strong microscope and you were zooming and zooming in to see that it wasn’t a blue leaf at all; it was millions of blue eyes that made up the leaf. All those eyes were looking at me. And then they weren’t blue, they were red, like the eyes of lizards looking. Blinking and looking, blinking and looking.

When I blinked, I awoke, my heart pounding and my head aching so badly that I winced. I should have known the day would carry its own basket of strange. I should have known to be prepared. It was Friday, but I should have stayed home.

---

—

The auto shop expected me in at eleven AM, so there was time. This would be my first weekend without Olaniyi. He’d come by and taken his things days ago, and when he walked in, he was holding heavy black charm beads in one hand and he refused to look me in the eye. He moved quickly, grabbing his clothes, laptop, chargers, his moldy old books. I said nothing, but inside I was weeping.

Now, fiancé gone, my life plans in unexpected ruin, I intended to spend much of the weekend weeping. I was going to wipe all of him away with a delicious meal of egusi soup heavy with shrimp, beef, and fish, smoothly pounded yam, perfectly fried plantain, sliced sweet mango, a coconut cake and hot tea. I was going to not call any of my friends. I was going to work on a sand repelling device called an “anti-aejej,” which a man from up north had brought me to repair. I’d only seen and fixed one, all using guess-work. I was sure I could fix this one, too, and I was excited because I was going to fully understand how it worked. All of this I could do in my spotless incense-scented, quiet roomy apartment with no man I loved staring at me as if I were a demon he’d been jujued into loving.

The evening and then the weekend were mine.

But first, I needed to do some food shopping before work. When I’d lived in Lagos, just getting to the market early would have been a whole morning affair. However, I’d followed my fiancé here to Abuja because a good mechanic (especially one with a cybernetic left arm and thus a hyperdexterous hand) can find work anywhere and a good man is hard to find. And so my life was a different story where I could go to the market in the morning and still make it to work on time.

Abuja was slower, lazier, yes. It’s only a few hours’ drive from the Red Eye, but a few hours’ drive is a long drive when you are just trying to live your life. Despite its relative closeness to the abomination in the north, Abuja was a thriving city that rivaled the fast-paced, clean innovative ones in the south like Lagos, Owerri and New Calabar. And in Abuja, men were less likely to run over a woman like me crossing the street.

Today, I could make it to the market and back before work. I drove, as I always did, and I went to my favorite market, the one that was about a mile away. I knew where everything was. Finding all the ingredients I needed would be easy. They knew me there, too. Or so I thought.

It actually was a really warm morning. So my dream was right about that, at least. It was also right about the refreshing breeze. I wore no make-up. No earrings. I’d braided my shoulder-length dreadlocks to cover the silver nodule that was the tip of my neural implants. Weeks ago, I’d even dyed my dreadlocks jet-black, so no one questioned how “clean” they were (for some reason, people always thought brown dreadlocks were dirty). And for extra cover, I wore a rose-colored veil over my head. I wore a light but long sleeved green silk top. My skirt was thick, covering my ankles and part of my feet, so neither my legs nor my arms were in view. They shouldn’t have caused any trouble.

Granted, by definition, to many Nigerians, I was trouble. Even in Abuja, though it wasn’t as rabid as in the south, I was a demon. A witch. An abomination. Priests, reverends, bishops, pastors and imams, holy men all over West Africa said so. To replace an organ or two with cybernetic, 3D-printed, non-human parts was fine. People needed pacemakers, new limbs, skin grafts, etc. But if you were one of those people who seemed to be “more machine than human” for whatever reason, one of those who “refused to obey the laws of nature and die,” you were a demon. I’d seen people like me fall victim to jungle justice in viral videos, murdered (or “shut down” as people liked to joke), attacked in the streets and, in less extreme cases, shunned. We were supposed to die; what we were doing instead of dying wasn’t living.

Then there are those who clump all of us into the same group. And when you do that, we all became “those Africans so deeply affected by twisted western ideologies that we’re obsessed with perfection and what money can buy.” We are cultureless children of the filthy rich corrupt elite class that has nothing better to do but augment our bodies with bullshit just because we can. We aren’t real Africans, we are the bootlickers of the United States, China, or the Emirates.

People here in Abuja have thought I was the daughter of an energy tycoon or the mistress of an Ultimate Corp exec simply because of what I am. Me. As if. I just wanted to live my life. As I was. As what I chose. As what I was. I was born and raised in Lagos, like 90 million other people. It’s not too much to ask.

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. ...