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.
This day, my head ached and I smelled pepper. When I looked up, putting down the onion I was inspecting, I made eye contact with a beautiful man. He was sitting on a stool with some others. Some wore trousers and dress shirts; I recognized one of them, his name was Okenna Nwachukwu, a shop owner who’d sold my ex his car. Others wore agbada and sokoto; I did not know any of them. Dull and brilliant colors, dull and complex fabrics. All men.
Over the strong pepper scent, I could smell the scented oil the men wore. Sandalwood. These were probably men who’d lived in Abuja for a long time, maybe they’d been teens when the Red Eye began to pick up speed in the north. Their parents may have been the ones who shouted that desertification would surely stop and the dust storms would never make it farther than Jos. And maybe they’d been at Imam Shafi Abdulazeez’s event yesterday.
I didn’t like the way the beautiful man was looking at me. As if I weren’t supposed to be there. I shivered, feeling the hairs on my neck rise, becoming too aware of my dexterous metal hand; the sophisticated hand of a robot. I knew it was one of the first things he’d looked at and noted. Wearing a glove only brought more attention to my arm. People there are too nosy and curious. The fingers could twist in all directions, as could my wrist. I could extend the arm to twice its length. I’d gotten my cybernetic smart arm and hand when I was seventeen, when my doctor said I’d finally stopped growing and could have the surgery. Before that, my very short arm stump had been fitted with an externally-powered prosthetic. Yes, my arm and its hand were extraordinary, still highly experimental, and to save my parents the cost, I’d opted out of the “humanizing exterior” that felt, smelled, even reacted like human flesh.
But people knew me in this market.
So why were people staring at me today? Maybe they’d been staring at me all along. All these years. Since I’d come to Abuja. Maybe I just hadn’t noticed. And maybe I just hadn’t noticed today that tolerance of me had reached critical mass. Or maybe that damn imam had really gotten into people’s heads yesterday.