Memories of the Old Sun

Sometimes you wish you were a biorobot. Unemotive, just 1s and 0s.

Your mother’s words burn inside your mind: “People are laughing, others pitying. Mazu. Who’ll wait on me?”

“I’m here, Mae.”

“The journey is far over the seas from Konakri. Come visit before I die.”

“I’ll visit. I promise. And you’re not dying.”

“Stop giving me regret. When will you find a woman?”

“If you keep asking, I’ll stop calling.”

“Aiii, his truth comes out. He’ll stop ringing.”

“Are you telling the phone?”

“Who birthed you? I broke my back to raise you. Now you will kill me with regret.”

“It’s not like that, Mae.”

“The girls here are budding. I’ll negotiate a wife with a good stomach. It shows in the clan—the ones who can make babies.”

“Stop it. Please.”

“I know to pick the right girl. Breasts like papayas. Buttocks bigger than a pot.”

“There’s more to life than marriage.”

An email from Jordan. In it, the photo of a marigold-eyed kitten, head cocked at the camera. You want to tell Mae about Jordan, but on a spell like today she’s no listener.

You snatch yourself back to her lamenting. “Don’t put me in mourning. Child, you’re cutting me.”

“Now you exagger—”

“There’s the question of dowry.”

“Is this what it’s about, Mae? I’ll send money.”

“Of course I need money. The cows are sick. And the village’s still growing—we need a well to water our yams. I told the pastor at the school—”

“The one I raised money for?”

“That one. I told the pastor I’d ask about the well.”

“Being here doesn’t mean I’m rolling in money.”

“Now you think you’re a big shot. That you can stop helping.”

You sigh. Sending money home is a bottomless cup. The village, through your mother, makes it an inescapable yoke. She finally agrees to hang up, because you invent that it’s midnight.

“It’s night there,” she says in wonderment. “Like here?”

“Yes, Mae.” Your pretend yawn is loud. “And if I don’t sleep, who’ll make money for us tomorrow? Sooo tired.”

“You take my advice—I don’t want to suckle the whole village. Give me a grandchild.”

“I hear you, Mae.”

“By the gods, you’d better. Mffyuu.” She sucks her teeth, letting you know she’s not letting it go.

Jazz knows sie’s a variable. Sie has an inbuilt scrapbook filled with memories, sometimes rushing, often rusting. They twirl inside hir head. File cards full of deserts and hungriness clipped away from hir heart. They are from names in a grammar sie doesn’t remember, childhood friends or secrets: Bug, Dyn, Cyclone, Bash, Allon, Prim, Krema …

Making a biorobot is genesis—not a six-day creation, rest on the seventh, but rather a Darwinian evolution, natural selection and all. You put each zygote under lights, spin it slowly to nurture its earliest developmental stage—the unique genome sequence of human and artificial intelligence. The right genetic signature is necessary to form memories derived from mainframes and natural evolution.

Malware botches some of the zygotes and they begin to show excessive individual thought, traces of zeitgeist. You vaporize most anomalies, rain them back into the network as gametes. It doesn’t matter if they had a name—all zygotes have a name—you deal with anomalies and rename them. Hundreds of zygotes each in a simulated placenta inside pods. Newborn. But only the fittest shall live.

A biorobotics engineer wants no variants, for obvious reasons. Variants generate runaway events. They display ego amplitudes, heroism complexes and random hierarchies that are circular, never linear. Inevitably, and it is inevitable, they fall into abeyance, putting the system into chaos.

The system demands everything exists in one voice: muted and responding only to command. Clumsy ones hit the bin, disconnected before they break synchrony. Daily, the eyes of cameras shift in a sense of rhythm and whirr, a silent opera taking down each face that might embrace self-actualization outside the greater good.

Rebooting, tagging and personal monitoring fixes the flaws of milder anomalies. Interface deconstruction tears down alpha anomalies. Intervention nullifies discord, keeping the systems in a unity of purpose. It ensures no counterpoint, convolution or polyphony: just algorithms and intelligence.

You assign each newborn to a research station that you closely monitor across the first year of extrauterine development. Then they graduate to space research stations.

Sie remembers days of life and death when fate snatched sie away and sealed hir sorrow to an exact point. Days that were mistrials drowned in desire, studded with intersections where babies cried in syntax, never in melody, and lights pulsed but never turned red.

That phone chat with your mother … you hold your head in your hands. You feel like a sea putting on tides in the dark, draping whole cities, washing away last night’s news and your mother’s insistence.

“My blood and sweat under the old sun put you to school—see where you are now.”

“And I’m grateful, Mae.”

“When your father died, you became the head of the house. Don’t you forget, son.”

“I won’t.”

A new item on the taskbar. You click the email open. Another Jordan animated gif: ‘Happy Lunch Hour!’ It’s shaped in old gold on a beach speckled with palm trees. He fills you with good vibes.

Memory is snow—iced crystals falling in clusters from the sky. Pellets big as fists, opaque yet trustless. Emotions are surface, doorsteps of a moment.

There was a time when conversation with your mother was easy. But on the phone it’s crumbs and shapes, what’s left of language and duty. If your mother were on social media, you’d take your chances on texting. IDK, BRB, G2G. You’d get away with saying TTYL, promising to talk later, and not doing it. Maybe she’d get the idea with YGTI.

You chuckle softly, but it’s only with imagining her texting you back: WTF? YOLO. Give grandchild. ASAP. Indeed, one only lives once. You’ve never been much of a swimmer yet dive into the ocean on your small screen, away from a weight of responsibility. Tradition is a beast. Why must you marry? Marriage is antiquity. There’s no alchemy for a perfect one. What you remember of your parents is absence. Your father was always away. Mostly for work, sometimes with other women. You remember the fighting like thunder—you trembling under a bed as Mae and your father crashed, wrestling around the house, breaking things. You don’t want to be that.

You’re unhappy, but Jordan’s meme that’s an animated gif of huggy cartoony figures in metallic hues and pearly textures, jellybean shaped, is lifting.

At nights sie wakes up from pixelated cyclones in hir dreams, shapeless footsteps to hir world of amorphous vapours. Hir life is a cradle—forming, morphing hir newborn self until sie toddles out of it. Hir heart is a blizzard—the data it holds veers from science, erodes trust. It’s a heart that touches petals with fists, unclear where on a flower to caress. If sie could levitate, sie’d give hirself to all the books in the universe, speak their tongues. Sie’d teach hirself magic from a book, pull out ebony rabbits and gilded coins that look easy on satellite.

Your eyes turn back to the job. 24/7 on live feed and reruns, no popcorn. A silver and black grid of the universe. A switch on the control splashes colour if you wished it. You watch the biorobots in their tasks across the globe. Inbuilt to take temperature, pressure, rain and wind readings. They’re humanlike, no different from people on the streets. A little sentient, yet designed to be windvanes, barometers, wet and dry bulbs through human skin. They’re imprinted with aerial surveillance and radius maps, motion imagery and billions of pixels in resolution splashed on your screen.

You created them. Still, sometimes you pity them. Isolated in research stations across the globe. You have four primes: Jazz, Krema, Cyclone and Bash. First-year wards in the biorobotic flock. Jazz is in Antarctica—sie was always different but you gave hir a chance from deconstruction. You remember how sie was always clingy, wanting a song, a cuddle or whatnot reassurance to perform hir best. The others don’t worry you: Krema in Pelican Point, Namibia—sand-dune-filled, blazing hot oasis, miles of desert. Cyclone in Mawsynram, East India—as wet as it comes on the East Khasi Hills district. Bash in Death Valley, Eastern California—it’s a furnace creek there. The government calls it Nextgen 4.0, but is it a future that you want? Each biorobot is a humanesque quantum machine.

Still, you worry about Jazz.

Jordan sends you a video funny of a big-bottomed man in blood-red dungarees dancing ‘Jingle Bells’ to an afro beat called ndombolo.

Sie remembers a world awash with sound. It feels years away, but sie remembers it. Sometimes whoosh… whoosh, or thump… thump... Always lub dub lub dub. Now and then a voice, hushed. Every now and then a whirr or a buzz, a hum or a drone. Sometimes beep, beep. Sie remembers jumping at a touch from outside the membrane. A gentle rub, and a song. Sie neared. Pressed hir ear to feel, to listen to the world. Hir world now. Entering it was calm in a squeeze, and then cold, then rub, more rub. And then warm full of soft. Rhythm. Melody. A fuzzy that never lasts. Hir poetry of yearning.

Another Jordan funny on your phone screen is dappled with heart shapes and ruby roses.

You crave sunshine. You long for the sun back home in Konakri. You step away from the monitors, go out the door. But outside is no sun. It’s full-blown winter, people in coats walking away from you on the streets. Cyclists in spandex jingle bells at drivers and shenanigans of life in the slow lane.

You smoke the city, packs of it a day. Not real darts. You stand outside the burnt-brick monolith of your workplace, same time each mid-morn, puffing the world. A few times to get going, until you feel cafés, libraries, theatres, high rises, post-offices, even ICUs—too many of them—on your tongue. You let the traffic jams and politicians linger in your mouth, telecom poles, museums, thugs, buskers, beggars, nurses, teachers wafting in too. You cast your mind on the taste of the metropolis to its last despondence, discontent, fear, fury and all. But sometimes there’s awe, serenity and hope. You draw the last bit into your mouth.

At first, when you started the smoke—Jordan introduced you to it, smoking the city, as he called it—you felt dizzy, nauseous. Jordan held you as you gagged. But over time the sensation of motion sickness morphed into something complex. What you feel now is alertness. You feel real. Relaxed, away from family pressure. You feel a pleasure of yearning, a nostalgia of curiosity. But you never want anyone other than Jordan to see you like this.

Yebe! Hey you! Found a woman yet? Your mother in your head disturbs the peace of the moment. You return inside to monitor the research stations.

Your phone vibrates. It’s Jordan.

“Hiya,” he says.

‘Hello you. How’s the writing going?”

“Going,” he says. “You know how it is. What’s happening there?”

You want to talk about your mother, but don’t. Instead, you tell him about your dream. “I was a goddess looking for new suns. Not one sun, a whiteness that’s all colours of the rainbow. I was searching for many suns. Different colours.”

“Right.”

“I was sick of same old. What I needed was blue. A teal sun, or a chocolate cherry one. I got close to my quest but shifted into a bird. It was a bird that kept morphing. First, I was a hyacinth macaw, cobalt blue feathered. Then I was a quetzal—scarlet, indigo and olive green with a white underside on my tail.’

“I’d love to see your underside tail,” says Jordan.

“And then I was a red-crested turaco. Green bodied, white-faced. Running on the ground, not flying in the skies, but in sonic speed. I was screeching and jabbering, whooping out my search for the suns. It’s a prophecy, do you think?”

“More like, they say dreams tell us something about ourselves.”

You look at the monitors.

Sie remembers Daddy.

You made the biorobots feel safe in an engineered womb, birthed them and threw them into experiments. You trained and tested each biorobot for endurance. You shoved them into water and studied their comfort, breathing, how they positioned for buoyancy. You stuffed them in saunas and monitored their need for water, which ones—like Jazz—lost their cool. You threw them into labs swollen with sandstorms, and observed their natural compass, which ones stayed hungry yet measured. You cut off their oxygen, nearly crushed them with pressure. You studied their navigation, patience, inventiveness.

But you don’t want them speculating why penguins make a beeline down a sandy hill. That’s the ilk of sentience you tried rebooting out of Jazz. Sie reminds you of a bee.

Memory is a billion miles folded in a box. It’s tucked inside a key at zero degrees staring long and hard at a wish for a bee. Because a bee prefers a garden or an orchard, a meadow or a copse—everywhere sie wants to be. Because a bee likes dandelions and black-eyed Susans, and the bittersweet breath of a bouquet is better than decay. Because a bee is dusky and blond, burgundy and silver, auburn and lime, azure, even lilac: none of those hues in this dull world and its swirl of winds. Because a bee makes honey, and it is thick and golden and tastes like a quest. Because a bee makes a buzz, and that’s a ringing in hir head sie can explain.

Yes. Jazz reminds you of a bee. Because a bee stings, and a sting is true evidence that you feel. How do you apologise to a biorobot you have created? In the world of research and engineering, apology is a hypocrite or a shadow or a make-shift desk with no authority. Apology is no answer for that which wants to come in and close the door behind it, leaving you trapped. Apology has no neat machine language, just a lisp. It might inhabit a name but casts adrift as a rowboat you swim and swim towards but can never reach it in your dream. Apology is a face in a hurricane, and it looks like your mother, drowning you. You look wrong and ridiculous questioning it, even drunk or alien, across a world of stories there and then, here and now.

You can’t apologise, same way you can’t tell your mae the truth. You live in two worlds, and you feel a deep and terrible sadness about that. When you leave each world, you carry boxes cramped with deception, trickery and guile encamped with sprites who make hostages from what matters. You’re a god or a goddess who sows souls from shore to shore, fiddling away from chaos and grief. Swooping music vibrates in circles, rips and ripples, as the rest plod with sprites and souls, and the fiddle pecks, prods and cripples.

On a scale of 1–10, it feels like 0.

Before Jordan, you secured the walls of your heart so nothing new blew in, nothing old blew out. All that was left was reclaimed baggage occupying objects of memory never in use, simply recycled along undesignated revelations. What you needed was a blanket: washable, breathable, lightweight in summer, plush in winter. That blanket was Jordan. He saw through the flicker of light on the hourglass of your armour that suggested the straps were not made of steel but rather fairy floss. You were fragile, sickly sweet and poor for your health. You had only to let in Jordan, and everything changed.

You wonder why you didn’t tell Jordan about the other dream. The one where your goddess walked with a gap across a city choked in smoke, and theories flew about the cavernous hole in her torso. Tar-shined ravens and death-watch beetles also soared through it. No one offered a mist blanket so she could fold her wings at midnight. She looked at herself and muttered a prayer or a dream. She gave anyone who looked an opus of her hollow.

Sie wears an infinite new coat over hir old coat. It’s unrecorded, no assumptions. When summer ... if summer ... long days, dropping nights. When spring ... if spring ... Hir heart is sealed in envelopes to a city of new suns. 

There’s a deadness about the night, yet you pick at it. You feel a dirge inside, yet you’re not good at chanting. You distract yourself with motion imagery from Krema, Cyclone, Bash and Jazz in their routines around their meteorological stations. Krema—unmindful of pink flamingos, black jackals and fur seals only miles north in Walvis Bay—mono-focused on iron-coloured sand dunes in Namibia. Cyclone—neutral to calcareous caves and rocky waterfalls, ferns, even orchids and aroids of the sacred forest in nature’s museum—collecting water and measuring rain in East India. Bash—impartial to salt flats, sand dunes, canyons, lakes and craters—simply charting dryness and windspeed in California.

I milked goats, says your mae in your head. Took the produce, together with mangoes and tomatoes, to the stall in the market for your schooling.

And I thank you, Mae.

Krema, Cyclone and Bash go about unquestioning of their lesser tasks, compliant that you will situate them to their higher purpose. But Jazz is different. As sie goes about hir climatological tasks in Antarctica, sometimes you notice a sadness in sie, and a happiness—the break of a smile, a spring in hir step—when sie integrates with nature. Sie sleeps under stars, swims in iced waters, gawks at penguins, feels snow on hir tongue.

You watch the screens. None of the biorobots can hear you and the hypersonic imprints of your invisible chant.

The place that reminds sie of home has deserts and seas. They scorch or hump in scars and pleas. Sie drags hir heart through heavens and earths in endless quests to find holy burghs. But what sie sees are memories and visas to the universe.

Jordan emails you a sample of his writing. “It’s called ‘Damned, More Than Thirty Percent’,” he says. It reads:

Your body’s flamboyant with tonight’s headlines. An unruly bugaboo peers through the sight: X marks the spot.

You bob through the city, in, out of back streets, away on the freeway. But it’s coming for you: the ghost of your harming ... all glaring in half-light.

“It’s called prose poetry,” he says. “The rogue cousin of a poem and flash fiction. I wrote it for you—there’s more in the head, Mazu. Think I’ll make it big?”

“You’ll be right.”

“The text’s spooky.”

What spooks you more are your mae’s words in your head: “Your children will do for you what you’re failing me.”

You fold away each memory of the old sun that’s black frost, but can’t escape it. Like the goddess in your dreams, you want new suns. You’d happily start again with no expectation of what’s normal, each moment that happens.

CCTV, no popcorn. You look at the screen. This here is getting by. Is this how you want to live your life—getting by?

A bird on Jazz’s screen catches your eye. It’s running extremely fast on the ground, until it stops in front of Jazz. How the? In Antarctica? More so, you’re fascinated by hir response to it. You watch with curiosity as sie reaches hir hand to the red-crested turaco.

It’s green bodied, white-faced. It perches on hir shoulder. Sie hums. It screeches, jibbers, like a jungle monkey. They practice a shared language, something intuited from intrinsic selves. It’s a wordless language cast from simple lives, complex to forget. But words never stay dormant long. They sear patterns in the snow, disrupt the icy water’s rhythm. Jazz and the bird follow each other distances along the shore, hear voices in the wind, and they remember. It doesn’t matter who speaks first. The turaco tells sie about luck and choice.

Sie hums.

It’s grey and wet driving home. It feels like solstice, the longest and shortest day, all at once. The wipers go lub dub lub dub like a heartbeat. Or the sound of drowning.

What you get when you turn the handle and cross the threshold into your shared flat is a warm, sweet aroma of your mae’s kitchen.

“I looked it up on the net. Got pumpkin leaves, cassava and curry from an African market in Clay. Drove miles to reach it. Sorry, no tilapia. I got a porcelain pot to bake it with chicken. Smells right, you think?”

“Always.”

Jordan’s smoky eyes put embers into your body, shimmers in all your senses. You hug him, notice base notes of wood, cypress and earth in his aftershave.

“How can you be taller than this morning when I left? What you been up to?”

He laughs. “You’re not the only specialist around here. Writers do spells all the time. Know that?” His shoulders are broader, a few inches more. He carries them right, no big boy guns on his muscles—he goes easy in the gym. There’s spunk in his boyish face, tenderness too when he looks at you, as he is now. “Think dinner can wait?”

Stroking fingers scorch away each longing for solitude and in its place blossom orchids into your heart. Luminescent stars, triple moons. You abandon independence and capitulate to the explosions of a galaxy inside your flesh.

Later, much later, you sit together on the high-rise balcony, smoking the city and its silver rain and blinking lights. Tonight, the metropolis has forgotten the taste of politicians and guile, traffic jams and disconnect. What it offers is the promise of morning dew. A new beginning.

You think about the biorobots. Already you know that Krema, Cyclone and Bash will graduate with soaring colours to the space research stations. Jazz—you don’t know about sie. Jazz has excessive individual thought and, as a biorobotics engineer, you know there’s only one way to deal with that.

But sie’s more than 1s and 0s. Sie’s a spirit of age. Funny, it doesn’t worry you now. It doesn’t matter anymore about counterpoint, convolution or polyphony. So what? There’s diversity in algorithms and intelligence, and what’s wrong with difference? Would it be so foolish of you, perhaps, if you asked Jazz what sie wants to do with hir life? See what random sie comes up with.

Sie opens hir memories. Colour photographs tacked close to hir heart. Nothing in particular, just dirt roads to a day that’s coming. It’s full of songs and dragons. Sie’s the one who sees ghosts, who walks on water in hir sleep. The child from a cerulean pearl yet smouldering with phoenix wings. Sie loves Daddy and his folding arms, the careful way his eyes chorus. Will the leaves bud, and the flowers open one by one? Sie walks in hir sleep, or is sie a ghost of hirself? There’s no password to reset.

Thank you for sharing, jibbers the turaco. And never a ghost.

You miss the splendour of an African vista darker than tar. The starry nights and bush calls of the savanna. The moon’s gaze on the regal height of baobab trees. You wonder how that would taste.

“Perhaps soon enough when you visit,” says Jordan. You look at him, startled. “Speaking out loud, mate.”

“Let’s play Imagine,” you say.

“You start.”

“Imagine we’re sitting in an air-loft garden atop a magellanic cloud orbiting the Milky Way,” you say.

“Imagine the petal of a whirlpool flower wafting inward from an ultraviolet vista and reaching your soul,” says Jordan.

“Imagine you’re for life.”

Jordan’s smile is full of glitter. He feels like sunlight. You wonder if something this perfect could go wrong. He’s the summer that gives you reason to wake each dawn. You tell him about Mae wanting you to marry, have children.

“I don’t make much money,” he says, dancing rays in his eyes. “I can’t bear you any babies, but I can cook—that do?”

You join in his laughter, at first uneasy, then you settle into belly-deep mirth that pushes out tears in its high.

“Will you tell her?” Jordan asks, a glisten in his eyes too.

You look at him. “Righto. Tomorrow, I will.” You clasp his hand.

“Ace.”

“Would you—” you stammer at his raised brow, “like, maybe … I was thinking video call … like, um.” The words rush out: “Shall we tell her together?”

“Sure thing. That’s decent.” He squeezes your hand.

“Serious?”

“I’m all in. A video is worth a thousand words, right?” The sun in his eyes.

“Dude, just don’t kiss me.”

Your laughter is together.

Now it’s Jordan’s turn to study you. “She’ll pull through.”

“You reckon? I’ve given so much. Surely, she can allow me this little happiness.”

“Little?” He roughs you up, you roll on the floor giggling.

She’d be wounded, maybe mad. She might not speak to you for days, weeks, maybe months. But you’d send money, then you’d call. She’d tell you about how you were hard to come out, nearly killed her birthing you. How she didn’t ask for the curse that closed her womb after one tiny child—look how you’ve grown. She’d get cunning, like a fox, go spiritual or ideological, tell you about so and so’s daughter in the village. You’d distract her with the trickery of a hare, and gently remind her about Jordan. The phone rings, and you let it. You stand at the balcony watching the road, as a silver sky in the vista reaches with its doubling rain. You hope that you’ll dream many suns in all directions and a kaleidoscope panning out softly. That you’ll sleep in late and wake in a tousle of toes and a smiling noon reeling towards Eden.

Originally published in Chasing Whispers (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2022)