“What are we doing here?”

That was the question I asked my late wife, Onyinye, the evening she flew us to the surface for our honeymoon.

Being an evolved, she earned much more than I did and had promised me a grand post-wedding vacation. I had imagined that she was going to shuttle us to Crater Resort on the moon so we could relish non-synthetic honey while cuddling in a floating bed. That was every would-be couple’s dream. Instead, she flew us to the surface to see the wasteland of parched earth, billowing dust, and radioactive air.

She knew.

She knew that, to me, the barren surface was like an arch nemesis. She knew the routine effort I dedicated to ensuring that every member of our community stayed below ground in the caverns and bunkers. She knew that on my return from offworld mining jobs, I always split in two the nanite doses I received as payment, and committed one portion to treating those afflicted with radiation sickness who couldn’t work to earn their own nanite doses.

She also knew that I usually bounded up here with my grandfather’s paramedic box, my body shrouded under my worn yellow radiation suit over layer upon layer of native Igbo fabrics, to rescue despondent strays. And she knew that seeing the desolation in which the surface languished caused me too much grief.

Yet she flew me up here.

We glided over dead deciduous bushes, scorched rubble, and radioactive desert storms, on an Ndi Elu shuttle whose joysticks and throttle controls she didn’t need to touch, as an evolved, to manage maneuvers and speed. This made the fact that she flew me to the surface on our honeymoon even more disturbing, and when I attempted to complain, she brushed her uli-painted lips against mine and said that she wanted me to see the surface with her one more time so I would understand what a priceless gift her return from her next voyage would be.

Was she talking about making the ground habitable again after what the United States, Russia, China, and North Korea (these were the main culprits) had done to it? Was that even possible?

I am a pathetic equivalent of a post-apocalypse medical doctor, and that’s probably why I prefer to call myself a paramedic even though the profession has more or less become nonexistent on Earth—or at least in Nigeria—now that all governments and the surviving corporations have fled to high Earth orbits. Still, I love fixing people. That love for medicine runs in my family, starting with my late grandfather. But the surface is something I can’t fix. Many have died in spite of my numerous attempts to save them.

When I asked her how Ndi Elu planned to make the ground habitable again, she said something about a lone Tree residing on a dwarf planet orbiting a sun 96.4 light-years away. To hear that something could be done about the residual nuclear radiation marring the Earth made my heart feel weightless as though it was on a spacewalk, and I embraced Onyinye as tightly as my clothes would permit.

They said that Onyinye found her demise right here on this planet, Nukosisi. That she was alone when it happened. That Captain Ọdụm did not pair her with another explorer whose hands she could have clasped as she died.

The Tree that killed her towers before me like an enormous pillar reinforcing the leafy sky. Its crimson trunk is massive, the width stretching over a hundred miles. This exaggerates its proximity even though my computerized polycarbonate visor displays that it’s 60.9 miles away. And the fact that we were specifically instructed to not indulge it—whatever that means—makes my skin wet with sweat and my heart thump with fear, in spite of my spacesuit’s liquid cooling and ventilation.

My belly begins to itch—perhaps a physical manifestation of my being unnerved by the Tree. But when I scratch with my gloved fingers, the crawling sensation persists. My multi-layered spacesuit, while much less unwieldy and intolerable than 21st-century extravehicular mobility units, still doesn’t allow for as much comfort as ordinary clothes when it comes to relieving an itch.

I stop behind my dark-skinned colleague Ibe as he sets his green botanical box down beside a small mound of red sand peeking through a tear in the fallen leaf that spreads like an expansive duvet underneath our booted feet. My gaze lingers on the Tree.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I mutter.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Ibe squats, opens his botanical box, and grabs a transparent cup and a glass scoop.

“I think they dumped her here to die.” I mean, to Ndi Elu in their space mansions, we Ogwu Ala are expendable. Captain Ọdụm, I suspect, understood the possible perils this rock, like every other planet humans have ever set foot on, hosts. He understood, and he sent Onyinye, the only evolved Ogwu Ala in his crew, to probe the Tree, even though he had half a dozen evolved Ndi Elu—the elite living comfortably in high Earth orbit—with him on that voyage.

Ibe doesn’t respond immediately. He is engrossed trying to use his scoop to push aside the two-meter-long red threads clustering near the sand he means to collect. That doesn’t work, as the threads, slim as a 2-0 suture, are clammy and entwined. I remember noticing, as we stepped off our shuttle nearly an hour ago, that they were everywhere. I imagine the Tree sheds them during Nukosisi’s version of autumn.

Putting down his scoop, Ibe uses his gloved hand instead to move the red tangles aside. Then he regards me. “You are still thinking about it. It’s been two years, Kachi.”

“It’s only sensible to think about stuff like that.” I watch as he scoops red soil into the container. “I wonder why no one else does that.”

With a tip of his helmeted head, he indicates the sky, where yellow sunlight beams down through gaps in the broad branches and leaves that cover the planet. “Well, normal people don’t think such thoughts aloud.”

The gesture isn’t difficult to read. His stentorian voice did well to accentuate the word “aloud.” However, I don’t care that Captain Ọdụm can hear us on the radio and monitor our progress via the cameras on our visors. My wife is dead. What else do I have to lose?

“You know, the old Christian religion said the truth shall set you free,” I say, as Ibe returns the cup and scoop to their compartments and gently closes the botanical box.

He rises with the box in his hand and we advance toward the Tree. “The truth remains that you wallow unnecessarily.”

“No,” I say, alternating between reading the fluctuating waves of data the sound vibration scanner in my hand displays and navigating the squishy leaf-veiled ground, which feels like wading in a humid farm with heaps of cocoyam leaves everywhere. “The truth resides over us . . . in that sky.” I tip a finger upward. “Look at those leaves. Should one detach and fall on us right now, what do you think would happen? Look at them. Each one is what? At least as large as a plot of land and possibly heavy enough to squash us.” Fortunately, we have only walked over four fallen leaves since our arrival, which implies that the Tree rarely sheds.

“Ehee. What has that got to do with anything?” Ibe asks, in a tone that suggests his face wears a frown inside his helmet.

“We are expendable. My wife was expendable.” Every member of the twenty groups the captain ordered down to this rock is expendable. I wouldn’t be surprised if the captain engaged the hyperdrive and abandoned us here at the slightest sign of trouble, and I suspect that was how they synced my wife’s brain with the Tree’s and left her to die. “To them, we are all Ogwu Ala. You know what else is Ogwu Ala? Ants. Aardvarks. Warthogs. They all burrow.”

“Well, we live underground. We mine planets and moons. And we even call ourselves Ogwu Ala.”

“Nonsense.” I fling a hand. “To them, the term is meant to insult. It’s a display of supremacy.”

“I realize that visiting the planet that killed your wife has not only scraped an old wound open but also sprinkled salt over it,” he says. “Trust me, I do, ’cause I think I’d be devastated, too. But don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

“Overreacting?” I have tried so hard to prevent my voice from reflecting the grief in my heart, but not anymore. I squeeze my eyes in an unavailing attempt to stifle the tear that I already feel rolling down my left cheek. “She didn’t have to die. She had no right to die.”

“Seriously? No right to die?” Ibe halts right at the margin of the leaf over which we have been walking, squats, and begins to repeat the boring process of collecting a soil sample which I imagine should be the job of a geologist or a geological robot and not a botanist.

I wince. “Your sympathy is unmistakable.”

“No, no, I pity you. Honestly. But it’s been two years. Expressing my sympathy feels redundant.”

There is no denying it. Ibe is right. And this leaves me realizing that perhaps I’m angry not just with Captain Ọdụm but also with my wife for volunteering for that mission, and with myself for being the reason she volunteered. I mean, her being integral to the Nigerian Aeronautic and Space Commission’s plan to fix the ground was supposed to be her honeymoon present to me. Perhaps I’ve not healed from her death because I’ve failed to acknowledge this since the news reached me a year ago.

“She had no right to marry me and take off the next day to another planet to die,” I mutter.

Ibe rises again and we progress. “She made a sacrifice.”

At the sound of those words, I feel heavy, as though my heart is burdened by a crushing force—perhaps the weight of my grief or Nukosisi’s gravity, which equals that of the Earth plus a tenth. I am about to reply but the irritating sound of static in my ear stops me.

Then comes that voice of Captain Ọdụm’s which sounds like a goat bleating. “Unit Four, cut it out. Focus on finding that seed.”

From then on, we both eschew our conversation. Not even a sigh escapes our lips. And while Ibe continues gathering soil samples, I alternate between picking my way over the tangles of fallen threads and glancing at the glowing blue screen of the device in my hand as it scans for extreme ultrasonic vibrations.

Now that we are quiet, the stillness of our surroundings becomes especially ominous, accentuating the fact that the planet is devoid of wind and any other life form apart from the Tree. Even the slim oscillating waves previously displayed on the screen of my scanner have now mostly disappeared, leaving behind repeating brief distortions that our dull footsteps and the occasional use of Ibe’s botanical equipment register.

The evening the cargo ship arrived, exhaling that droning, bunker-shaking noise that often marked the outset of an offworld mission, the news of Onyinye’s death accompanied it, like a torpedo rammed through my heart, leaving a vacuum that was forever there to stay. I had waited for that ship for nearly a year. That evening, all I wanted to do was open our bunker’s exit hatch, slouch down the barren wasteland naked, and let Earth’s toxicity murder me.

But I just remained there in our pathetic clinic, right where I had been standing when my colleague Udoka had brought in the ugly news from the ship, watching unseeing as the images on the old HDTV before me distorted repeatedly. With my teeth clenched, I smacked the TV thrice, each time harder, not caring what the ill who lay by the dozen on the timeworn mattresses on the cold ground behind me thought about that.

The smacks did a nice job of returning clear images to the screen, not the images of the informative documentary of extinct animal species previously playing on it but rather those of Onyinye boarding Captain Ọdụm’s ship, the Ijeaka. Seeing her in that light blue, wire-textured cat suit, so elegant and regal for an Ogwu Ala, coaxed the tears I had been holding back to bathe my eyes and cheeks. I wanted so much to hold onto those images of hers, to trap that moment in a never-ending time loop.

But then the broadcast was brief, as though Onyinye’s death meant nothing to NASC, a robotic female voice announcing that she was the first human to receive an interstellar funeral in a solar system 96.4 light-years away—as if that would change the fact that she was dead. Why couldn’t they simply call it what it was? They spaced her body without any consideration for her friends and family back here on Earth.

I put my hands over my mouth to stifle an impending wail, tears dribbling onto them. In that moment, I wanted to strip away the strength with which I supported my stance and let myself collapse on the concrete floor, but a hand I recognized as Udoka’s because of its stone hardness alighted on my shoulder and squeezed, steadying me.

My agony left my heart feeling heavy as though I was trapped on a spacecraft careening toward a black hole. The fact that the news arrived approximately one year after Onyinye’s death, one year after I had signed up for the third Nukosis expedition in the hope of eliminating the light-years between Onyinye and I, intensified that agony. Captain Ọdụm could have sent an instant message via the quantum communications network, the same way he had issued the call for new expedition members. But no—he waited until his return so that the news of his discovery could overshadow that of Onyinye’s demise.

I stood there before the old television, my legs wobbling, my rancor toward Ndi Elu seething as I watched the rest of Captain Ọdụm’s expedition team receive congratulatory handshakes from the president of Nigeria for the data they brought back with them. The albino president neither mentioned anything about Onyinye nor offered any explanation for her death. He just stood there on the stage smiling as though the universe belonged to him.

The droning noise shook the bunker again and again, the television tripping off as a result.

I turned to Udoka, the sympathy evident on her pitted face somehow encouraging the vacuum in my bosom, making my already wet cheeks overflow with tears.

“You could ask to terminate your contract,” she said. “You have a reasonable cause.”

I winced. “You know what will happen if I do that. NASC and their sponsors would own me for the rest of my life.” It was that simple. They served us unfair terms and we accepted because we needed their nanites.

She placed her hands on my lower left arm and squeezed. “I could sell some of my nanite doses. We just need a reputable lawyer.”

I chuckled. The sound felt strange, given the heaviness in my heart. “All lawyers are Ndi Elu.” Then pulling away from her, I walked toward the extremity of the hall, opposite to the television, where lay a man whose whole body was riddled with cancerous gashes. She trailed behind. I had only one nanite dose remaining. I retrieved the dispenser from the breast pocket of my haggard lab coat, raising it so Udoka could see. “This doesn’t buy their loyalty. They don’t need it.” I injected the nanites into the man.

Many Ogwu Ala had been sentenced to unpaid servitude simply because they had failed to honor offworld mining contracts they had signed. Perhaps I was overthinking everything. Perhaps, as Udoka had insinuated, my case would be different, seeing as the news of my wife’s death at the hands of Ndi Elu was still fresh.

With a loud sigh, I grabbed my suture kit from the paramedic box beside the ill man and rose to face Udoka with a stare hardened by grief and resolve. “I’m going.” Deep down, I could sense—why? But I dared not poke the suicidal thought.

Resigning, she stepped out of my way and I proceeded toward the cargo hall. She followed behind.

It didn’t take long and her silence overwhelmed me. So I said over my shoulder as we walked, “The pay is good. Apparently, they discovered something tangible on the planet.” Forty nanite doses per volunteer per week on the planet.  Plus, two meals per Earth day throughout the expedition. Even without the meal plan, it was a major step up. Typically, a week-long mining job on Mars or Europa went for a dose—two if the work environment was extremely toxic. Apparently, they factored in travel time, which they didn’t usually do. “The clinic needs those nanite doses.”

For the other thirty-nine volunteers, this was the offworld job of a lifetime. Most of them made between six and twenty-four nanite doses per year. Joining the third Nukosis expedition meant they would have regular meals for two years, be away from the residual radiation plaguing Earth, and return with enough nanite doses to last them and their families for a long time.

“The clinic needs you,” she said as we reached the hall, which was already crowded with hundreds of people from the other bunkers in my community. Some NASC cadets in fancy black spacesuits addressed the crowd, shouting out the names of the volunteers. I shoved through the throng, and each person pulled out of the way as they noticed me. There was more or less nobody there I hadn’t offered medical help.

“This isn’t a journey to Mars or the Kuiper Belt,” she continued. “A trip to and back from Nukosisi will expend no less than two years. That’s a long time to do without a doctor here.”

I turned to face Udoka as I reached the front of the crowd. “I need to know what happened to Onyinye. To find out for myself. I need to mourn her. What better place to do that than on the planet where she died? I would feel closer to her, wherever in space her body floats.” I rested my two hands on Udoka’s shoulders. Her brocade gown was a tad wet. “I have shown you nearly everything I know. You and the others can take care of everyone. I wouldn’t be leaving if I wasn’t sure of it.”

She began to cry. I joined her simply because I couldn’t help myself. My grief was still too fresh and dense. She rewarded me with a lengthy hug. When we separated, I turned to listen to the helmeted cadets. They called the names of the botanists among the volunteers, and five people (including my childhood friend Ibe) stepped toward them. Then they called the geologists, about two dozen of them. The process was tedious. First, they checked the volunteers’ documents. Next, they questioned them based on their professions, perhaps to establish some consistencies with the info they had supplied when they signed up. Then the geologists were handed radiation suits.

I was the only medical practitioner among the volunteers, and when they called me, I bade Udoka goodbye and stepped up. While I had no paper credentials or medical work experience outside Earth, I had a copy of my contract inside my red suture kit. Though the suture kit was much lighter than my grandfather’s paramedic box, it contained the essential implements required to close a wound. I always had my suture kit with me so that in the event that I became injured or happened upon a wounded person, I could suture the wound and save my nanite doses for serious cases like radiation sickness.

That day, the cadets didn’t question me. They just looked at my contract and handed me a radiation suit.

Onyinye was one of the few evolved, able to establish a symbiotic connection with many known life forms and even probe ones of lesser intelligence using Professor Ike’s neural-hormonal interfacer. She often teased that she could easily probe my brain and mine any secret I was keeping from her if we were to be connected via an interfacer. And although that habit of hers always made me grimace, I desisted from arguing with her lest she should, as usual, go on jeering that I wallowed in philosophy and religion instead of science and fact like a man from 2000 AD.

Onyinye wasn’t always an evolved. She was first a regular Ogwu Ala, a volunteer for the first Europa water mining mission. Fortunately, or should I say, unfortunately for her, the brain scan from the mandatory pre-mission medicals revealed a brain signature consistent with those of the other evolved. And thus began her many years of servitude, probing the minds of criminals (well, Ogwu Ala that defied Ndi Elu) and, like the other evolved, joining one offworld mission or another to serve as a bridge between her crew and any alien civilization they might stumble upon.

The Tree, however, was the first and only extraterrestrial life form ever discovered, and even though Onyinye wasn’t in Captain Ọdụm’s crew, the short puff-chested man didn’t hesitate to enlist her as soon as she volunteered. She should have known Ndi Elu were using her. She should have also known the Tree was neither passive nor of the same biological makeup as the Earth’s plants with which she had successfully interfaced before. As rumors among crew members during our year-long journey to Nukosisi revealed, her interfacing with the Tree led to her death.

Now here we are again, courting death, meddling with another world’s ecosystem. I joined this expedition partly to learn how my wife died. Now that I have seen the enormous beast of a Tree that killed her, its bark riddled with giant ridges that make it look like it’s bleeding human blood, I realize that I can’t blame the Tree. I blame NASC, especially Captain Ọdụm. I mean, the Tree stands here on a dwarf planet approximately the size of our moon, orbiting a sun much like ours, minding its own business. And we came looking for it.

My scanner suddenly vibrating in my hand jars me from my rumination, and when I concentrate on the screen, I notice that the oscillating waves have returned, this time richer. And a red arrow points to a green dot on the display, suggesting that there’s something emitting high-frequency sounds about half a mile ahead of us.

We came here looking for the Tree’s seed, and I suspect that I have found it. In fact, I want to scream that I have, but something holds me back—a doom-laden feeling churning in my stomach, making me feel like I’m going to defecate, something for which my suit has no provision. I step past Ibe, who then follows behind me without a word, and trace my way toward the position of whatever the green dot represents. I feel my heartbeat speeding up as I walk.

According to the data NASC scientists discovered on the shuttle that lowered Onyinye down to Nukosisi, the Tree dies every one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years but not before its roots have produced a seed that will grow to take its place and knowledge. The data also suggested that the seed is invisible but resonates with high-frequency sounds—between 200,000 Hz and 1,000,000 Hz to be precise. Onyinye was able to transmit that data to her shuttle prior to her death because the shuttle was one of the latest models fitted with Professor Ike’s neural-hormonal interfacer and able to wirelessly sync with the brains of their evolved pilots.

The data also revealed that the Tree feeds off the planet’s rich primordial radiation and, like the Earth’s trees, secretes oxygen. Thus, NASC scientists believe that if grown on Earth, the Tree will live in symbiosis with the Earth, syphoning off the residual nuclear radiation currently polluting the planet in order to grow, and at the same time replenishing the atmosphere with oxygen while the native plants recover.

The bottom line is: they believe the tree can fix the Earth in ten years.

A sigh issues from my lips, and I shake my head. While I’m earnestly for fixing the Earth, I can’t seem to stifle my dread. Although NASC scientists have harvested and studied samples of the Tree’s bark, leaves, threads, and roots, they obviously neither fully understand the biology of the Tree nor the viability of their plan. Yet they want to plant its seed on Earth, not caring that their plan could destroy the short lives of those that still call the Earth home.

They don’t care, and they have established that fact time and time again. Residing comfortably in orbit, they use us Ogwu Ala to harness resources from Mars, Kuiper Belt, and Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons to build their ruthless space-faring civilization. In return, they offer us food and medicine (low-impact nanites) that counter radiation sickness, but for a limited period of time. In fact, they manufacture the LI nanites specifically for us Ogwu Ala, to keep us half-sick and half-healthy, to keep us begging for more offworld jobs. The high-impact nanites they make only for themselves.

My scanner begins to beep. When I check the display, I find that the arrow has disappeared and the green dot has three meters written beside it. A glance over my shoulder reveals Ibe stooping a few strides behind me, quickly setting a cup into his botanical box and swinging the lid shut.

He lifts his face to regard me, the light from the torch on his helmet making me avert my gaze. “Find something?” he asks.

Static briefly follows, preceding the captain’s voice, which is tinged with anticipation. “Unit Four, come in.”

“We’re here, sir,” says Ibe as he stands with his botanical box and approaches me.

“You found something,” the captain says. “What is it?”

I don’t reply. Neither does Ibe, who looks to me to issue an answer. Instead, I take five short steps toward the tree, which now towers before us like an enormous red wall rising into space and stretching from horizon to horizon. The beep from my scanner resonates louder and faster, five green arrows appearing on the screen and zeroing in on the dot.

“I’m standing on it.” I don’t include sir in my response because I earnestly believe that a man who left my wife to die deserves neither the title nor my respect. “It resonates at six hundred seventy-eight kilohertz, eighteen decibels.”

“Splendid! Call back the other units,” he says, and a female voice I peg as that of the brown-faced lieutenant, who manages communications and often refused us a call home throughout the eleven months and nine days we spent in transit, replies, “Yes, sir”

A long, uncomfortable pause follows, and I can’t help but sense a medley of fear and discomfort in the deafening silence. As excited about the discovery as the captain is, he wouldn’t risk any of the Ndi Elu on Ijeaka if he can help it. Their contracts, I imagine, are more delicate than what we Ogwu Ala got. They are like royalty, and the captain would rather risk us—probably how he sent my wife down here without backup.

The thought flares up my rancor, and I speak up, “When are your specialists arriving to do the harvesting?” This gets me an elbow from Ibe.

Another long pause ensues, leaving Ibe and I staring at each other, my stomach rumbling.

Then the captain says, “Give me an analysis.”

I hesitate, contemplating the dot on my screen, but Ibe snatches the scanner from me, then touches the analyze icon and a window pops up, displaying graphical data most of which I’m unable to decipher. The part that isn’t gibberish to me hints at the size of the object the scanner discovered and its position in the ground.

“It’s 30.6 centimeters in the ground,” Ibe says. “Diameter 7.0234 centimeters. Just forwarded the data to you.”

The captain sighs. “That looks like it should be easy to harvest.”

“Yes. We can do it.”

“You don’t have the necessary equipment.” The captain’s response sounds hesitant.

“Based on the samples I’ve collected so far, the topsoil here is consistently soft enough to be dug by hand or a scoop. One of the scoops in my box is sizable enough.” Ibe bends, opens his botanical box, and fetches a stainless steel scoop much like an olden sugar scoop but flatter and broader. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“Good,” the captain says. The word is more or less an exhalation of relief. And that’s the thing with the radio—it captures everything. “Be careful with the seed.”

“Yes, sir.” Ibe comes toward me.

I adjust to the side, hissing, “Are you crazy?”

“What’s the point of our training on transit if not this? Chill. We can handle this.”

“Do not damage it,” comes the captain’s voice, as though to silence us into focus. “I repeat, do not damage it.”

Ibe stoops, touches the screen a few times, and a green light shines from its back. Like a spotlight, the circular beam highlights the part of the ground on which I was previously standing and which is riddled with twists of long threads from the tree. The screen in Ibe’s hand then displays a three-dimensional cross section I figure is that of the highlighted ground, and at the center of the image resides the seed in profile. It appears to be nestling inside a root.

First, Ibe uses the scoop to push the threads away. Then as he begins to spoon soil away, the captain’s voice sounds in my ear, “Gently,” reminding us that he’s watching via our cameras. After the fifth scoop, Ibe’s spoon meets the root harboring the seed and leaves a slight cut and dent that suggest that the Tree’s root (perhaps the part containing the seed) is soft, like a ripe papaya. This particular root is crimson and, according to the cross section, forty centimeters broad. A very slim root, I would call it, compared to how massive the Tree is.

Using the beam from the scanner as a guide and his scoop as a blade, Ibe makes a circular incision on the root. The idea, I figure, as Ibe gently pushes his scoop down and into the root, is to skirt the seed, to cut out the portion of the root containing the seed without touching it. A black fluid, much like blood but as black as coal tar, starts seeping out, and for a moment I think I hear the sound of bees buzzing in the dead silence of our surroundings.

“What’s that?” the captain’s voice roars with concern, not for me or Ibe, but for the mission, I think. “You cut the seed?”

“No,” Ibe says, glancing at me and then inhaling deeply. “The root bleeds.” When he pulls out his scoop, the resulting flanks of the cut flop like flesh without supporting bones, leaving a cleft so deep the black fluid pools inside. This speeds up my heartbeat and incites in my bosom pity for the Tree.

“This is wrong,” I mutter.

“What did you say?” Ibe asks as he pushes his scoop down again, beside the previous cut he made.

The ground begins to tremble. At first, I imagine it is my heartbeat escalating. But then the tremor strengthens and the buzzing sound I heard before begins to resonate again—louder this time. Ibe jerks back, dropping to the ground on his buttocks and pulling his fluid-coated scoop with him, the scanner tumbling out of his hand and hitting the soil with a soft thud. I, on the other hand, struggle to maintain my stance. Even the captain notices the phenomenon.

“What’s that noise?” he asks, his voice panicked.

Neither I nor Ibe reply. And as I drop on all fours to steady myself, Ibe begins to scream, “What’s happening? What have we done?” his voice drowning that of the captain.

The tremor and buzzing intensify. Then something—a root, massively forked and disturbingly flexible—rips out of the ground with such force that it sends heaps and a spray of sticky soil flying in the air. Before I can flinch, it swings itself at Ibe, grabs him by the leg, flings him up, and slams his body against the ground. Ibe’s helmet cracks, exposing his black face, and I can hear his oxygen fizzling out. The root must have damaged his canister.

As a paramedic, I feel the burning compulsion to help Ibe, but I’m frozen in my position, sweat crawling all over my skin in spite of my suit’s cooling garment. Ibe isn’t moving, and I know it in my bones that I’m next. Still on all fours, I watch the root retreat from Ibe’s leg and twist toward me. It jerks forward. I stagger backward, falling on my back with my guard up.

But nothing happens. I slowly move my hands away from my view to find the root writhing and buzzing before my face as if angry and cursing. In that moment, I feel my urine wetting my loins and legs. Truly, I often wallowed in religion and philosophy, but I was never a man of faith until now—I mean, I can’t stop my lips from reciting, “God, please. Please.” I also often imagined that given my grief, death on this planet would only be a blessing, a means of perhaps seeing my wife again. But gazing in horror at the root hissing at me leaves me gasping for life.

The root, however, withdraws from me and toward the Tree, until it disappears in the deepening gloom of the planet. It’s only then that I become aware of the captain’s shrieking voice. “Unit Four, come in. Ibe! Kachi! Unit Four, come in!”

I don’t respond, as I am busy trying to mellow my nerves with long, deep breaths. I scramble toward Ibe’s motionless body.

“Any response from the other groups? Did they make it out?” Ọdụm asks.

“No, sir,” comes a reply from the lieutenant. “I think they are dead, sir.”

“Analysis?”

“Possibly an organized simultaneous attack, sir.”

“That can’t be right,” the captain says. “You scanned the surface for life signs on our arrival, yes?”

“I did, sir. Detected only one life sign. The Tree’s.”

“Then who attacked them?” the captain barks, his outrage hinting at his devastation, which in turn suggests that he cares—neither about me and Ibe toward whom I now hurriedly crawl nor about the other groups whose members are supposedly dead. He only cares about the mission, and if he’s truly devastated, it is because he realizes he’s lost the seed, which implies that, as I previously dreaded, he would most likely abandon us here to die.

“I saw a moving branch in one of the feeds,” the lieutenant says.

“A moving branch?”

“Maybe a tangled root. Here, sir.”

A long pause follows.

When I reach where Ibe sprawls unconscious, my paramedic instinct kicks in. I check the biomedical monitor on his shoulder, my fingers tapping it a few times. The monitor looks broken and dead. The fingers then dart to his neck, only for me to realize they can’t get to it with his suit in the way. Therefore, I slip my index finger through the fissure in his visor and place it right under his nostrils. If he still breathes, I can’t feel his breath.

“No, no, no. Ibe! Ibe!” I unlatch his extravehicular visor assembly, since it’s broken and no longer protects him from the planet’s radiation. His head lifelessly falls sideways, and when I run my fingers along his nape, I discover his neck is broken. I slump to the ground on my buttocks and let out my grief in a long squeal, not caring that the noise might offend the Tree.

Static. “Kachi, come in,” comes the captain’s voice again. “Kachi, are you there? What happened?”

“He’s dead,” I cry. “He’s dead.”

“What attacked him?” the captain asks. “I want to send a rescue team, but first I need to know what we’re dealing with here.”

As though in response to the captain’s mention of a rescue team, a brief droning groan issues out from the Tree and darkness swoops on the planet. The darkness is so grave that I can barely see Ibe’s body, in spite of the light from my helmet’s torch. My heart begins to thump as though it’s trying to tear out of my chest and abandon me on the planet. I scramble closer to Ibe, grabbing his hand, if only to hold onto something familiar.

“What just happened?” the captain’s voice sounds in my ear.

I lift my face skyward, but the light of my torch doesn’t get far before disappearing into the darkness. When I look sideways, the same thing happens. “I don’t . . . I don’t know. I can’t see anything. Everywhere is dark. Please, Captain, you need to get me out of here.”

“And I will. But I need to know what you saw. Calm yourself. Take a deep breath. And tell me what attacked you.” He says those words as though he earnestly cares. But somewhere in his tone resides a devious tinge that reminds me of an old video of a girl talking her boyfriend into committing suicide.

Therefore, instead of telling him the Tree’s root killed Ibe, I continue pleading with him to get me off the rock, and the plea, I swear, is sincere.  I can feel my sweat sluicing all over my body, and breathing inside my suit has become a Herculean Task. I can’t help feeling that my suit, like the Tree, is sentient and means to suffocate me, that that monstrous root sneaks toward me with ill intent, and that my thoughts are not my own.

Sitting there trembling like one trapped naked in the now-thawed ice of Antarctica, I fight a gnawing need to unlatch my suit’s rear entry hatch. Maybe for a while. I figure I could do that without the planet’s primordial radiation inciting any health complication that the nanites in my dispenser cannot correct. After all, having lived on a radioactive Earth for most of my thirty years, I imagine I have, to an extent, become resilient.

I shake my head in the darkness with as much force as I can muster, trying to stifle that urge. Why do I need to shed my suit, I ask myself. It’s not that my primary life support subsystem is defective. An answer creeps out of nowhere into my head. It reminds me that I have, for most of my life, resided on the ground where air, though riddled with residual radiation from the nuclear war and then purified as it passed through the shelter ventilations, was unmetered and we didn’t have to don something as claustrophobic as the spacesuit in which I currently feel trapped.

“Kachi. Focus.” The desperation in the captain’s voice rescues me from the urge to shed my suit. “There’s a veil around the planet. Not the Tree’s leaves. The veil appears to be black and solid. A sort of shield. We will try to punch through it so we can send a rescue team. But I still need to know what we’re up against.”

“It’s . . . it’s the roots,” I stammer. “The Tree is alive. Please come, come. You have to come now.”

“Okay. Hold on,” the captain says. “A rescue team is inbound.”

I sit there, shaking like one gripped by the black hand of death itself, and wait, listening for the slightest sound suggesting a sudden movement in the deathly silence and darkness around me. Soon, I figure that either my fear has got the better of me and I have lost my innate ability to tell time, or twenty to thirty minutes have passed and I haven’t heard from the rescue team.

“Cap—captain?” I mutter. “Captain, are you there?”

“Well, this is problematic,” he answers. I didn’t expect that. I suspected they had engaged the hyperdrive and left me behind. “Our attempt to punch a path for the rescue shuttle through the shield failed. Our torpedoes didn’t even make a dent. I asked you what attacked you but you failed to mention that the branches are sentient. I’ve lost four crew members and another shuttle because of you.”

“It was a root that attacked me,” I blurt. “I swear.”

Although Captain Ọdụm remains silent, I can discern his breath hitting the mic. After what seems like a minute-long pause, he sighs and says, “Can you still harvest the seed? If you expect me to risk more crew members on your behalf, you have to give me something. Make it worth the effort.”

I want to shriek at him. At the top of my voice. But the hope that I’m wrong about him stops me. “Trying to harvest the seed was what put us in this mess,” I say as calmly as I can, which means that although I didn’t bark, my tone was far from friendly. I swear I heard irritation in my own voice.

“Alright,” he says. “Hold on tight. We’re working on another rescue plan.”

“How long?” I tap the biomedical monitor on my arm, and when the screen comes on, I find that my life support system has only an hour worth of oxygen left. “I’m running out of air.”

“Use Ibe’s life support system. We can guide you through extracting it.”

“It’s damaged,” I say. “The root punctured his canister.”

“Can you find your way to the shuttle? The torch on your visor should be able to light your way.”

Suddenly, I feel a wave of relief. The shuttle is approximately five kilometers from my current position and it has enough oxygen to sustain a two-man crew for a day and one person for two days. An hour of oxygen in my suit, I figure, should be able to get me to the shuttle.

“I can try,” I say. Then I rise to my feet and begin my trudge toward the shuttle. Unfortunately, after about ten steps, my light hits a barrier—a sort of curved black wall with a vertically ridged surface. When I lift my face in the hope that the barrier can be climbed, I notice that it curves inward, forming a roof over me.

“Umm, Captain?” I call. “How big is the shield over the planet?”

“Not over, but around the planet,” he says. “The whole planet. Why?”

“I can’t get to the shuttle.” This realization makes me want to throw myself on the ground and slap and curse its soil. “There’s a smaller barrier over me. A dome. Judging from the curves, I think it’s maybe two to three hundred square feet.”

“Hold on,” the captain says and I move leftward, inspecting the wall with my torch, all the while trying to convince myself that I’m not going to die on the planet. But everything that has happened—Ibe’s death, the shield around the planet, the dead rescue team, the dome over me, and ultimately the fact that I’m alive but trapped—suggests that the Tree means to murder me slowly. I mean, so far I have surmised that there are three possible ways I can die, of asphyxiation, of exposure to the planet’s radiation, or of hunger and thirst. Was this how my wife died?

“Kachi,” a male voice I don’t recognize comes through the radio. “I’m Dr. Ugo, and I have astrobiologist Dr. Dima with me. We think the attack, dome, and shield are the life form’s defense against external threats. This all happened when you cut the root, correct?”

“No,” I say. “Ibe was the one that cut it.”

“Okay. During our last expedition here, we shaved off some root, bark, leaf, and even fiber samples. Nothing of this magnitude happened,” he says, and I wonder how they don’t see that trying to harvest the Tree’s seed was the life-threatening event. “So, I need to know. How deep is this cut?”

“Let me check.” I trace my way in the darkness back to the cut. When I gingerly drop on all fours, silently praying to the Tree not to strike me, and closely inspect it with my light—

I discern something. The black fluid, which now soaks the ground and thread tangles around the root, has stopped flowing from the cut and the cleft itself seems to be healing. “I think it’s healing itself.”

I think the remark jarred them. Dr. Ugo doesn’t say another word. Not for a while. When he does speak again, he suggests that if we allow the root to heal, there’s the possibility that the dome and shield will collapse. “How much of it has healed?” he asks.

Focusing my light on the cut once again, I inspect it. “A tenth. Maybe. The cut is very deep. At least twenty centimeters deep.” And when I hear the doctor mutter, “This is useless,” I ask, “What?”

“That’s a tenth in an hour,” he says. “There’s not enough time. You’d run out of oxygen before the cut has completely healed. That’s assuming the dome and shield will indeed collapse after that.”

Once again, the urge to shed my suit ignites in my bosom. “If I should unlatch my rear entry hatch, how long would it take before I absorb a lethal dose of radiation?”

“Maybe an hour or two. It’s suicide. Instead, you might want to try accelerating the healing.”

I perk up. “How?”

“What does the root look like?”

I adjust my head from side to side to concentrate my torch on the cut. “It’s actually quite supple. Like flesh.”

“Good,” the doctor says. “Try closing the cut by pulling the flanks together. Then administer your nanites.”

“What?” I wince. While I don’t know much about nanotechnology, I understand that nanites are microscopic vessels designed to venture into the human body and fix problems like cancer, damaged cells due to radiation, and wounds. I know it in my guts that the application the doctor suggested is careless and dangerous, seeing as the nanites weren’t made for extraterrestrial life forms.

“I have a dose. Another dose is in Ibe’s pocket,” I say. We all get a dose each, which if unused at the end of an expedition, we’re expected to return. “I think it would be better if I shed my suit and use the doses to counter any radiation sickness that manifests. This should buy me a lot of time.” At least a day.

“Are you a medical doctor or a nanoscientist?” Ugo yells into my ear.

“I’m a paramedic,” I say.

“A paramedic? Hogwash! The only reason we’re going through all this trouble to extract you is because of the firsthand information you have. Unless you want to die down there, I advise that you do as you’re told.”

My whole body shivering inside my suit, I unzip the small pocket on my lower torso assembly and fetch the pen-like nanite dispenser. I pull the two sagged flanks of the cut in the root together and hold them with one hand, thus freeing the other for injecting the nanites, my gloves tainted with the black fluid pumping out of the root again. I’ve practiced suturing using synthetic beef many times in the past, and I’m most certain that’s what the root feels like—synthetic beef.

As I move the injector closer to the root, I notice something. Tiny crimson wisps rise from it the way a dog’s hackles raise when the dog is in fight mode, except that the wisps sway from side to side, growing toward the injector in my hand as though trying to check it out. I let them, and when they touch the point of the injector, they shrink away from it, the tree issuing a brief buzzing sound once again.

I quickly release the root, and as I stagger backward, something strikes me in the darkness, throwing me into the air. My back hits a rough wall and then I slide to the ground, my head spinning and my ears ringing.

“Kachi! What just happened?” I hear a distant voice saying, but I’m too disorientated to indulge it.

As I lie on the ground, my aching shoulders against a wall, I begin to feel lightheaded. That feeling is accompanied by a headache that intensifies with time. I try to breathe but choke. I move my hands toward my neck. Something is wrong with my life support subsystem and I have no idea what. I don’t have time to think, as I grasp my neck and gasp for air. All I know is that if I don’t do something immediately, I will suffocate.

“Kachi, come in,” the captain calls. “What happened?”

I don’t reply. I can’t reply. Instead, I push myself to a sitting position and reach for my suit’s rear entry hatch. I manage to unlatch and yank the hatch open. Cold air washes over me, and I inhale quickly and repeatedly as though it were the last remnants of air on the planet. The air stings my nostrils and has a taste to it—salty and ashy.

I rise to my feet, in spite of the pain that besieges my muscles and bones, and climb out of the suit, wearing only my communications carrier assembly and liquid cooling and ventilation garment. Luckily for me, the garment has soft boots, so I don’t have to contend with my bare feet touching the soggy ground.

“Kachi, are you there?” the captain’s voice resonates again.

“It hit me, captain.” I press two fingers against my temple as though to rub away the now fading headache. “The root hit me. My life support subsystem is compromised.”

“Compromised? How?”

“I’m out of my suit. Wearing only my liquid cooling—” A pang assaults my head. A migraine much worse than the headache that accompanied my near-miss asphyxiation. I drop to my knees, squealing and grabbing my head, the only thought on my mind being “is this some sort of radiation sickness from my exposing myself to the planet’s atmosphere?”

“The nanites!” I blurt out, remembering that it can counter the sickness. I’m about to dive to my spacesuit, to see if I can extract the torch on my visor and use it to find my nanite dispenser when a series of images begin to flash in my mind. There I am on all fours, screaming at the top of my voice as my brain becomes so inundated I fear it’s going to crash.

The migraine subsides and I begin to make sense of the visions. First, I see myself running under thousands of faint crimson lights beaming down from the sky. Then I see the shuttle Ibe and I arrived in beckoning me from a distance. Somehow, I can see through the metallic wall, and in a corner on its floor resides my suture kit.

Immediately, I realize what I must do. Every other thing—the static in my ear, the captain’s bawling voice, my fright—becomes like a distant memory. Staggering to my feet, my balance a tad off, I bound toward the shuttle in the darkness, neither attempting to detach my visor’s torch (something I imagine will be difficult or even impossible) nor minding that the wall of the dome over me bars the way ahead.

Somehow, I find that I don’t need a light, in spite of the darkness. Somehow, I know I’m not going to stumble and fall. It is as though my sight resides in my mind, or should I say a collective mind, a pool of intelligence that ruthlessly belittles everything I have learned in my thirty years of life. It is as if I have become one with the planet and it’s guiding my every step. I say this because as soon as I near the dome’s ridged wall, a circular portion of it dissipates like a hologram that has just lost its power supply.

I don’t pause to think. I can’t. My impulse nudges me onward and the images in my mind accentuate the importance of my suture kit. And as I step outside the dome, I discover a world illuminated by butterfly-sized crimson lights fluttering in the black sky. I continue running, occasionally plodding over the Tree’s fallen leaves.

I run and run and run until I reach the shuttle, my heart drumming with a hectic rhythm that warns that I might crash to the ground and die should I exert such pressure on my body again. Therefore, when I open the hatch and stumble into the shuttle, I don’t pick up my suture kit and break into a run again. Instead, I scurry to the cockpit, sit, and grab the joystick.

Before long, I’m in the air, thrumming toward the dome. The flashes of images in my head have subsided. Even the captain’s voice no longer buzzes in my ear. And I figure for a moment that the crew might have engaged the hyperdrive and left me on this planet to die like my wife. But I don’t care. All I want to do is fix the Tree. It’s like a hunger, and that hunger overrides everything, even the fact that I’ve spent more than an hour in the planet’s radioactive air.

I only pilot the shuttle for a minute or two and there it is, Ibe’s broken body sprawling on the ground amidst a cluster of the Tree’s tangled fallen threads. Somehow, the dome is gone. The whole of it and not just a portion. My shuttle’s light shines on its previous location and I can’t see its wall. The red lights in the still-black sky, however, persist.

Landing the shuttle some meters away from Ibe’s body, I don’t switch off its lights. I grab my suture kit, scuttle to the Tree’s cut root and, as I fall on my knees right there, I notice that the cleft has healed a tad more. However, the healed part is a smidgen compared to the whole cut.

It only takes unzipping my faded red suture kit to realize that my suture thread isn’t appropriate for the Tree. I pick up one of the Tree’s tangled crimson threads beside me and, with my scissors, cut out a long thread which I then attach to a tapered suture needle since the root is supple.

I wedge the needle between the jaws of my needle driver, pull the flanks of the cleft together, and begin to stitch. As I drive the needle through the root, it begins to bleed black fluid again, tainting my gloved hands. At first, the process feels unwieldy, as I keep dropping the needle because of the weight of the thread, but as time passes, my hand steadies and the needle goes in and out seamlessly, as though I am suturing human flesh.

While I’m at it, the flashes of images assault my mind again, but they don’t give me a migraine this time. Neither do they deter my efforts to suture the cut. The visions, however, are different this time.

I see the Tree growing on Earth, in Awka precisely, its trunk spanning a whole village in the south, even though it looks younger and less gigantic than the one whose wound I’m suturing. I see children scampering under its great shadow, and they wear no protective clothing against Earth’s residual radiation. But then as suddenly as a streak of lightning across a gloomy sky, the beautiful visions are swept away by a new wave of images that bring a grimace to my face, images that speak of starvation and impending extinction.

The first to wither and die are the Earth’s plants. Then what’s left of our wildlife follows. A great famine besieges the Earth, millions die, and the surviving humans retreat to space, to mining planets and moons and asteroids while the Tree towers, spreads its great branches and expansive leaves across the planet, and makes Earth its home.

Weaving the thread through the root to close the cut expended an hour, more or less. And the satisfaction that accompanied finally tying a square knot to secure the rough stitches made me want to drop to the ground giggling. I don’t, seeing as my whole body feels laden with grave weakness. I crawl toward Ibe’s corpse, coughing and not caring whether or not the cut is healing faster now.

Another cough, this time a painful one, sends blood spurting out of my mouth. I put a hand over my lips as I fall beside Ibe’s body, and when I retrieve the hand, the blood painting my glove suffuses me with dread. The foremost thought that visits my mind is that the planet’s radiation is killing me. Then I recall that Ibe and I each arrived with a nanite dose in the pockets of our lower torso assemblies.

First, I grab Ibe’s leg, pull it closer, fish out his nanite dispenser and inject myself in the neck. Then I scramble around my surroundings in the blazing light of the shuttle, looking for my own nanite dispenser, which I lost when the Tree struck me. When I can’t find it, I collapse supine by Ibe’s side and gaze hopelessly at the tiny lights populating the darkness in the sky.

Lying there, I begin to reconcile with my fate. The nanite dose I injected into my body can counter my radiation sickness today, but what of tomorrow? The darkness in the sky suggests that the shield over the planet hasn’t collapsed despite my having sutured the cut. And Captain Ọdụm has abandoned me on this rock with no food—there’s water in the shuttle. Thus, I figure I only have a few days before death finds me. I find some consolation in knowing it will find me here on the same planet it found Onyinye, right under the Tree that killed her.

At the thought, a sharp pain assaults my head. I jerk to a sitting position with a scream, my hands flying to my temples.

A voice as familiar as the sound of my own follows: SisiMumu didn’t kill me.

I push myself up to my feet, my eyes wandering, wondering from where the voice, my wife’s voice, originates.

I radioed in, the voice resonates again and I reckon it’s in my head. I warned Captain Ọdụm that if we didn’t sever the connection, I would lose my mind, myself. He ordered me to keep probing SisiMumu. How can it now be SisiMumu’s fault that I transcended?

“Onyinye. Onyi,” I cry, my gaze still combing my surroundings with much hope in my heart. “Where are you?”

You know where I am, Kachi. I’m part of SisiMumu now. And it’s okay. I like it here. It’s peaceful and enlightening.

I fall on my knees. “What of me? You have to come back.”

I’m not your Onyi. I’m just a memory. A simulation of her essence. I reveal myself now to warn you. They will all die if they try again. This is a whole civilization, a peaceful race existing as one—a pool of matter and consciousness.

I chuckle. It’s a hopeless expression, my shoulders slouched. “Your warning is belated. They’re gone. They abandoned me here. Just like they abandoned you.”

No. They are still in orbit. SisiMumu jammed their radio signal so you can focus on fixing the damage you and your comrade did.

“They waited,” I say. “They waited for me.”

No. They might not care about you or the units, but they have twenty shuttles down here. We will free them once SisiMumu has healed.

“You promised me. You said you will make the surface habitable again. It was to be your honeymoon gift to me.”

And I will keep that promise. There’s a new world. A refugee world 98,423.78 light-years from here. It’s a world much like Earth, but bigger, and the gravity is only off by 2 percent. Not only do its denizens accept refugees; they also reach out to dying worlds. I can’t make the surface habitable again for Ogwu Ala, but I can rescue them to a habitable surface. All Ogwu Ala can stay there until the Earth’s surface is safe again. I have transmitted a message to the world via SisiMumu’s subspace communication. They will find you. Save everyone.

“What about us, Onyi?” A cough escapes me, but it doesn’t spew blood as I feared. “What about—”

Enough, she snaps in my head, stirring a mild headache that makes me wince. SisiMumu is done healing. You and your comrades can leave now.”

“My comrades?” A frown visits my face. “You killed them.”

They are only incapacitated. Take them.  And don’t come back. None of you should come back here.

Her voice fades away in my head. In fact, I sense it and the headache leave. Now I just feel empty, like a wheeling can of synthetic milk without any actual milk inside.

The sky suddenly groans—it’s like the droning of a machine world waking up to a new morning. The darkness in the heavens dissipates and sunlight beams down on me through massive branches and vast leaves.

I inspect the root Ibe and I cut to discover that it has truly healed and now glows with a faint red light. I’m tempted to venture toward it, but I dare not. The captain’s voice once again emanates from my earpiece, but I don’t respond. Instead, I say goodbye to the SisiMumu, to my wife, haul Ibe’s corpse into the shuttle, and ascend.

Then I hail the ship.

“Rescue crews are on the way,” says the captain, as though he and his people have truly been working to rescue me and not their expensive shuttles and harvesters. “How safe is it down there?”

“It’s safe, Captain,” I say. “So far as your people don’t touch anything that doesn’t belong to them.”

My anger rages. It burns like a sun in my heart, making my head seethe like a lake infiltrated by volcanic lava. It lines my skin with thick veins. I wish I could reach across the long computerized glass table between Captain Ọdụm and me and throttle him. But two cadets have their pinioning hands on my shoulders.

How could he? Sitting there swathed in his jade uniform, he doesn’t understand the gravity of his actions. I can’t help wondering why human life means so little to him. Though Ibe is dead, he was still human and deserved a proper burial.

Instead, the captain ordered his men to salvage Ibe’s spacesuit and eject his corpse as soon as my shuttle docked in the bay, without even allowing me to pay my respects. This makes me wonder if Onyinye hadn’t received a worse treatment.

Now the captain expects me to recount my encounter on Nukosis.  I don’t do that. Instead, I give him SisiMumu’s warning. “I have a message for you. SisiMumu will kill you should you ever venture on her world again.”

He chuckles, touching a stubby hand to his chest, which I consider too broad for a dwarf. “Me in particular?”

I wince. “Ye—yes. All of you.”

“Isn’t that why we have you Ogwu Ala?” he says, a smirk on his triangular face. “We command. You burrow.”

My heart burns hotter. I fear it will go supernova. Sitting there, I can only glare at the captain, the cadets’ massive hands preventing me from doing something stupid.

Captain Ọdụm stands and paces toward me. “SisiMumu. That’s an unusual name.  Did you meet something on Nukosisi? Perhaps the being that initiated the shield?” When I remain quiet, he bends before my face and intones, “You will tell me everything.”

As he retreats to his end of the table, a female officer swathed in a black uniform less decorated than his ambles in carrying a glass plate containing two odd-looking metallic syringes that immediately remind me of nanite dispensers.

My heart pounds, and my body twitches. “What’s that?”

“Nanites.” The captain smiles, gesturing for the officer to put the plate down on the table. “A different kind.”

Someone else walks in. A girl in her early twenties, gray-eyed but black-skinned, wearing the same form-fitting cat suit Onyinye wore the day she boarded the Ijeaka to Nukosisi. And the realization hits me. She’s an evolved. She gently picks up one of the syringes and injects herself in the neck. The black-uniformed officer picks up the other syringe and approaches me.

“Please! Please, you can’t do this.” I squirm harder in my seat, but that doesn’t shake off the cadets pinning me down. The girl’s soulless stare unnerves me. Last I heard, an evolved getting into your head can be ruthlessly excruciating and bares your whole life to them. “Please, Captain. I will tell you everything.”

“Sergeant.” The captain raises a hand. “Hold on.” He regards me with an inane grin on his face as the sergeant stops beside me and waits. “Well?”

With a grimace, I tell him SisiMumu is the race that makes up the Tree, that the seed is their next generation. I tell him the Tree would feed off the residual nuclear radiation marring the Earth, while its branches and leaves would complement the ozone layer. It will eventually make life impossible for Earth’s plants.

“Why do you think Nukosis is devoid of plants and other life forms?” I ask, avoiding the evolved’s eye. She looks unblinking at me in the most perturbing way, as though she is already probing my mind. “After the death of our plants, the few animals left that feed on plants would follow. Soon, it would be our turn to die. We would starve to death.”

His big eyes narrow. “Are you making this up?”

“Planting SisiMumu’s seed on Earth will be a disaster.” I try to contain the frustration in my voice but fail. “Why do you want to destroy the only home we know?”

He goes into a fit of laughter. “Who said anything about Earth? We need you Ogwu Ala where you are. We are talking about Mars. Giving it an oxygen-rich atmosphere and protection from cosmic radiation. We can grow food in labs as we have always done, but at least we get to venture outside and enjoy free air.”

That hideous remark of his, of needing Ogwu Ala where they are—underground, subjugated, and subservient—leaves me deciding he doesn’t need to know about the refugee world.

“There’s more,” the evolved who has been quiet all this while says, her voice disturbingly calm and tuneless. “He’s hiding something.”

My heart thumps.

“Okay, that’s it,” The captain says. “Sergeant.”

Before I can say another word, the sergeant jabs me in the neck with the syringe.

“The rumors are true,” she whispers in my ear. “This is going to hurt like hell.”

I brace myself, my dismayed eyes darting to the evolved, to the captain, and to the evolved again. “Please,” I whimper. If the word meant anything to her, she seems too indifferent, too disconnected from reality to show it.

I jerk to my feet, my whole body raining sweat. No one, for reasons unknown to me, tries to stop me. They all just cringe from me. So I scramble toward the captain. “Please! Tell her to stop. I will tell you every—”

My limbs stop working, and I crash to the floor, stiff in my sinews and bones. It is as though we have just crash-landed on a cold alien planet whose intense gravity wouldn’t let me even flinch. Then I feel the weight of her mind pressing against mine, crushing my sanity and clawing at my memories. The migraine that accompanies the hideous experience is so commanding that for a brief moment I wonder if one of the cadets is striking at my head with a hammer.

I can’t move. I can’t scream. The torturous pain persists. When I try to counter it with a memory of Onyinye, the one that leaps to the surface is Onyinye’s voice saying, I have transmitted a message to the world via SisiMumu’s subspace communication. They will find you. Save everyone.

Immediately, the pain abates as abruptly as it came. Everywhere is quiet. Someone is gasping for breath. I work a finger and it moves. So I look up from the floor to find the evolved leaning against the wall behind her and panting.

“What was that?” The captain hurries to her, grabbing her by the upper arm so she doesn’t fall.

“They are coming to take them,” the evolved whimpers, her voice frail. “All Ogwu Ala.” She drops to the floor in spite of the support the short captain offers.

“They?” The captain’s eyes flit from her to me and back to her. “Who are they?”

“I . . . I couldn’t get in. Everywhere was dark.”

The captain glances at me with horror. “He is an evolved?”

“No, no. It was something else. Something else blocking me. So—something else . . .” She goes silent and her head flops.

Everybody turns to me. The cadets point their weapons at me. On their now-sweaty faces is fright of the sort I don’t think I’ve ever known. And I reckon I’m a dead man.

Every day, they torture me.

The torture is simple, yet effective.  They inject a new kind of nanites into my system and leave me there, in the sensor-and-camera-riddled cell NASC made for me, and watch from their observation room while the nanites break my body and repair it over and over again.

First, an agonizing slit appears along my throat, spilling a disquieting amount of my blood and threatening to sever my windpipe while I lie there on the cold metal floor squirming and screaming from the depth of my stomach. Then the cut closes itself and, just when I think it’s over, another tear opens, circling my left eye and then right, inching closer and closer to my eyeballs, until it eventually blinds me and knocks me unconscious. When I wake again, I can see.

The sequence continues, a nightmarish cycle targeted at breaking my already broken mind. From quarantine on the Ijeaka to solitary confinement in the notorious OkeNga maximum-security prison orbiting Jupiter, from multiple brain scans and blood works to endless instances of excited, perhaps gleeful, scientists extracting tissue and even bone marrow samples from my body, it’s absurd to imagine I’m not broken.

Today, they strap me to an operating table, whose eight robotic tentacles won’t quit buzzing over me as two doctors adjust their positions via a screen-only device in the female’s possession. Now I’m certain of it. They found something inside me, and they mean to open me up.

Lying there, sniffling, my tears dribbling down the sides of my eyes, I can’t help but indulge a sudden thought of SisiMumu. I want to believe that my encounter at Nukosisi was all a lie, if only to banish the dread that ships from the refugee world have arrived and rescued every Ogwu Ala but me. But the thought, or should I say feeling, that wakes and persists is strangely one of anticipation, in spite of my tears, as though something alien is in my system toying with my hormones when clearly I’m about to be carved open like a chicken.

I indulge a gnawing impulse to perk up, but the straps hold me down. Just then, a flicker, as clear blue as the waters of America’s old Crater Lake, forms in the air a few meters from my foot and begins to expand, seething and bubbling as though it reacts to an invisible heat source behind it. The doctors are startled. They scramble away from me and the froth of blue energy which continues to enlarge, forming what seems like an upright Jacuzzi. I, on the other hand, can only lie there on the table, shuddering and panting as fear overpowers my previous anticipation.

Then the light spits out two short figures, making my heart lurch painfully. I realize as I try to calm my nerves that the beings dripping transparent goo next to my shaking feet might be from the refugee world. The doctors dart toward the exit hatch. Soon, I’m alone with the beings, frantic and unable to move.

“Ndewo,” one of the figures greets in Igbo, waving a hand on which I can clearly see six digits. Its voice emanates from a closed pointy mouth, dry and hoarse. “Don’t be afraid. SisiMumu sent us.”

“SisiMumu?” I frown. How is it that they speak my language, I wonder. I strain my neck to get a better view of their bodies, which are more or less four-foot silhouettes against the bubbling light behind them. Why did it take them so long to arrive when they are obviously capable of instantaneous travel, and how did they figure out my precise location?

As if they’re in my head, the second one replies, “Your transmitter,” pointing a stubby finger at my head. Its tone is much lighter and higher in pitch. I assume it’s a female, but apart from its voice, nothing else distinguishes it from the other.

“My transmitter?”

“A piece of SisiMumu in your brain.”

I wince. And the reason those barbaric Ndi Elu were going to open me up dawns.

“She touched you, yes?”

I nod, my ears detecting something, a drumming sound coming from beyond the exit hatch to my left, which the doctors left open when they fled. I jerk, twisting my body in the hope of freeing myself from the straps. Surprisingly, they indulge me, slacking. I scramble down the table to the beings, my breathing labored.  “They are coming. Please, please. Take me. They are coming,” I whimper, my bare feet restless. The alien beings seem like the better of the two options facing me. I mean, those Ndi Elu doctors were going to have their robots dissect me.

“Yes, they’re here.” The beings hesitate, glancing at the hatch in unison. A group of over a dozen guards charge in, blocking the entrance, their weapons pointed at us.

“Don’t move!” The red-faced leader of the group barks, inching forward with his weapon. The others follow. “Get down on the ground, now! Right now!” They begin to flank us, warily.

I put my hands up, my heart juddering, and I find myself choking, gasping for breath. The beings don’t seem to understand what guns can do. Or maybe they do but don’t care. They just stand there staring at the guards with their big expressionless eyes.

“Let’s go,” one says to me, indicating the portal behind it.

“Last warning. I won’t ask again,” the group leader continues to bark. “Get down on the ground.” Then he lunges forward, sweeping the rear end of his gun toward my face.

I scream, jumping toward the aliens. The group leader’s hands jerk to an abrupt halt in midair and his gun begins to vibrate and dismantle, one component after another.

Another guard shrieks, “Engage! Fir—!” but is cut off mid-scream, her hands and those of the other soldiers freezing. It reminds me of what that dead evolved girl did to me. The only difference, I think, is that their guns begin to dismantle like their leader’s, each component knocking, bouncing, or slapping on the floor before coming to rest.

As they all hang there panting, unable to move, one of the beings says to me, “You need to address your people. Everyone. Tell them your story. Then we can all go.”

I nod, unable to take my eyes off the guards’ frozen horror-stricken faces. The faces incite in my bosom a foreboding I cannot ignore, and I find myself wondering what invisible technology the beings used on the guards and what such technology can do to torpedoes, ships, or even an entire civilization.

A sigh escapes me.

What do I even know, truly know, of SisiMumu except that she is the Tree that murdered my wife and friend? What do I know of these aliens, except that they traversed a great distance to rescue a bunch of strangers out of the goodness of hearts I’m not even certain they have. This all leads me to one pertinent question: would I be saving all Ogwu Ala or dooming them?

“You are uncertain,” the alien’s voice—I don’t know which one—jars me from my thoughts and I turn to find their big perturbing eyes staring blankly at me.

I glance at the frozen guards one more time. An echo in my head—alien, yet familiar—encourages me. It’s accompanied by a feeling of weightlessness, as though another consciousness reinforces mine, assuring me that so far as a piece of SisiMumu remains with me, Onyinye will always be here to make the coming days easier.

A wistful smile visits my face, and with that, I follow the beings through their portal.