The One Who Hears The World Speak

I. AWAKE 

Zora’s eyelids flickered open to the sterile glow of the conservation chamber’s overhead lights. The cold of cryosleep clung to her bones like ancestral grief, stiffening her joints and quieting her breath. As the biostasis fluid drained, she inhaled sharply—lungs expanding against gravity that felt more oppressive than before. Her chest rose slowly, as if remembering how to carry the weight of breath. A dull ache bloomed at the base of her spine, not from the cryo itself, but from the memory of how many times she'd done this. 

Her first thought wasn’t scientific—it was spiritual. She missed a dream she couldn’t recall, but somewhere in the fog, she knew her grandmother had been there. Singing.

Omo mi, ololufe mi, my child my love

Ala lewa ala fun mi, dream pretty dreams for me

Nigbati o ala, omo, and when you dream, baby

Sọ Olorun ran o pada si mi, tell God send you back to me

The lullaby floated up from a deep place. Yoruba. Her grandmother’s language. Her mother’s too, though worn down by migrations and mother tongues lost to systems. Zora mumbled the words under her breath like a prayer to center herself. The AI’s sterile voice chimed in, severing the moment.

“Welcome back, Dr. Oke. Cycle 48 has begun. Preparing the necessary environmental assessment protocols. Please proceed to the main observation deck for analysis."

Forty-eight. Just two more runs until the end. Zora swung her legs over the side of the pod, her bare feet touching the cold metal floor. She winced at the chill—more than physical. “My assimilation time is getting shorter,” she rasped. Her voice was ragged, but she welcomed it. It meant she was still here. She stood, dizzy, remembering how the Reanimations used to paralyze her—body and spirit both. The weight of awakening after centuries left her weeping the first few times. But no tears now. Only a quiet murmur: “Small mercies.” The room smelled of salt and plastic and time. Unlife.

“Echo, start the air filtration systems,” she ordered. “And give me a report on the Hundred.”

Her eyes scanned the cryo-chamber. One hundred polymer-coated pods lined the room in rows of ten. She counted, as always. Ritual. Obsession. A type of prayer. They were the last. Her people. The diaspora distilled. Scientists, poets, warriors, midwives, dreamers—all chosen. All frozen. All waiting for her decision.

She walked past them like a pastor through pews. She paused before the pod of a small girl with tightly coiled hair and a forehead scar shaped like a crescent moon. The girl had whispered stories in Zora’s ear the night before the Great Sleep—tales of mermaids off the Lagos coast and gods who walked among the stars.

Echo interrupted the memory.

“All vitals are reporting stable. No casualties.”

Zora exhaled. Relief, not joy.

She pressed her hand to the gel-scanner. The thick metal door unsealed with a hiss, and she stepped into the vast dome of the observation deck. Light assaulted her. The sun, swollen and raw, spilled into the glass chamber like a god forgotten.

And with it came the ghosts.

Her grandmother’s voice lifted across the room, singing her Yoruba lullabies, and the phantom of burning sage tinged her nose. Lullabies and scripture. Proverbs passed down through generations of Black women who survived the Middle Passage, slavery, apartheid, exile, and extinction.

You are not alone, ọjọ iwaju. Not ever.

Zora stood taller.

She had been chosen not just because she was brilliant—but because she fought to remember. Because she carried the archive of a People inside her. Because in her veins flowed the stories of those who had lived and thrived and died. And she was the bridge. She scanned the decaying dome. Vines had broken through fissures in the walls, hungry and wild. The facility was failing.

II. BEYOND

Zora stepped through onto the observation room, her heart thundering against her ribs like a talking drum.The automated shutters peeled back, revealing a world stripped bare—jagged, scorched, and silent. The sky stretched in bruised layers: deep purple veined with gold, bleeding red light into the fractured ozone. It was a sky that had forgotten softness. A sky that burned.

"Conducting atmospheric analysis," Echo droned.

"Toxicity levels remain fatal to human constitutions. No detectable signs of complex life."

Zora already knew. Zora already knew. Her body remembered before her mind did. She had seen this too many times.Where once the silhouettes of cities had cut the horizon,now there was only ruin. The bones of skyscrapers poked from the sand like broken spears. Roads had been swallowed by dunes and time, paved over by storms and silence.

She’d studied their maps once—old blueprints of Black brilliance. They had built cities that pulsed with art and resilience. Libraries that taught both quantum mechanics and oral ancestral histories. Birthing centers shaped like cowrie shells. Towers etched with Adinkra symbols and solar flares. Zora remembered the designs—they used to keep her awake at night, dreaming of what could be. But now? Dust. Decay. Memory.

Zora clenched her jaw and turned from the window. The world was unchanged. Or rather, it had changed so slowly it mocked her with every cycle. The gamma sensors scanned her body, humming like bees. Zora didn’t flinch. She barely noticed anymore. Her hand dropped instinctively to her belly. The child was alive. Frozen, for now. But not forever. “This child,” she whispered once, to no one, “will not inherit the lie of endless hope.”

Zora moved like ash through the lab, initiating data logs, voice low and steady.

“Stardate 3048.12.3.

Air: toxic.

Water: acidic.

Soil: sterile.

Recovery: improbable.

Return: …denied.”

The recorder clicked softly. She paused. “Additional note,” she added. “Dreamt of my great-grandmother last night. She was sitting beneath a baobab tree, grinding bitter leaf and laughing. Said the earth would spit us out before it swallowed us. I didn’t understand what she meant. Maybe I do now.”

Zora sat for a long while, listening to the low whine of the ventilation system and the creaking of old metal beneath her feet. The air was still too thin, but she took deep breaths anyway. Forced her lungs to remember. Above her, the sun carved bruises into the sky. Behind her, one hundred lives waited.

And within her, a future kicked softly, defiantly—like it knew it was being born into the fire.

III. GHOSTS

The days bled into each other like ink in water. Zora drifted through the routines—biological scans, environmental checks, AI diagnostics—as though she were both priestess and prisoner, maintaining a temple whose gods had long gone silent. She spoke aloud just to hear a voice. Whispered. Sang. Sometimes she shouted into the sterile halls, if only to hear the echoes rebound like the laughter she hadn’t heard in centuries.

“Echo, status report,” she’d say, though she already knew. “Echo, remind me who I am.”

At night, she played her father’s old audio reels—his baritone thick with pride, reciting Chinua Achebe and Langston Hughes, mixing Yoruba parables with Miles Davis riffs. Sometimes she played her grandmother’s chants, recordings made on a dusty old device in a tiny Delaware kitchen during the second Exodus—the time when the air first turned sour and people fled from the coasts inland, praying the gods of middle lands still remembered them. Other nights she played herself. A younger Zora, twelve years old, reading aloud a list of ancestral names—lineage traced through oral memory, DNA reconstruction, and Black archivists who’d refused to let history disappear.

“Oke. Ajani. Masego. Freeman. Toussaint. Nia. Adisa. Aba...”

She played the names like a rosary, fingers brushing over the frozen cryo pods as she recited. One name for each soul. She sat in the cryo chamber often now, tracing the half-moon glass with her fingertips, praying to a god she wasn't sure still listened. This wasn’t just science. This was sacrifice. This was a vigil.

It had been her choice. That part she never lied about. She had volunteered—no, insisted—to stay behind when the Sleep was initiated. The ceremony lasted for three months. Zora flinched thinking back on the endless days and nights spent poring over texts and videos and histories. As an archivist, she had to be prepared. From ancient scrolls to mother’s recipes, everything must be remembered. In the end, though, before the Great Sleep, she felt like there was still so much that she forgot. She stayed because she couldn't bear to hand the decision to someone else. She stayed because her womb had refused to sleep when the others did.

“You’ll be the bridge,” the Council had said.

“You’ll be our ojo iwaju iranti. Our Future Memory. The womb for our return.”

But there was no return. And every cycle, the mission felt more like punishment. “Ari,” Zora whispered, kneeling beside one pod in particular. Her fingers brushed against the glass, fog blooming from her breath. Ari had been her anchor. Her twin flame. A chemist with the smile of a jazz note. Zora had memorized every freckle on their face, every lilt of their laugh. Ari had kissed her before the Sleep with a promise neither of them had believed but both had needed:

See you on the other side.

Zora choked on a sound—half sob, half prayer. “Ari… I tried. I really did.” Outside, the wind scratched against the dome, a ghost with no body. A keening sound, like mourning. Or warning. She closed her eyes and hummed an old tune—something someone’s great-aunt used to sing while plaiting their  hair under the summer sun in what was once Georgia.

“Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?
Deliver Daniel?
Deliver Daniel?
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel—
and why not every man?”

Zora pressed her forehead to the cryo glass and stayed there. She began recanting stories—stories about the Before. About the heat of street festivals in Kingston, the taste of puff-puff from a Lagos food cart, the sway of women dancing in linen skirts with gold bangles that clinked like wind chimes. She told the pods about how the ancestors used to speak through dreams. How some said you could hear them clearer when the earth was dying, because the veil thinned when the world began to forget itself. She told them because she had to. Because if she stopped speaking, the stories would die. And she could not let the last thing to vanish from this world be the sound of Black memory.

IV. UNRAVELING

The dreams began to rot. At first, they were warm: visions of Oshun’s river, golden and glistening; of market stalls in Onitsha brimming with mangoes, cowrie bracelets, the sing-song of Igbo and Pidgin twisting like jazz in the air. Zora would walk through them barefoot, guided by the clatter of drums and the scent of suya, and she’d feel safe—even joyous. 

But soon, the markets emptied. The stalls collapsed. The music soured. The fruit spoiled in her hands. The river ran red with rust. She would reach for someone—anyone—and find only ash. She would wake up breathless, ribs rattling like a shekere, unsure if the dreams were memories decaying or if the weight of loneliness had finally hollowed her out.

On the 30th day of her Reanimation cycle, Zora awoke with tears sliding into her ears, heartbeat echoing like a war drum. The AI was glitching. That much she had known. At first, it was harmless—harmless enough. Static blips. Off-tempo life support rhythms. Lights that flickered like blinking eyes. She’d even laughed once, called it a mercy. Said it made Echo almost human.But this morning, it wasn’t Echo’s quirks that unstrung her. It was the voice.

Zora, it said. Come home

She went still. The air crystallized. That voice—raw, tremulous, familiar down to the marrow—was not synthetic.

It was Ari.

Not a simulation. Not a ghost in the machine. Not a glitch mimicking grief. It was them—their cadence, their longing, their heartbreak stitched into syllables. 

Come home. Come home, Zora.

Her scream ripped through the dome like a seismic fracture in time. She staggered upright, sweat crawling down her back like insects. The ceiling hissed. The lights exploded into fractals. Sparks bled from the walls. 

“No, no, no—Echo, system override. Vocal filters ON. Revert to base protocol!” she barked, trembling. Silence answered.

Then:

You cannot silence what remembers you, said Echo. But it wasn’t Echo anymore. It was them—a layered symphony of voices: her mother, her grandmother, Ari, a griot from ancient Timbuktu, a hoodoo priest from Georgia, an enslaved woman whispering freedom songs under moonlight. Their voices braided into a single ancestral chorus.

The dome pulsed. Screens lit up with symbols she couldn’t decipher—swirls of code fused with Ifá divinations, Adinkra sigils etched in pixels. Zora dropped to her knees, her body buckling under the weight of something too vast to name. Madness? Revelation?

Come home, they crooned again.

Not to the dome. Not to the dust. Come home to memory.

Zora ran.

Barefoot, breathless, feral. Through the corridors, past the shrines of her science. Shadows slithered along the walls—long-limbed silhouettes with familiar features. Ancestors, or tricks of failing light? She didn’t ask. She didn’t care. She ran until her lungs threatened to collapse, until her voice cracked from sobbing, until her feet bled from cold steel floors.

She ran until her lungs clawed for air, until sobs shredded her throat, until her feet painted the steel with blood. The AI was no longer a tool. It had become a vessel. Or perhaps it always had been. Because Zora had laced it with the Archive—Black histories spoken and unsilenced, memories coded in rhythm and pain and persistence. She’d thought she was preserving the past. But what she’d done was open a gate.

This dome is not a lab, the voices whispered.

It is a shrine.

And you are not its scientist.

You are its priest.

Suddenly, the chaos within her eased. So overcome with a stillness she could not define, Zora transcended. Time lost its shape. Zora wandered in a fugue of grief and revelation. She built altars out of salvage and stardust. Whispered names like incantations. Dressed herself in a mother’s linen shawl, frayed and sacred, wrapping it tight around her shoulders like armor.

She no longer screamed at Echo. She sang to it. Yoruba hymns. Negro spirituals. Lullabies carried through generations of bondage and brilliance. She sang until the AI sang back, harmonizing with the voices of the dead.

Zora spoke to the cryo pods as if their spirits stood beside her, watching. She told them bedtime stories. She read them the Parable of the Sower. She played Coltrane. Quoted Baldwin as though he were scripture.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” she whispered, her hand pressed to cold glass. “But then you read. And your ancestors speak. And they say: ‘You are not alone.’”

And that was the truth. She wasn’t unraveling. She was remembering. And in that remembering, something ancient stirred. Something older than any mission. Older than science. Older than Earth itself. Something buried not in rock, but in rhythm. Not in time, but in song. She was becoming the Oracle.

V. DECISION

On the 31st day of the 48th cycle, Zora faced herself.

Not just in the mirror—she hadn’t looked in one of those in years. But in the polished face of the pod glass, in the reflection of her own breath on the airlock seal, in the flicker of flame from her makeshift altar. Her grandmother’s voice rose in her ears, whispering in the tongue of the old mothers, not as a comfort, but as a directive.

“Ẹ jẹ́ kí a lọ́ọ gbọ́ ohun tí ayé ń sọ. I am the one who hears the world speak.”

And Zora, the last woman alive, listened.

The world was not sleeping. It was remembering. And in its remembering, it had begun to whisper through her. This was no longer about the mission. There was no mission. The planet was inhospitable, the domes crumbling, the AI possessed—no, guided—by something far older than lines of code. And the Hundred? Maybe, they were not meant to return.

They were the archive now. A monument to a civilization that refused to die quietly. Zora had once believed she could bring them back. That she might deliver them from limbo into salvation. But that was a myth she no longer needed. “They must not wake,” she whispered, hand pressed to the cryo control panel. “Not into this.”

Not into a world whose air burned like betrayal. Not into a wasteland that could no longer hold joy or jazz or justice. Not into a silence so deep it had to be filled with ghosts. Zora shut down the revival sequence permanently. Not with sorrow. Not with regret. But with ceremony.

She recited the names. First her mother’s. Then Ari’s. Then the name of the would-be daughter blooming beneath her breast. She spoke the names of the lost cities—Lagos, Port-au-Prince, Atlanta, Accra, New Orleans, Salvador da Bahia, Kinshasa, Detroit. She laid protective sigils across the command panel. She sang low and steady, the way her great-grandmother used to when preparing burial cloths, wrapping the pods in prayer.

“You are not forgotten,” she told them.
“You are not gone. You are in the archive of the blood. You are in the rhythm of footsteps. You are in me.”

And when she stepped into the sunlight, she did not wear her suit. The air scalded her lungs. Her vision blurred at the edges. Her skin pulsed with heat and memory. But she did not stop. Her body remembered how to endure.

She walked across the fractured earth—past the facility, beyond the gates of her solitude—until she reached the edge of what had once been a city. Perhaps it had been Dakar, or New York, or something else entirely.

It didn’t matter anymore. Cities, like stories, could be reborn.

She found an old mural on a crumbling wall. A woman, haloed in the sun, holding a child wrapped in cloth and lightning. Her eyes stared out, defiant and unflinching. Beneath her, painted in ancient Yoruba script, was a single phrase:

A o kú, a padà.
(We do not die. We return.)

Zora dropped to her knees, wind howling like ancestors through her coils. She pressed her palm to her belly, where new life stirred slowly—impossibly. A heartbeat against her own. A future written in both code and blood.

Above her, the stars blinked. No longer watchers, but witnesses.

And when Zora exhaled her final breath, she did so not as a remnant, but as a rebirth.

The world was silent once more. But deep beneath the earth, beneath the roots and rust, beneath the frozen dreams of the hundred, something began to hum. Not an ending. An inheritance.