In 2010, I was asked to write a speculative fiction story for an anthology called Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, co-edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. The idea was for organizers and activists who in their everyday life work to make a better world, to engage with their creativity to imagine and describe different worlds, in the form of short stories, under the premise that all organizing is already a form of science fiction. When I received the invitation to write for Octavia's Brood, I was in the Bay Area and just so happened to have a studio session with my cousin, singer/songwriter/visionary Meklit Hadero, and our friend, the producer/emcee/designer Ellias Fullmore a.k.a. Burntface. I talked about the idea of Octavia's Brood with Meklit and Ellias, and what happened in the studio that day ended up being the genesis of CopperWire's Earthbound, a transmedia storytelling project centered around an album that was released on April 17, 2012. copperwire.bandcamp.com

The album told pieces of a story of three renegade space travelers from the year 2089, who have hijacked a starship and traveled through time to return to Earth in our present day. There were different parts of the story told through the liner notes (written by Nnedi Okorafor), a music video, short pieces of writing on our website copperwiremusic.com and a few projects that are still unreleased.

My character in CopperWire was named Getazia 13 Zeritoicus-Oxygen. His mother was an astronaut from planet Earth and his father was from a telepathic species who lived both underwater and on land, on a planet called Zeritoicus. Getazia grew up on a space station in-between worlds and was coming to Earth for the first time both to learn what it meant to be human, and to share something that he believed could help his mother's people.

The Lost Files of Getazia 13 Zeritoicus-Oxygen is another piece of the CopperWire story. It was a mixtape I made in 2013, that was an exclusive gift for people who gave to our Indiegogo when we were fundraising to self-publish Octavia's Brood (before any of us knew the book would get picked up by AK Press.) I resurfaced the mixtape again as a thank you to the first group of people who signed up to my email list, and to this day I think less than 100 people have ever had access to this project.

In the spirit of time traveling and hijacking starships, I took inspiration from the "data thief" of John Akomfrah's film The Last Angel Of History, and had help telling this story with pieces of audio sampled from Sun-Ra, Walidah Imarisha, James Baldwin, Haile Gerima, LeVar Burton and Octavia E. Butler herself, along with music from Erykah Badu, Khingz, Damian Marley, Geto Boys, Goodie Mob, OutKast and Zapp & Roger.

For people who have followed my music closely through the years, this mixtape is a missing puzzle piece in how all my other projects work together. The secret is I never stopped thinking about transmedia storytelling, and I've been doing it across albums and other forms of writing ever since. On this mixtape you obviously hear more from my character in CopperWire's Earthbound, but you also hear the inspiration behind Children Of The Dragon, Evidence Of Things Not Seen, the story "Lalibela" from Octavia's Brood, and there's even references to songs I wouldn't write for another 7 years, that I'm still planning to release in the next year or so.

Recorded in the caretaker's apartment of Washington Hall. Summer 2013.

Hope you enjoy discovering this audio artifact.

More about Octavia's Brood: www.akpress.org/octavia-s-brood.html