AFRO SYNTHETIC: THE WOVEN EARTH: ECHO CHILD

Lagos had become a city of mirrors. Glass towers rose from islands of concrete, their surfaces shimmering with advertisements that shifted in real time, each one reminding citizens of the same truth:

ONE CHILD PER FAMILY.

DIGITAL ONLY.

FOR LIFE TO CONTINUE.

Everywhere the message burned itself into the eyes of the people, plastered across the Eko Atlantic skyline, blinking on ferry screens in the Lagoon, even stitched into the neon strips that lit the bridges of Third Mainland.

The world was heavy with bodies. Earth had reached its limit decades ago, and Africa’s megacities had learned to choke back their growth. In Lagos, you did not bring children into flesh. You were given one child in code, housed in the great Data Grid that pulsed beneath the city.

Parents could visit these children through public nurseries, sleek pods scattered in every district, or through private neural bands if they could afford the licenses. The government called it mercy. People called it survival. The children called it nothing at all, because they had never known otherwise.

In Yaba, a former shopping complex had been stripped bare and converted into one of the largest nurseries. Gone were the rows of market stalls and food courts. In their place stood chambers lined with white pods, each humming softly, each occupied by a parent longing for a child they could never touch.

Amadi and Folake arrived at dusk. They placed their wrists against the gate, biometric codes flashing green. Inside, they walked between the rows until they reached an empty pod. The attendant did not look up from his terminal.

Folake lay back first. Her eyes closed, her breath slowed. Amadi followed. A soft light bathed their faces. Then came the familiar pull, a sensation like falling and rising at once.

The playground opened before them. A place built of fractal trees and glowing swings, more dream than real, its colors bending at the edges. And there she was, their daughter, Sade.

She ran toward them, her eight year old figure looked as if it was shimmering, maybe it was how she was coded, or maybe it was how they perceived her. She laughed, arms open wide. “Mama. Papa.” Her touch felt like warmth coded as memory, enough to trick their hearts into believing.

She held up a drawing made of light: three figures holding hands before a small house.

Amadi smiled, though his chest tightened. He wanted that house, those hands, the weight of her body in his arms. But here, she was only light and code, always just beyond reach.

Sometimes, when the playground flickered, Sade tilted her head and said she could hear other voices. “There are gaps,” she told them once, eyes wide. “Sometimes my friends disappear in the middle of a game. Sometimes I feel like I am outside myself.” Folake brushed her words away, but Amadi remembered.

Later, as Folake slept beside him in their one room flat in Mushin, Amadi remembered what Sade had mentioned earlier, “There are gaps” Maybe it was those words that echoed in his mind which led him to leave their bed and wander the streets at night. And he eventually ended up above a mechanic’s shop, in a backroom that smelled of solder and smoke. There he met Adewale, a man known for touching the edges of forbidden code.

Adewale’s artificial eyes glowed faintly, implants long overused. He pushed a thin glass shard across the table.

“This can download her pattern,” he whispered. “Every laugh, every tear. You could print her into a shell. Not flesh, but close enough.”

Amadi’s hands shook as he held the shard. “Is it possible?”

“It is dangerous. The Grid scans everything. If you are caught, she is gone forever. But for a price, yes. You could bring her home.”

When Amadi told Folake, she turned away, her voice hard. “If they find out, we are dead. They will delete her. We will lose her twice!”

She stared outside and saw the familiar glowing bill board that lit the entire city.

ONE CHILD PER FAMILY.

DIGITAL ONLY.

FOR LIFE TO CONTINUE.

Folake’s anger grew and with resolve she turned to Amadi

“We must be careful”

At dusk, Amadi and Folake walked through the gates of the Yaba nursery. The white pods arranged in rows like coffins standing upright. Each pod pulsed faintly, holding parents who dreamed of children they could never touch.

Amadi kept his hand tight around the inside of his jacket where the cracked shard lay hidden. Adewale had told him what to do: slot the crystal into the pod interface while logged in, mask it with his palm, and pray the system would not scream too quickly.

Folake’s breath was shallow as she lowered herself into the pod. “One more visit,” she whispered. Amadi nodded, but his eyes were hard.

Light swallowed them. The playground appeared, filled with fractal trees and shimmering swings. And there was their daughter, Sade.

She ran to them, glowing and alive. “Mama. Papa. I missed you.”

Folake knelt and kissed the space where Sade’s cheek should have been. Amadi reached for her hand, then turned slightly, sliding the shard into the slot of the console. The interface stuttered. The air thickened.

Sade’s laughter broke into static. Her image flickered. “Papa? What is happening?”

Folake’s eyes widened. “Amadi, stop.”

But he pressed on, watching the shard glow brighter as it drank in their child. Code streamed across the walls of the playground, lines of light pouring into the crystal. Sade’s voice fractured, her words stuttering, pieces of her breaking into silence.

The pod outside began to hum loudly. Red lights blinked across the chamber. Guards at the far end stirred, scanning their terminals.

“We have to go,” Folake hissed, grabbing his arm.

Amadi yanked the shard free. The playground collapsed. For a second, Sade was everywhere, stretched thin across the walls, whispering, “I can still hear them…” Then she vanished.

The pod went dark.

Folake was shaking when the lids opened. Amadi pressed the hot shard against his chest, its glow pulsing like a heart. Guards were moving now, heading their way. But it slipped from his hands, maybe it was sweat, maybe he wasn’t careful enough but they were the last fragments of his child slipping through his fingers. Heading to the cold concrete floor to be shattered across the floor but at the nick of time Folake grabs hold of it and casually slid the shard into the sole of her shoe. She was more careful. They rose together, forcing calm into their movements, walking past the guards as alarms sputtered and screens flashed. A voice over the loudspeaker barked, “Anomaly detected. Lockdown initiating.”

But then, as suddenly as it began, the alarms reset. The guards slowed, their screens returning to green. The anomaly no longer detected. Folake and Amadi walked out into the night, their daughter smuggled in silence between them.

Back in Mushin, they lit a single lamp. The shell waited in the corner.

It was unsettling. The skin was smooth and poreless, an artificial brown with no variations. Its eyes were too large, their whites slightly luminescent. Its hair was made of thin strands that glistened like fibers, more plastic than human. When it shifted, its joints clicked faintly.

Folake stared at it, horrified. “This is what you want her to be?”

Amadi said nothing. He slotted the shard into the cavity in its chest.

The body jerked, shuddered, then opened its eyes.

“Papa.”

The voice was small, cracked but familiar.

Folake gasped, rushing forward. “Sade?”

The girl stumbled to her feet, unsteady. She looked at her hands, turning them slowly. “I feel heavy.”

Folake touched her cheek. The skin was cold, the texture wrong, but it was her child. Tears streamed down her face.

Amadi watched, his heart tight. But then Sade whispered, “I was still playing when you pulled me away. I can still hear them.”

He froze. “Hear who?”

“The others,” she said simply, as if it were obvious. “They are still there.”

Before dawn, the sirens returned. Drones swept across Mushin, their red eyes glaring through the windows.

“They know,” Folake whispered, clutching Sade close.

Amadi felt the truth settle like a stone. They had pulled her out incompletely. She was both here and not here, split between their home and the Grid. If they ran, the body might collapse. If they stayed, the officers would destroy everything.

He knelt before her. “Sade, listen to me. If they take us, remember you are real.”

Amadi held the pulsing shard that held Sade’s original code, He turned to Folake who held a terrified Sade in her arms. She gave Amadi the nod and Amadi understood exactly what it would mean. And with that Amadi pressed the upload switch on the shard.

Boots thundered up the stairs. The door crashed open. Red light filled the room.

When the officers burst in, they found nothing but an empty shell lying still on the floor, its eyes dark. The shard was gone.

Weeks later, whispers moved through Mushin. Citizens said they saw a girl playing in the streets, laughing like a bell. She spoke of places she should not know, fragments of playgrounds, songs no one remembered, stories half told.

Some called her a glitch in the system. Others said she was proof that Lagos could not lock its children away forever.

As for Amadi and Folake, no one knew. Some said they were taken. Others said they ran. Their flat was emptied, their names erased from the registry.

Above the city, the billboards still flashed: 

ONE CHILD PER FAMILY.

DIGITAL ONLY.

FOR LIFE TO CONTINUE.

But in the cracks of the megacity, a ghost child laughed, slipping between wires and shadows, half girl, half memory, and more real than any law could erase.