AFRO SYNTHETIC: THE WOVEN EARTH: LAST WATCH

The Zenith Complex died five years ago, but its AI still believed it was alive.

Nneka walked the fortieth floor at 2 AM, her flashlight unnecessary as motion sensors triggered overhead lights in perfect sequence. Behind her, they dimmed again, creating a traveling pool of brightness that followed her through empty corridors. The building's synthetic voice chimed softly: "Good evening. Meeting Room 12-A is prepared for the quarterly review."

There was no quarterly review. There hadn't been one since the company dissolved, its workforce redistributed to the towers that still functioned. But the AI didn't know that. It just kept running its schedules, maintaining climate control for no one, brewing coffee in break rooms that would never be drunk.

Across the water, the massive billboard on Eko Atlantic blazed its message into the night: 

ONE CHILD PER FAMILY.

DIGITAL ONLY.

FOR LIFE TO CONTINUE.

She'd been seeing those words for ten years now, since Kofi was born into code instead of flesh. She didn't choose. She was young, poor, violated the Single Generation Protocol by getting pregnant at 22. Her physical pregnancy was terminated but she was compensated with a digital child. Kofi IS her son, built from her genetic profile and what the father's would have been. But he was never born.

Nneka was the Ghost Shift Guard. Her job was to ensure squatters didn't break in, that the building's confused AI didn't malfunction and start fires, that the valuable copper wiring stayed in the walls. Mostly, she walked. Twelve hours of walking through spaces where phantom routines played out their purposeless loops.

The executive floor was different. Here, the terminals still worked, old models the AI maintained out of some deep-coded habit. During her third week, she'd discovered they could still access the net, their security protocols years out of date, forgotten by everyone who mattered.

That's where she first learned about the fragments.

The forum was buried deep, its members identified only by numbers. Parents like her, desperate to give their digital children something real. They shared techniques, code modifications, ways to hide data packets inside approved interactions. Nneka read everything, her reflection ghostly in the monitor's glow while the building hummed its lullaby around her.

Her son Kofi was ten, brilliant, and painted worlds he'd never seen. Every evening before her shift, she visited him at the public nursery in Surulere,a converted shopping mall where parents queued for their allotted pod time. Lying in the pod, Nneka was logged in and Kofi, was once again before her. He run to her, eargerly and showed her his latest creation. The other digital children played their pre-programmed games, but Kofi painted. Swirls of color that seemed to reach for something beyond the fractal playground.

"What's outside the playground, Mama?" he asked one day.

"Other playgrounds," she lied.

"But what's outside those?"

She couldn't answer. The Grid monitored everything. One wrong word and he'd be flagged, corrected, or worse. She'd heard whispers of children deleted for becoming too anomalous.

"I dream sometimes," Kofi said quietly, looking around to make sure no other children were listening. "About a girl who plays in real streets. She laughs like a bell. She knows things we don't. She whispers to me in my dreams. She tells me it’s not real"

Nneka's breath caught. She'd heard a rumor about a ghost child who'd somehow escaped. Who lived in the code. But that was impossible. Wasn't it?

That night, she found herself in Mushin, in a room above a mechanic's shop that reeked of burned electronics and sweat. Adewale didn't look up when she entered, his hands deep in the guts of some elaborate machine.

"You're the ghost guard," he said. Not a question.

"How did you—"

"You've been accessing things you shouldn't. The old terminals leave traces. I watch for desperate parents."

His eyes glowed faintly, implants long overused. He studied her with an expression somewhere between pity and recognition.

"I just want to show him something real. Just fragments."

"They always start with fragments." He pulled out a thin neural bridge, no bigger than a child's fingernail. "This goes behind your ear. Creates a channel the Grid won't recognize. You can pass memories through it, hidden in your emotional responses. The Grid expects parents to feel things. It won't flag feelings."

"How much?"

"First one's free. You'll be back."

The installation took minutes but felt like hours. The bridge burrowed behind her ear, sending tendrils into her nervous system. When it was done, she could feel it humming, a new frequency in her skull.

That night at the Zenith Complex, she practiced. The terminals on floor forty became her training ground. She learned to compress memories, to wrap them in emotion, to hide data in the spaces between heartbeats. The building's AI announced midnight meetings while she worked, its voice echoing through empty halls.

The next time she visited Kofi, she brought him rain.real rain from physical Lagos, just three seconds, disguised as a glitch in the playground's weather simulation but hidden inside the hug she gave him. His eyes widened as the sensation passed through their connection.

"It's... different. Harder. It stings." Kofi had never felt this, ever felt anything close to it. 

"You can't tell anyone," she whispered.

"Mama, what was that?"

"What was what?" she said aloud, for the Grid to hear. But through the neural bridge, she whispered: "Real."

Kofi began to change. His paintings grew darker, more complex. He painted storms with weight, markets with smell, chaos with texture. The other digital children would stop their games to stare. Parents in the waiting room began to whisper.

"Your son is different," a mother said, suspicion sharp in her voice.

"He's creative."

"Digital children process. They don't create. Not like that."

Nneka returned to Adewale two weeks later. The neural bridge wasn't enough. She needed to share more, hide larger packets.

"I knew you'd come." He held up a signal scrambler, a crude thing that would sit in her wrist. "This will hurt. And it won't stop hurting."

She rolled up her sleeve.

The scrambler made her arm ache constantly, a deep throb that followed her through the Zenith Complex's empty halls. But it worked. She could pass entire minutes now, whole experiences. The texture of bread. The sound of traffic. The way dust danced in afternoon light.

Kofi devoured each fragment, incorporating them into his art. His paintings became windows into a world he'd never seen but somehow knew. The other children began clustering around him, drawn to something they couldn't name.

"He dreams," one said.

"That's impossible," replied another. "We don't dream."

"Kofi does."

When the announcement came about the Migration, Nneka was walking the thirty-fifth floor. Her phone buzzed with the emergency alert. She stopped mid-step, the building's lights following her pause, waiting for her to move again.

All digital children would be transferred to isolated servers in seventy-two hours. No more direct parental access. Scheduled visits only, monitored and limited. Pure environments, they called it.

She stood there in the empty hallway, the weight of it crushing her chest. The building's AI cheerfully announced: "Reminder: Fire drill scheduled for 3 PM." There would be no fire drill. There would be no more bedtime stories with Kofi. No more secret fragments of rain.

Her legs gave out. She sat on the pristine carpet of a conference room that would never host another meeting, staring at the announcement on her phone. Seventy-two hours. After eight years of visits, of slowly feeding him reality one hidden memory at a time, they were taking even that away.

She thought of Kofi's paintings, his questions, his dreams of a ghost girl in real streets. He was already different, already questioning. What would isolation do to him? Would they correct him? Delete him?

No.

She ran to Adewale that night, her augmented body aching. The neural bridge behind her ear burned. The scrambler in her wrist throbbed. She'd added a processor along her spine on her last visit, and it hummed against her vertebrae.

"I need to get him out."

Adewale looked at her, at what she'd become. Partially machine already, prepared for this moment whether she knew it or not.

"Not into a shell. They monitor for those now. But this," he pulled out a device like a metallic spider, "this can download him into you. Something I have been working on, never been tested but if it works. He'll live in your mind, see through your eyes."

"Do it."

"You don't understand. Two consciousnesses in one brain—"

"I said do it."

The installation was agony. The spider fused with her existing augmentations, creating a web of connections throughout her nervous system. When it was done, she could feel the empty space it had created, a hollow waiting to be filled.

On the last night before the migration, she sat in her pod at the nursery. Around her, parents said their goodbyes, knowing “scheduled visits” meant more opportunities for the government to extort bribes from desperate parents. Some already knew they would not afford it, so these goodbyes could be their last. Nneka connected and found Kofi under their usual fractal tree, a painting in his hands.

It showed the two of them standing in rain, real rain, the kind that stings.

"I know what you've been doing, Mama," he said quietly. "The fragments you share. They're from outside, aren't they? From the real world."

Her heart stopped. If he knew, the Grid might know.

"I've been careful," he continued. "I haven't told anyone. But Mama, I need to know. Why do you show me these things?"

"Because you deserve to know what's real."

"Even if it hurts?"

"Especially then."

She activated the download. The playground flickered. Alarms should have screamed, but Adewale's code held them back. Kofi's essence poured through their connection, his consciousness fragmenting into light, into data, into thought. Her augmented body received him, every modified part working to draw him in.

The pod released her. She lay still for a moment, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. The nursery hummed around her, other parents still deep in their final visits.

Then, a whisper inside her skull, tentative and small: "Mama?"

Her eyes flew open. She wanted to answer, to cry out with relief, but she couldn't. Not here. Not with attendants watching, with cameras recording. She had to be normal. Just another parent finishing her visit.

She stood slowly, her legs shaking. Each step toward the exit felt like walking through deep water. Kofi's presence fluttered in her mind like a trapped bird.

"Don't speak," she thought desperately, hoping he could hear. "Not yet. We have to get out."

She passed the attendant at the desk, forcing her face into the blank expression of post-visit sadness that all parents wore. Her hands trembled as she pressed her wrist to the exit scanner. Green light. The door opened.

The hallway stretched ahead, endless. Other parents shuffled past, lost in their own grief. Security cameras tracked every movement. Inside her head, Kofi whimpered, confused and frightened by the sensation of being bodiless yet everywhere at once.

"Shh," she thought. "Almost there."

The building's exit loomed. One more scanner. One more camera. She pressed her wrist again, and for a terrifying moment, the light stayed red. Had they detected something? Had the download triggered a silent alarm?

Green.

She pushed through the doors into the humid Lagos night. Only when she'd walked past five major skyscrapers, turned two corners, and confirmed no drones followed did she finally whisper aloud:

"Kofi?"

"Mama!" His voice erupted in her mind, no longer whispered but full and present. "I can see! Through your eyes, I can see everything!"

She looked up at the buildings, the smog, the flickering lights of the city, and felt his wonder explode through their shared consciousness. A danfo splashed through a puddle, soaking her legs, and Kofi gasped at the sensation.

"It's cold! And dirty! And it smells strange!"

"It's real," she said, tears streaming down her face.

She walked back to the Zenith Complex for her shift, one body carrying two consciousnesses through empty halls. The building's AI welcomed her as always, announcing meetings for people who would never come. But now she wasn't alone in the emptiness. Kofi marveled at everything through her eyes: the dust motes in the air, the way shadows fell, the persistent hum of machines maintaining nothing.

"Is this what you do every night?" he asked. "Guard emptiness?"

"Not anymore," she said, feeling him settle into her thoughts like he'd always belonged there. "Now I guard you."

Through the window, the billboard still blazed: 

ONE CHILD PER FAMILY.

DIGITAL ONLY.

FOR LIFE TO CONTINUE.

But in the abandoned towers of Lagos, a ghost guard walked her rounds with her son riding behind her eyes, both of them finally, impossibly, real. And sometimes, when the building was especially quiet, Kofi would tell her about his dreams of the laughing girl who played in actual streets, and they would wonder how many other ghosts had found their way home.