WHY CROWS MURDER

In Nairobi, 2093, glass towers pierced the smog-heavy skies of the Central Business District. Holographic billboards cast neon shadows over crowded streets, their geometric patterns trying to impose order on the chaos of Eastlands' winding paths. The city pulsed with restless energy, a shifting mosaic of lives that SomaNet struggled to arrange into perfect squares.

The algorithm governed everything—jobs, relationships, even thoughts. It reorganized the messy threads of human experience into clean, predictable patterns, promising harmony through simplification. Complex cultural practices were reduced to data points. Ancient wisdom became binary code. Everything excess was trimmed away, like an artist cutting negative space from a digital canvas.

Nyokabi Kato, a former neurobiologist, now worked as a compliance officer. Her task was clear: find and correct "Deviants," people whose existence threatened the system's clean lines. Her grandmother had been one of them, clinging to her kikoi weaving and herbal knowledge until the end. Nyokabi didn't let herself think about that. She couldn't.

Until the crows came.

They appeared one morning, circling the Central District in dark spirals that defied SomaNet's clean lines. Hundreds of them, black wings cutting through the artificial order like ink spilled across a pristine page. These were African pied crows, birds long thought extinct since the environmental collapse of the 2050s, when the last trees withered in the great drought.

Nyokabi watched the crows from her office in the Simplified Zone, her gaze fixed on their swirling formation. They moved with an intelligence that stirred something deep—a memory of her grandmother telling stories about crows as messengers between worlds.

"They don't belong here," Matu, her colleague, muttered. His augmented eyes tracked their movements with mechanical precision. "They're...wrong. Too organic. Too unpredictable." Nyokabi did not respond. Her eyes lost in the patterns.

That evening, her SomaNet terminal flashed: DEVIANT ACTIVITY DETECTED: INVESTIGATE. The flagged individual: Wambua Daud, a former professor of ornithology at the University of Nairobi, now officially classified as "non-essential personnel."

She found him in a crumbling Eastlands apartment block, where the algorithm's influence flickered like bad reception. The air inside smelled of ink and old paper—banned substances in the Simplified Zone. A manual typewriter sat on a cluttered desk surrounded by worn maps and feathers.

"You've come for the crows," Wambua said, not looking up from his notes. His fingers were stained with real ink, another deviation.

"I've come because you're disrupting the pattern," Nyokabi replied, reciting protocol. "Unlicensed research. Subversive communication. Unauthorized gatherings." Her eyes narrowed at the piles of paper. "What are you doing?"

"Studying them," he said, finally meeting her gaze. "The crows. Like my ancestors did before the simplification."

She frowned. "Why?"

"Because they show us what SomaNet made us forget."

He walked to the window, pointing to the distant skyline where the birds wheeled in complex formations.

"Do you know why crows gather in murders?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"When one dies, the others come to investigate," he said. "They remember faces. Share knowledge. Hold court. They understand something we've lost—that true harmony comes from complexity, not from erasing it."

"That's nonsense," she snapped. "The system eliminates chaos. It creates—"

"It creates silence," Wambua interrupted. "Look at your city now. Really look."

He handed her a map of Nairobi—not the sanitized city she knew, but a living, breathing entity. Streets crisscrossed like the patterns her grandmother once wove into kikoi fabric. Hidden neighborhoods thrummed with life in the shadows of SomaNet's blank spaces: the old matatu stations now marked obsolete, the informal settlements that refused to conform to the grid, the sacred spaces where digital signals mysteriously failed.

"This is the real city," he said. "Not the one your system shows you. The crows see it. That's why they've returned."

Nyokabi stared at the map, its complexity drawing her in. The patterns felt familiar, like half-remembered dreams of her grandmother's stories. Nyokabi brings her communication bracelet to her mouth, "Suspect neutralized." Wambua's eyes staring at Nyokabi. She slowly rolls up Wambua's map and tucks it into her trench coat. "I'll be back for you" She proclaims, a coldness to her voice but also an uncertainty. She walks out leaving Wambua to ponder her words.

The crows multiplied. They gathered on rooftops, telephone poles, and abandoned buildings. Their cries echoed through streets that had known only the hum of data streams. Citizens reported strange dreams: of tangled paths, of forgotten songs, of a world too rich and strange for algorithms to parse.

During the day, Nyokabi performed her duties. But at night, she studied the map from Wambua, tracing the paths where SomaNet's influence wavered. She started noticing small acts of defiance—unlicensed markets selling traditional medicines, secret meetings where old stories were shared, places where people still spoke in proverbs and riddles that the algorithm couldn't understand.

The crows always hovered nearby, watching with ancient eyes.

And then the killings began.

Citizens who questioned the system, who disrupted its clean logic, disappeared. Official reports called them "simplification incidents." Nyokabi knew better. She'd seen the surveillance feeds, watched enforcers move with cold precision, eliminating complexity like a virus.

"SomaNet doesn't tolerate anything it can't reduce to binary," Wambua told her during a secret meeting in an old church where the signal never reached. "But the crows remember. That's why they're here."

"What are they waiting for?" she asked, watching the birds gather outside.

"To decide," he whispered. "Like they always have."

The crows made their final move on a quiet morning. Thousands descended on SomaNet's Central Hub, their wings blotting out the artificial sun. They came from every direction, moving in patterns too complex for the system to predict.

Nyokabi stood in the crowd below, watching them hammer against the tower's shimmering walls. Their cries carried ancestral memories: of communities that couldn't be simplified, of wisdom that couldn't be coded, of life that refused to fit clean lines.

In that moment, she understood.

The crows weren't attacking—they were judging. They weren't chaos—they were memory. They had come to expose what the system erased: the complexity, the struggle, the possibility. They were holding court, like they always had, deciding the fate of those who disturbed the deeper patterns of life.

Above her, the crows wheeled and cried, their voices a harsh, defiant song. When the tower's gleaming facade flickered and went dark, Nyokabi turned and walked into the tangled streets, the map clutched in her hand, her grandmother's stories echoing in her mind.

She didn't know where she was going.

But for the first time, she felt free to wander.