The Network: Chapter Two

Credit: Gemini

We had all dreamed of the day the Motherland would rise, though few of us dared to dream we would actually live to see it. It started in Nigeria, in the year 2027. In many ways, it started long before that. What was missing all those decades was the right spark, the right hope. The demonstrations persisted through every tyrannical onslaught. The boycotts and mass resignations persisted through the endless propaganda. The Uprising – to the degree it could even be called such a thing – sent seismic ripples across our continent, and then across the world. It watched, mouths agape, as a very different breed of African leader rose from the ashes of the old order, as the floodgates of innovation burst open, and a people shackled for generations finally broke free.

Full disclosure… we may have had a thing or two to do with it. Hi. My name is Abinla. I'm a member of the Network. And in this series, I will be sharing some uplifting stories about the Africa my friends and I helped build.

This story… is about a little boy named Chinue.

***

“Hi.”

“… Hello.”

“… Wow… I’m Chinue. What’s your name?”

“Tunde. This is so cool!”

“I know, right?!”

Looking around himself, at his classmates and their screens, Chinue saw his own amazement reflected in their faces. This was cool!

“So…” he said, adjusting the earbuds as he turned again to his new acquaintance. “So you’re actually hearing Yoruba when I’m talking?”

“Mhm,” said Tunde.

“I hear Igbo!”

“Cool.”

“So cool,” said Chinue. “Ummm… So tell me about your school, Tunde.”

“Oh…” said Tunde, wondering where to begin. “Well, it’s called Ikeja Central Primary School…”

“I know that, silly,” said Chinue, chuckling as he pointed to the bottom-right corner of the screen, and the caller info therein.

“Right,” said Tunde, chuckling in kind. “Okay… It’s… beautiful, lots of trees, classes are awesome – art’s my favorite – and the food’s almost as good as what my mom cooks.”

Chinue smirked at the witty retort. “I prefer STEM. I’m not very artistic. And the food here’s great too. What kind of art do you do?”

“Sculpture. I made a bust of one of my classmates last week.”

“Oh! Can I see?”

“Sure,” said Tunde, and tapped at his screen, pulling up a picture of something that…

“Hmmm…”

“No, she doesn’t actually look like that,” said Tunde. “But we laughed a lot.”

“I mean… it’s not terrible…”

“Oh, you should see the other ones… Wait, I think I’ve… Hold up…” His gaze drifted as he searched for something. Then he tapped again, and four other pictures stacked up above the first. “… There you go.”

“… Right,” said Chinue, regarding what he could only assume were a banana, a dog, a smaller dog, and a helper droid’s tentacle respectively.

“Mhm,” said Tunde. “We laughed about those too. Anyway… I’ve never been to Abia. What’s it like?”

“Quieter than Lagos,” said Chinue. “But not as fun. My older sister took me there last year to visit our auntie. She lives in New Makoko. I had a lot of fun.”

“Yeah… Me on the other hand… I’d love to go somewhere quieter. I mean… I like it here… but… It’s like our Mindfulness Mentor says… You always want something different.”

“Mhm. Speaking of fun… what’s your thing?”

“Besides art? Gaming. My parents let me have an extra hour on weekends because my grades are good. Do you game?”

“Yep! What’s your favorite?”

“Old Gods. I’ve been trying to kick the ass of this kid from Asgardia for a month now. You?”

“I like Old Gods. But I’m more into Vanguards. Me and my friends in the neighborhood have been at it in World Mode for like a year now. Still only halfway through.”

“Vanguards. Awesome. Haven’t gotten to it myself, though.”

“Oh, it’s worth it… Trust me.”

“How are we liking the app?” came Mentor Nnenna.

“It’s amazing, Mentor Nnenna,” said Chinue, looking over his screen with a grin.

“I love it!” came another pupil, and a polyphony of equally good reviews followed.

“Good, good,” said Mentor Nnenna. “And I’m glad you’re all getting to know your new friends. Soon, you’ll be learning with them. You’ll be collaborating on your STEM projects, sharing ideas and research. You’ll also have the app on your personal devices so you can keep in touch at home. Are we excited about that?”

“Yes, Mentor Nnenna!!!” came the chorus.

Chinue was certainly excited. Today was a pleasant surprise. All Mentor Nnenna had told them after classes yesterday was that they would be doing something new on their systems. She didn’t even give them a hint. The app was called UniLingo, a real-time universal translator that could replicate speech patterns down to the tiniest quirk. It was built by UniLingo Inc., a company founded in the wake of the Uprising by a Cheetah named Francis Obi and a group of like minds across the Motherland and its diaspora, who had all been working on different technologies to preserve their ancestral languages, and decided to pull their ideas together.

Chinue, of course, only understood about 54% of this information when Mentor Nnenna showed them the video from UniLingo, and Francis Obi’s message. He didn’t know much about the Cheetahs beyond what he had learned in History, STEM and Entrepreneurship. He knew they were the most important people in the AU, and had helped shape it into what it was today. He knew one of them had rebuilt his school about a decade before he was born. He also knew they had recently “retired”. The message from Francis Obi was an old recording.

He found himself wondering what the man must be up to these days.

A soft tone drew him out of contemplation. Time for next period.

“So…” he said, looking back at Tunde. “Guess I’ll… catch you later?”

“Yeah. It was nice… ‘meeting’ you, Chinue.”

“You too.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

The call ended, the holo screen blinked off, and the whiteboard came alive with the subject of the hour.

“Alright, kids,” said Mentor Nnenna. “Today we’ll be learning a little more about Natural Selection. We’ll be exploring the ecosystem in our very own Kalunta Forest, and how it’s been doing over the past 20 years.”

He straightened up, paying attention.

***

Chinue’s house was a 5-bedroom brick flat in a quiet, suburban neighborhood in Umuakwu, just a 30-minute bus ride from his school. He had lived in that house for as long as he could remember, and though he loved to travel, wanted for nowhere else. Papa was currently away on a research trip to Giza. Mama, back from her 9 to 3, was in the kitchen with Chioma, his big sister, who had just finished secondary school, and was waiting on a response from her college of choice. He had asked her out of curiosity one time what she would be studying, and when she told him, nodded his satisfaction, then proceeded to privately look up what on Earth “xenobiology” meant.

“Afternoon, Ma. Hey, Chioma,” he said, as he passed them both on the way to his room.

“Afternoon, Chinue,” said his mother, looking up from her chopping board with a smile. “How was school?”

“Great!”

“Hey, smallie,” said his sister, as she placed a pot on the fire. He smirked at the endearing tease.

“Need a hand?” he said.

“Yes!” said both of them, in emphatic sync.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Just a minute."

He headed to his room, tossed his backpack on the bed, ditched his trousers for a pair of shorts, and headed back out. He helped with seasoning the meat, and told them all about the new app in school, and his new friend who spoke Yoruba.

“Ah, so that’s what it was!” said Chioma. He had mentioned Mentor Nnenna’s cryptic announcement to her yesterday, hoping she could guess. He hated mysteries. They bugged him. “Yeah, I know UniLingo. So they’re already using it in schools… Nice.”

“Mhm,” said Chinue, placing the cuts in the searing pan and rinsing the leftover spice out into the sauce pot, which his mother was now stirring. Then he tossed the basin in the dishwasher.

“I’m glad you made a new friend, Chinue,” she said.

“Me too,” said Chinue.

“Now throw those in for me, please,” she said, gesturing to the diced veggies.

He did. Mama was always meticulous with her cooking. She liked to take her time. He loved to help. He loved helping both of them. He loved the results.

“Thanks, smallie,” said Chioma.

“No problem, sis,” he said.

***

“Ready?” said Tunde.

“Ready,” said Chinue, fingers tensing above the controls, eyes set to kill.

He had picked Amadioha, Igbo God of Thunder. Tunde had picked Esu, the Yoruba God of Chaos. The battleground was a glade in an alternate, colonial-era Benin Kingdom. He hadn’t played Old Gods in over 2 years.

It was almost a fair match.

“What the hell?!” said Tunde, as 30 seconds later, his deity found himself on his backside. “You said you barely play!”

“I barely play,” said Chinue.

“Hmmm,” said Tunde, leaning back in his chair. “You’re good.”

“Thanks,” said Chinue, leaning back in his. “Wanna try again?”

“Uhh… Yes!”

They went at it 14 more times. Chinue’s streak broke at Match 10. Tunde was pretty good too, quick to adapt to the tactics of his opponent. He put up a good fight, beating Chinue twice before the latter upped his game.

“Okay,” said Tunde, at his 13th defeat. “Wow.”

“Hey, you actually had me on my toes for a minute there,” said Chinue.

“You are definitely better than Ivar.”

“Good to know,” said Chinue, and checked the time just a second before he heard his sister’s voice. “… Right. Dinner.”

“No probs. It’s just about for me. Rematch after?”

“Definitely!”

“Alright, then,” said Tunde, and with a wave, logged off.

Chinue was just about to log off himself when a notification popped up on the screen. It wasn’t from the game. It was from the UniLingo app.

“… Huh?” he thought out loud, as he read it, and utterly failed to understand it.

He understood what it said, of course. It was a simple sentence, with a prompt to type in a response, a button to “Submit”, and a second button to “Dismiss”.

Those were clear enough.

Why this was coming from the app was the confusing bit.

“Chinueeee!” came Chioma again.

He let the screen be, and went to have his dinner.

***

‘Gwam tum tu gem gem!’

I shall give you a gem!

The meaning rang clear in Chinue’s mind. It was a riddle, an ancient riddle. He had heard about this type of riddle from his father and his maternal grandmother. They were called Agwugwa, and were of two classes, the first: the common agwugwa, which tested reason and intuition, and the second: the tonal agwugwa, which tested memory. This was a tonal agwugwa. The “answer” wasn’t actually an answer in any rational sense, but a tonal echo of the question. You couldn’t figure it out. The traditional form of each pair had to be known by heart.

He had never come across this tonal agwugwa before.

He wasn’t supposed to know the answer.

But he did.

He was absolutely sure of it!

And he had no idea how.

He reached for the keypad, and typed…

‘Oso mgbada bu n’ugwu’

The deer is in the mountains!

He clicked ‘Submit’, and felt a rush of nerves as the form vanished.

He waited. A minute passed.

Then another notification popped up. A single word, ‘CORRECT’, with a button to close.

He clicked.

It vanished.

And that was it.

Nothing else happened.

When another minute of confusion had passed, he logged back into the game.

“Hey,” said Tunde.

“Hey.”

“Saw you were back a while. Was waiting… Everything… okay?”

“… Yeah,” said Chinue, more hopeful than certain. “Yeah, just… some thing with the app.”

“Oh,” said Tunde. “Ummm… Okay. So… Same battleground?”

“Yep.”

***

The next riddle came the next day. He got home, headed to his room, fired up his computer, and there it was. And there, once again, in his head… another answer he was not supposed to know.

He typed it in, submitted, and a minute later, stared bewildered at the congratulatory message.

It went on for weeks.

He told no one, not Mama, not Chioma, not Mentor Nnenna, not Tunde, not because he didn’t want to, but because a feeling he couldn’t explain kept stopping him. Maybe Tunde had noticed something weird on his end too. But with everything they had shared with each other over these past weeks… surely he would have said by now. Surely Chioma, who actually seemed to know a bit about the app, would have given him a heads-up… if she actually knew what this was. He didn’t think she did. He didn’t think anyone did. And it wasn’t just deduction. It was…

It was like the answers!

Somehow… he just knew this was something else, something unique, something that had to do with him, and him alone.

But what?

Why was this happening?

Why him?

He carried on with his life, with school, with home, with his new friendship, keeping the mystery to himself. He answered riddle after riddle, day after day, curiosity egging him on, each response bringing him closer to a truth he simply just knew, that there was a reason for this, an ultimate answer at the end of this long trail of answers.

On the last day of week 6… the answer came.

***

A video call. The ringtone filled the air the second he stepped into his room. A corporate caller ID – which he knew from his STEM classes. He had only ever had video calls with his dad, Tunde and the boys, and there was that one group call with the two classes when projects started. But even as he stared at the profile picture attached to the ID, and the unbelievable face it depicted… he realized that he wasn’t as surprised as he, by all accounts, should have been, given who was in fact calling him.

And that… was very surprising.

He dropped his bag on the floor, sat in the chair, and answered.

“Hello, Chinue,” said Francis Obi, in the tongue they both shared.

“Uhh… Hello… umm… Good afternoon… sir,” said Chinue.

The man smirked, a warm, reassuring smirk. He looked different than in the video Mentor Nnenna showed them, more… weary. He was seated in some kind of dimly-lit office, though the only thing in the background that Chinue could see was a white, holographic sphere hovering above a glass table to the right, with bright red dots pulsing at seemingly random points on its surface. He couldn’t see any windows.

“Are…” he began to say.

“I know how… unexpected… this is. I know how confusing these past 6 weeks have been for you.”

“Are you… Are you the one who sent me those riddles?”

“I am.”

“… Why?”

“Don’t you already know?”

He thought for a moment, and realized that he did know. Images he had never seen and concepts he had never learned filled his mind now, a flood of information rushing in from some intangible wellspring. His mental vocabulary could barely keep up with the input.

“How…” he said, glaring at the man when the flood stopped. “What just happened? Why do I know all this stuff?!”

“Because these are special times, Chinue. And you are a very special boy.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I want you to focus now,” said Francis. “Focus on the images and ideas in your mind right now. Then focus on your questions. How were you able to answer those riddles? Why were you able to? Sit up straight, close your eyes, breathe, and just… focus…”

He did. Eyes closed. Spine straight. Deep breaths. Just like in Mindfulness class.

In… and out…

And in… and out…

The answer came. He opened his eyes.

“Good,” said Francis. “What you just saw… what you just learned… It isn’t something that can actually be understood. It just is the way it is. Think about your Physics. What have you learned so far about time?”

“… That it’s… relative? That it depends on where you are in space and what you’re doing? That gravity warps it?”

“Mhm… And what else?”

“That… ummm… The laws of physics are symmetrical no matter which direction it’s going in… except entropy.”

“Yes… and…”

“Oh!” said Chinue, making the connection at last. “And… It only goes in one direction for us… because we’re three-dimensional beings!”

“Exactly! We experience time as a straight line, moving from present to future. No going back. No skipping forward. But that line is like a shadow, and the fourth dimension is what is casting that shadow. In the fourth dimension, there is no direction of time. There is no time at all. Every moment, every minute, every eon, is folded into a single instant. The line… becomes a circle. And so… here you are, looking at a riddle you’ve never seen before. But you knew the answer. You were sure of it.”

“… Yes.”

“Because…”

“I…” He already felt it coming, another flash of clarity, another answer. The concepts were still jumbled up, but once again, Francis’s words had nudged him in the right direction, guiding his train of thought. “… Well… because I was always going to.”

“Correct,” said Francis.

“But…”

“I know, I know… It makes absolutely no sense, not to our brains, not normally. Our brains evolved to perceive the fourth dimension only through its shadow, through the flow of time. But the human brain is an amazing machine. Under the right circumstances, it can compute almost anything, become almost anything. And you happen to have been born with a brain that can perceive the fourth dimension as it is! That’s why you knew those answers. You learned them from yourself, a version of you that lives in the future.”

“But if…” Then he paused… What need of asking at all?

“You’re focusing again, aren’t you?” said Francis. “Good. Now you understand.”

“… Yes,” said Chinue, as it all finally clicked into place, the truth about why he was being tested, why Francis had personally reached out to him, what the Cheetahs had been up to for the past 23 months.

“You will need time to adjust,” said Francis. “It never stops being weird, but you get used to it. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Do you… Can you do it too?” said Chinue, and he truly had no idea. This ability was many things, he realized now, but it was not omniscience. It wasn’t nearly that boring. He could only sense his part in the story, and of that only the parts that stood out, the moments and lessons that would define him.

“I can sense things, yes,” said Francis. “Though I wasn’t born with the gift. Like I said… our brains are amazing machines. And I’m not as in tune as you are.”

“… Right.”

“I’m going to send you some material that’ll help with the details. It’s a little above your grade but… something tells me you’ll have no problem keeping up.”

“Ummm… Okay,” said Chinue, smirking at the humor. Then he remembered something, one of the many distinct fragments that made him especially curious. “So none of you know when it’s happening?”

“None of us,” said Francis. “But we have to be as prepared as we can. That’s why we went underground. The Network that will carry on from us, the Network you will be a part of, will be very different. It’ll have a lot more on its plate.”

“How long have you all known about it?”

“Since 2025.”

“… Oh…”

“But that’s nothing for you to bother your head about right now. Now… you’re still a kid. Be a kid. Enjoy the journey. And I’ll be here to guide you through.”

“… Thanks… Francis.”

“Also, there’s no actual rule against sharing this with anyone, but…”

“I know,” said Chinue, and in his mind, he saw the day he would share it. Then another interesting fragment came to the fore, and he turned his gaze to the holographic sphere. “How many of us are there?”

“Enough,” said Francis, looking to his left. “All with unique gifts of their own, all with a very important part to play.”

Chinue fell silent then, as the revelations continued to sink in, and an old persona, an obsolete perspective, continued to slip away. He was still just a kid. He still felt like a kid. He still wanted to be a kid. Even now, he couldn’t wait to log in to Old Gods and kick Tunde’s ass some more. But there was no denying… he was something else too now. He was someone else. He was a thousand selves all at once, guiding each other across time. He had to keep that part of him separate.

“I won’t use it,” he said, as Francis raised a curious eyebrow. “Ever. Except when you’re training me.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” said Francis, with a smile.

A message notification. The books Francis had promised.

“I’ll see you around, Chinue,” said the man.

“See you,” said Chinue.

The call ended. The game menu loaded. He rested back in his chair, and looked around himself.

Even the room didn’t feel the same anymore.

***

He hopped off the bus, breathed in the school’s air, and heaved a mindful sigh. He was excited about today. Today was Presentation Day. He and Tunde had worked hard on their STEM project: a simple game engine written with a state-of-the-art, AI-powered quantum CPU assembly framework. Tunde’s artistic flair and Chinue’s way with words shone through in the finished product. The story was a quest, a group of protagonists setting off into the world to find special people to defend humanity from a coming threat. The demo was sure to entertain. He didn’t need a special ability to know that.

It had been 8 weeks since that first conversation with Francis, 5 since their last training session. He found his balance, putting the gift in its place, enjoying the journey as Francis had advised. It felt weird keeping something so important from his family, especially Chioma, but it was simply how it was going to go. Even if he could change it, between his age and how inexaggerably nuts this whole thing was, telling them now would lead to more complications than he cared for.

“Welcome, everyone,” said Mentor Nnenna, as they took their seats in class and logged in to their systems. “Before we get started, I just want to say… I am so proud of the work you’ve all put in this term.”

“Thank you, Mentor Nnenna!” came the chorus.

“I can’t wait to see your presentations,” said Mentor Nnenna. “So… who wants to go first?”

Silence, and the nerves it betrayed. Chinue looked at Tunde. Tunde looked back, and smiled. It was he who Chinue would share his secret with, in a time when they would be much closer.

He raised his hand.

“Alright, Chinue and Tunde!” said Mentor Nnenna, stepping away from her desk and sitting among the audience. “Take it away!”

Chinue rose and made for the front of the class. In his own class, Tunde did the same. Chinue stood to the left of the whiteboard, Tunde to the right of his, and a holo cell in the floor adjacent each blinked to life, as did a scanner in the ceiling directly above. A tone filled the air. Chinue looked to his left, and for the first time, saw Tunde standing beside him. The boy was a few inches taller than him, and had a far more confident air.

“Hey,” he mouthed.

“Hey,” mouthed Chinue, then faced the class again as the board flashed on.

© 2024 Barra Hart. All rights reserved.

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