The city hummed with prayerchannels —
solarpowered pulpitboxes installed on every
street corner, humming psalms into the air,
sucking sin from the breath of passersby. In
1963, the Ministry of Spiritual Efficiency had
made it law: every Nigerian must receive daily
electronic confession, and the state purified
souls with tuned frequencies. No more manual
repentance. No more pastors holding vigil. Only
the Box, and its silent, glowing judgment.
Eunice, daughter of Pastor Adeyemi, walked
barefoot past the nearest Box in Surulere, her
fingers pressed low on her belly. She had
conceived with a university boy who vanished
after his visa approval — the kind who kissed
you with petroleumscented lips and left for
Canada before the rain came. She did not tell
her father. He had died three weeks before the
diagnosis, his last breath lost to a Box that
misread his heart as “unrepentant.”
Adesuwa, his widow, had taken the church, the
car, the land in Ibadan — and now the Box
network. She wore Pastor Adeyemi’s robes like a
second skin, and her sermons were broadcast
through the machines: “The womb is a temple the
Devil now owns unless the Church cleanses it.”
She had declared unborn children “unbaptized
sinsacks,” ripe for extraction.
Eunice’s pregnancy grew in silence. She worked
the night shift at the Ministry’s data archive,
typing prayers into the system — the sins of
others — while her own body became a forbidden
code. The rule that bit her: any woman found
pregnant without statesanctioned conception
permit was subject to SoulRecalibration — a
procedure that emptied the womb, then rewrote
the mother’s spiritual profile. No trial. No
mercy. Only the Box’s light.
On the eve of the National Prayer Festival,
Adesuwa ordered a citywide scan. Every pregnant
woman, flagged by the Box’s new resonance
algorithm, would be summoned. The machines had
learned to hear fetal heartbeat as dissonance —
a glitch in divine order.
Eunice ran to the old chapel behind the Lagos
University Hospital. The roof was gone. The
altar cracked. But the floor still held the
scent of her father’s incense. She knelt. The
Box outside pulsed red — her name, her location,
her child’s heartbeat — all uploaded. The
Ministry van arrived at dawn.
Adesuwa stood at the door, not in robe, but in a
white lab coat stitched with gospel verses. She
held the extraction device — a chrome tube
humming with stolen prayers. “You think your
father’s love saved you?” she said. No quote.
Just the truth, heavy as Lagos humidity.
Eunice did not scream. She pulled the knife from
her sandal — the one her mother gave her before
the fever took her — and drove it into the
machine’s power core. The Box exploded. Not with
fire, but with a sound: a thousand voices, all
her father’s sermons, all the unspoken
confessions of Lagos, all the unborn cries,
bursting into the air like wind through palm
leaves.
The city went silent. The Boxes blinked out.
Eunice walked into the morning, blood on her
thighs, the child still inside her, the city’s
faith broken. No one chased her. The system was
dead. The world had changed — not by law, but by
silence. And for the first time since 1960,
Lagos did not pray. It wept.
