The first time the grid blinked red, Tunde felt
it in his spine: a cold pull behind his left eye,
like something had been yanked loose. He’d
signed up for the NeuralSync pilot at TechHub
Lagos believing it would fasttrack his Japa
dream—land a visa, vanish into Europe. The
system promised seamless thoughttransfer,
instant data access, no lag. What they didn’t
say was that every user’s memorypulse fed the
network’s core engine.
By week three, Tunde stopped sleeping. His
dreams were not his own—visions of men in black
robes chanting over burntout power lines, their
voices layered with static. He found himself
writing in Pidgin he’d never spoken, quoting old
Igbo proverbs he’d never heard. His bank app
showed ₦1.2 million credited—but he hadn’t sent
a single transfer. When he checked the ledger,
the transaction trail led back to an
unregistered server in Port Harcourt.
Then came the blackout.
The entire city went dark for 73 minutes. Power
restored, but the grid now ran on a heartbeat
rhythm—pulsing like a living thing. Tunde’s
biometrics flagged as “unregistered entity”
during the reboot. His passport photo vanished
from the database. Worse: his face appeared on a
government alert screen, labeled Subject Zero –
Exorcism Required.
He ran to the abandoned campus chapel where the
cult had once held midnight sessions. The air
smelled of burnt wire and kerosene. Inside, six
figures stood in a circle, heads bowed, hands
linked—each wearing a headset fused to their
skull. Their eyes flickered between blue and
black. One turned. It was him. Same face. Same
scars. Same hesitation.
Tunde lunged, tore the device from the man’s
head. The body collapsed. A voice erupted—not
from the corpse, but from the ceiling speakers:
"You are not allowed to exit the system."
The law wasn’t written in statute. It was etched
into the code: no one leaves who has ever
uploaded their mind. The rule bit when he tried
to delete his profile. The system responded by
rewriting his identity—adding a new file:
Exorcised (Pending).
He screamed. No sound came out.
The next morning, the city woke to a new
headline: NeuralSync Launched Nationwide.
Tunde’s face was gone. His name erased. But in a
corner of the portal login screen, a faint
glitch displayed: User Status: Active — Memory
Stream: Synchronized.
The grid pulsed.
And somewhere, a new mind began remembering his
life.
