“Excess energy creates sonic storms, as we all know from Órino-rin. But depletion is equally dangerous. Sound pollution, industrial harmonics, and unregulated amplification, these all thin the ambient field. When flare energy strikes a depleted system, it doesn’t heal it. It fractures it, and if left unchecked, it can produce deserts of silence.”
"Technology had improved on most things except housing, poverty, social injustice, the climate, inequality of women and scarcity of water. It did allow for crematorium distillates, units that pulled water, evaporating, condensing, in biological recycling to keep water alive from dead corpses."
"She smiles. It never gets old to her, the act of growing something for the first time. She remembers sprinkling the tiny dry seeds onto moist soil and leaving the planter, a rose-gold tin out in the sun. She wonders what the tin used to be, in its past life, a hundred years ago. What it was first filled with, all the things it’s carried and will carry in the future. For now, it carries fragile life."
"With the backing of well-funded lobbyists, Pastor Usen and the Quintessence Foundation pushed for the Nigerian government to relax the legislation around the incorporation of new technology required to sustain soul chains nationwide. Quintessence and Nigeria entered Public-Private Partnership that started with developing vast energy infrastructure, and this collaboration heralded a quantum leap in tech, unlike anything a country has ever experienced. Many called him a visionary, and with his leadership, the Quintessence Foundation commissioned QTSSMN1, the first of what we now call soul mines."
'The whispers picked up, then receded, a cascade in the air. You already forgot us. Like every other human. Cut us down, betrayed us, forgot us. Leave what is ours and go. “Peace,” Muta pleaded. “I have not forgotten you.”'
'She pulls a face. “Language and hidden histories matter. It’s from Kora, the tongue of the First People of the Cape, the now extinct Khoe. It means sweet water for all. The First Name for this place.”'
‘“Trees dey talk o,” she would say. “Dem dey talk about bad-bad things wey go happen for future.”’
"Our way of life is no longer sustainable, if we want to survive we have to adjust to the world, adapt and embrace it. For thousands of years humanity has tried to shape the world in its image. We failed and did so much damage to the world in the process. Now, we pay it back."'
Set in New Delta, a city rebuilt on drained swampland in former oilfields, the protagonist, Chioma, is expectant and is caught up in labor during a violent, unpredicted storm linked to bioengineered periwinkle grass.
The futuristic city becomes a utopian gaze, setting the stage for us to rethink and see urban planning as an intrinsic aspect of climate justice.