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A Female Nigerian AMISOM Police Officer follows the procedings during a medal award ceremony for Nigeria Formed Police Unit on December 05 2014 at Mogadishu Stadium, Somalia. The medals were being awarded to 140 police men and women who are about to complete their deployment to Somalia. AU UN IST Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed

If They Can Learn

'Without moving, she says, “My name is Elizabeth Soh. I’m a technical resolutions officer with Pegasus Incorporated Middle East and Africa geomarkets. I facilitate uptake of Borg technology in law enforcement. The Nigeria Police Force, your owner, is one of my new clients.”'

Future Long Since Past

"Nigeria had become extremely attractive to investors from the year 2020. It was partly due to an attractive tax regime and the uninterrupted power supply that the nuclear plants provided. The tax laws limited the burden of double jeopardy of taxation and substantially reduced taxes for companies that agreed to establish headquarters in Nigeria. Since 2019, there had been literally no export duties charged on finished manufactured products. The country was admitted into BRICS, which in 2022 was changed to BRINCS to accommodate Nigeria. Young vibrant talent moved back home from their bases abroad. Dr Izima was one of them."

A Lever is a Complex Machine

"Being offline from Orisis, my artificial intelligence mother governing Pinaa, the inhabited moon of Mahwé, means I am unable to find a solution or explanation for this scenario. I cycle through microseconds of data, yet even with a world of knowledge built into my system, along with a billion iterations of an action, I cannot find a reason for my abduction mere hours ago."

The Algorithm

"They called themselves the Gaia Accord. A group of elites and technocrats that pushed for global technocratic stewardship. Governments replaced by systems, presidents replaced by panels, parliaments by predictive models. The climate collapse had come faster than anyone expected, and in the aftermath of the Migration Years, the famines, the water wars, the pandemics that never ended, people were too tired to argue. That they controlled Lethal Autonomous Weapons through their monopoly over AI systems, meant arguing was futile anyway."

Every Centre is an Ant

"When children in my region completed their schooling, they left to live and work at The Centre. Other children in other regions went to the ships to lay undersea cables. In the poorer regions, they went to work underground in the lithium mines. In some parts of the world, we were told there were Centres located underwater, and even some in outer space. But I couldn’t imagine my people living under the sea or up in the sky. We were people of the land, and our memory was in the soil."

The Whaling

“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.”

Hanfo Driver

"When Oga Dayo convinced Fidelis to be his delivery driver for his No Place Like a Hobox project—an initiative aimed at “giving the homeless, low-income communities, and rural areas compact smart houses with built-in AIs”—Fidelis was sure Oga Dayo had thrown around the words revolutionise and housing policies in his pitch. Fidelis had witnessed the fallout of the project, with the houses resold by the recipients, the high cost of maintenance, which equalled an increased standard of living for said recipients, two lawsuits, and several robberies—of the recipients, the houses, and him, the unfortunate driver-guy. Oga Dayo was still dealing with the rehousing and settlement payments from that project. And that was two years ago. When Oga Dayo’s pet projects fell through, they fell through hard. Between his philanthropy and charity initiatives, he was always looking for the next big thing to put all that generational oil money into."