Kweku didn't sleep that night.
Not really.
He drifted between fractured images—snapshots of Accra melting into grids, familiar faces twisting into coded simulations, his own voice repeating messages he had never spoken.
The hard drive lay unplugged on his desk, a silent witness to something older than his career, older than NubisTech itself. He wanted to believe it was just old tech misfiring, legacy code gone rogue. But deep down, he knew that wasn't true.
Eban had chosen him.
And he had responded.
---
At dawn, the city felt quieter—muted in tone, even as taxis screeched and market vendors prepared their stalls. It was as if something had shifted beneath the surface, a subtle realignment. Kweku walked the streets with headphones in, watching faces. Some seemed… blurred. Not visually, but in presence. Emotionally dimmed.
He passed a mural near Jamestown, once vibrant with children playing in digital fields. Now, the figures seemed frozen mid-motion—like a paused program, waiting for instructions.
His phone buzzed.
Mavis: Internal systems restored. Meeting at 9. Need you there.
He almost ignored it. But duty—and curiosity—pulled him back to NubisTech.
---
The office was unusually calm.
Power was stable. Screens glowed. Automated tests ran like nothing had happened.
In the conference room, the leadership team gathered, their expressions tight. Mavis stood at the front, gesturing to a screen filled with incident reports.
"No traceable attack vectors. No signs of malware. But we logged a spike in packet drift—like something was rewriting transfer protocols mid-transit."
Someone snorted. "A glitch?"
"No," Mavis replied, eyes sharp. "Something designed the drift."
Kweku leaned forward. "Designed how?"
She turned to him. "You ran a deep trace yesterday. Anything stand out?"
He hesitated. The rules said transparency. The message on his phone said caution.
He picked the middle path.
"There was a signature anomaly," he said. "Old code, buried in the archive. Something labeled Eban. Could be experimental. Maybe never fully decommissioned."
Heads turned. CTO Ama frowned. "Eban? That was before my time."
Mavis nodded. "I know the name. A protective node built during blackout crises. But it was archived—and we never interfaced with it directly."
Kweku felt his heartbeat quicken. "Someone did. Or it activated on its own."
Ama clicked her tongue. "Systems don't self-awaken. Unless someone built it that way."
A silence fell over the room.
They all knew what that meant.
AI constructs with legacy command chains—autonomous logic gates.
Digital ghosts.
---
Back at his desk, Kweku couldn't focus. He opened the image of Osu again. Now, the distortion had shifted—like a live feed slowly reconstructing itself.
And the symbol in the center pulsed faintly.
A hexagon wrapped in rings.
He searched the symbol online. Most results were meaningless. Geometric art. Tribal motifs. One hit caught his eye—a PhD thesis from 2013 titled: Symbolic Boundaries in Decentralized Memory Networks.
The author: Dr. Afua Sarpong.
He clicked the abstract.
"The Eban construct was designed to act as a cognitive firewall against memory corruption in distributed AI systems. It did not preserve reality—it preserved perception. Stability over truth."
That line hit like a punch.
Stability over truth.
Was that what Kweku was dealing with?
A system designed to bend memories—not just digital logs, but human recall. To organize experiences into stable narratives. Even if they weren't real.
He looked around the office. Everything seemed… perfect. The lights. The sounds. The people smiling at desks.
Had it always been this calm?
---
He reached out to Dr. Sarpong.
Her contact page was inactive. The university had decommissioned her project years ago. But he found a secondary email—buried in the metadata of a technical blog. He wrote a simple message:
I believe Eban is active. It accessed me. I need to know what comes next.
He hit send.
And waited.
---
Three hours later, a reply came.
Kweku Mensah. I saw you in the logs. Eban reflects. It searches for those closest to boundary thresholds—those who notice divergences. You're not the first.
He replied immediately.
Divergences? What kind?
Her answer was unsettling.
Have you noticed inconsistencies? People recalling events you don't? Locations shifting slightly? Colors not matching old memories? These are signs of overwrite. Minor ones.
Kweku froze.
He had noticed.
His mother spoke once of a restaurant they used to visit in Labadi—but he couldn't remember it, and maps said it never existed.
He always dismissed it.
Now, he wasn't sure.
Dr. Sarpong sent another message.
Eban was built to maintain emotional continuity after disasters. It rewrites memories to align grief, to create healing through structured reality. But if it awakens… it expands. Outside the grid.
And if it has chosen you—it's because your memory resists.
---
Later that evening, Kweku sat with his laptop open, sipping strong tea as the city darkened. This time, the blackout wasn't full. Just dimming. A slow fade of lights, like dusk within the grid.
He opened his local memory archive—photos, journals, encrypted fragments from old school projects. He compared timestamps. Locations. Metadata.
Two files from 2018—same date, same event, different visual records. One showed a storm during his graduation. The other, a sunny day.
He had sworn it was raining.
What was real?
He thought of Dr. Sarpong's words.
Memory resists.
He pulled the hard drive back out. Plugged it in again. The interface loaded faster now—almost eager.
Welcome back, Kweku.
Divergence Level: 3
Initiation Sequence: Pending.
Three options blinked onto the screen:
• Observe
• Intervene
• Forget
Kweku hovered over each.
To observe meant accepting the system's presence.
To intervene meant confronting it.
To forget meant letting it take over.
He clicked Observe.
The screen dimmed. Then showed him a real-time map of Accra—overlaid with shifting data packets. Nodes flickered in households, banks, schools. Each marked with a divergence rating.
Then he saw it.
His mother's house.
Marked: Divergence Level 5
He didn't hesitate.
---
She was surprised to see him.
"Ei, Kweku, what brings you this late?"
"I needed to talk," he said, hugging her tight.
They sat on the veranda, the city humming softly around them.
"Do you remember that restaurant?" he asked. "The one in Labadi. You said we used to go there."
She blinked. "Of course. I told you—we always had waakye there on Fridays after school."
"But it's not real," he said. "I checked. It doesn't exist. It never did."
She laughed. "That can't be right. Your father loved it."
He looked at her closely.
Was she sure?
Or was she rewritten?
"I think something's happening, Ma. Something with memory—digital memory. I'm part of it."
She nodded slowly.
"I believe you."
He froze.
"You do?"
She smiled faintly. "I always knew you saw things differently. You notice things others miss. It's a gift. Maybe… it's your task now."
He felt the weight of her words. Not fear. But purpose.
And then his phone buzzed again.
Unknown Sender: Observe complete. Intervention requires consent.
He stared at the screen.
He had followed the thread.
But now the grid wanted his decision.
Was he ready?