James Okonkwo was late.
Not dramatically late — not the kind of late that warranted an apology or a phone call or a story. The kind of late that was four minutes, which was invisible in the mathematics of office life as long as you walked in looking like you had been there longer. He had perfected this walk over three years at Meridian Analytics. It involved carrying something — a mug, a folder, a phone displaying an open email — and making eye contact with anyone who looked up, the brief nod of a person who had been here, who was very much not arriving, who had in fact already accomplished several things this morning before you even sat down.
Today he was carrying a coffee he'd bought from the cart outside, which still steamed, which technically proved he had not been here long, but people saw the confidence before they processed the steam.
"Morning, James," said Amaka from her desk.
"Morning," he said, the nod, the brief eye contact, already moving.
He reached his desk. He sat. He opened his laptop and pulled up his email and began the process of reading while appearing to have already read everything important. Outside the window, Lagos did what Lagos did in the morning: it moved, loudly, with the enormous kinetic energy of a city that had decided to become one of the largest on the continent and had been executing on that decision, regardless of infrastructure, with magnificent stubbornness.
James had grown up here. He had gone to university here, gotten his data analysis degree here, gotten this job here three years ago when he was twenty-five and the job had seemed like the beginning of something and not, as it now occasionally felt, the entire thing.
He was good at his work. He wanted to be clear about that, even in the privacy of his own assessment. He was genuinely skilled — the trend modeling, the visualization work, the ability to locate the story in a data set the way other people located shapes in clouds. His manager appreciated him. His performance reviews were strong. He was being considered, apparently, for a senior analyst role.
He was also, he had recently concluded, profoundly bored.
This was not the kind of boredom you complained about. He had a good job. He had a comfortable flat two bus rides from the office. He had his mother, who called on Sundays and worried in the specific way that Nigerian mothers worried, which was deeply and out loud. He had his friend Chidi, who was a software engineer and also bored at his job but expressed this differently — through elaborate weekend schemes and recreational outrage at technology news.
The boredom James had was quieter. It was the specific boredom of a person who had followed a reasonable path to a reasonable place and found the reasonable place exactly as expected. No worse. No better. Exactly as advertised, which was, paradoxically, its own kind of disappointment.
He opened the quarterly client report he'd been building for two weeks. Forty pages of consumer trend data, sixteen visualizations, three executive summary sections. It was good work. He knew it was good work. He would send it at eleven, it would be appreciated, and then he would start the next one.
At nine-thirty, he went to get a second coffee from the office machine. At nine-forty-five, he responded to four emails. At ten-fifteen, he had a brief conversation in the corridor with his colleague Tunde about a data discrepancy in the Q3 figures that turned out to be a formatting error. At ten-thirty, he was back at his desk, and the city outside the window was still doing what it did, and he looked at it for a while without really seeing it.
His phone buzzed.
A notification from the transit app: service disruption on Line 7. Irrelevant — he took Line 3. He dismissed it.
Then, underneath it, a second notification from an app he didn't recognize. He stared at it. He hadn't downloaded it — he was careful about his phone storage, bordering on obsessive — but there it was: a small blue-white icon he'd never seen before, and a notification that read:
YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR THE CROSS-WORLD SURVEY. REPORT TO THIRD STREET JUNCTION AT DUSK. BRING NOTHING YOU CANNOT CARRY.
James looked at this for a long time.
It was clearly spam. It was obviously some kind of marketing stunt, or an ARG, or an elaborate setup for something he hadn't agreed to. He should delete the app. He should report it, probably. He should certainly not experience the small, embarrassing flutter in his chest that felt dangerously close to excitement.
He opened the app.
The interface was completely blank except for the message, which did not have a sender, a brand, a logo, or any of the identifying marks that would let him file a complaint or a curiosity with any relevant authority.
Third Street Junction was three blocks from his flat.
He deleted the app.
He redownloaded it at lunch, because the blank icon had been sitting in his deleted files and he'd kept looking at it.
The message was still there.
He sat at his desk in the afternoon, in the city that was too loud and too alive and entirely predictable, and he thought about dusk at Third Street Junction. He thought about bringing nothing you couldn't carry. He thought about the word worlds, plural, and what a person with no magic and no special constitution and no scavenging skills might bring to a survey of them.
He thought: probably his laptop. He was good with data.
Outside, Lagos continued to exist, magnificent and indifferent.
James finished his quarterly report.
He sent it at eleven-oh-three, which was technically late by two minutes, and he looked at the third-street-junction pin he'd quietly dropped on his maps app and then looked away from it and went back to work.
Dusk was a long time away.
He would think about it more later.