The quarterly report had been well-received. Chidi had texted him: saw the slides ur manager showed the org meeting, impressive stuff, and James had responded with a thumbs-up emoji and then stared at the response for longer than was probably warranted.
It was impressive stuff. He knew that. The trend analysis on consumer behavioral shifts in the Lagos middle market over an eighteen-month period had been genuinely complex work, requiring the integration of three different data streams and the development of a visualization approach that communicated uncertainty ranges without losing the clarity of the central finding. He had done it well.
He had also done it sitting at the same desk, in the same chair, looking at the same city through the same window, in the same building he'd been in for three years.
The sphere had shown him Lagos from outside. He kept coming back to this. Not because it had surprised him — he'd seen satellite images, he wasn't naive about geography — but because the sphere's view had been different from a satellite image. A satellite image was an instrument measurement. The sphere had shown him Lagos the way the other worlds had been shown: as a living thing, as a place with texture and intention, as a human project ongoing.
He'd been running numbers on it in his head ever since. Not formally — he had no data to work with, only the sphere's images and his own twenty-eight years of living here — but the pattern-recognition that was his professional tool turned on his own environment.
Lagos had approximately twenty-five million people. It was the largest city on the African continent, one of the largest in the world. It had grown with a speed and density that made conventional urban planning theory look like advice written for a different species entirely. It had traffic that people sang about in despair and art that people traveled from other continents to see. It had markets that operated on a logic of social relationship as much as economics. It had history that went back centuries and infrastructure problems that had been present for decades and a creative energy that was palpable in the way that a physical force was palpable.
It also had — and this was the data James had been sitting with since he'd read the sphere's question — an enormous and complex cost structure for an ordinary life.
Not magic. Not cultivation. Not the threat of hull breach. The cost structure of being a person trying to live in Lagos was built from: the price of housing, which had become increasingly difficult for middle-income earners; the price of transportation, which consumed a significant portion of daily time and money; the reliability of public services, which was uneven in ways that correlated with neighborhood income; the cost of quality education, which tracked the same correlation; the cost of healthcare, which was improving but remained a source of anxiety for most families who did not have employer coverage.
None of this was unique to Lagos. He knew that. Every city he'd read about had some version of this matrix. But he was from here, and the sphere had asked what a life cost, and the honest answer for a life here was: a significant amount of money, a significant amount of navigational intelligence about how to get what you needed at what prices from which sources, and a significant amount of time, of which the city consumed an extraordinary quantity in the basic mechanical requirements of moving around.
He opened a new document. He titled it, with the same matter-of-fact precision he used for client reports: SURVEY — WORLD OF EARTH (LAGOS) — PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.
He typed for an hour. He used the same analytical structure he'd use for any data project: context, observed patterns, initial hypotheses, questions for further investigation. He was careful about his claims — he marked clearly what was documented and what was inference, what was his experience and what he knew to be general.
When he stopped, he had three pages. It was not the most rigorous work he'd ever done — he needed actual data, not memory and impression — but it was honest, and it was a start.
He saved the document. He thought about the others — the five of them sitting around the table with the sphere turning between them, five people from five different configurations of human existence, each carrying a different kind of knowledge about what it actually took to be a person in their world.
The survey, he thought, was not going to produce a single answer.
That was fine. The best analyses rarely did.