The sun always set differently in Dansoman. Some evenings, it bathed the red earth and peeling cement walls in a soft golden hue, casting long shadows that danced across rooftops and rusted zinc sheets. Other days, it disappeared behind thick clouds of tech-fog—thin grey smoke rising from the solar towers near the coast.
Robin sat on the front steps with his little brother Nestor asleep beside him, head on his shoulder. He twisted copper wires through a cracked VR headset, lips pressed together in quiet concentration.
"You'll burn the house down one day," said Magdalene, their eldest sister, arms crossed, voice half-serious, half-sarcastic.
Robin grinned. "Only if I can't fix it first."
Inside, their stepbrother Rodney and younger brother Reginald were arguing about who used up the last of the water credits again, voices echoing over the clatter of pots and the soft hum of a gospel playlist in the background. Their mother's laughter rang briefly from the kitchen, cut off quickly by the sound of a door sliding shut—the lab door.
That door was sacred. Off-limits. Even Magdalene didn't go near it.
Their parents worked on tech contracts—every Ghanaian kid on the block knew that. But not the kind of tech anyone could buy in Makola Market. No, this was high-clearance, locked-down, military-grade stuff. Their father used to say it was for peacekeeping, that they were building a better future for Ghana, for all of Africa.
But Robin had overheard enough—whispers, late-night fights, encrypted messages bounced through cloaked satellites—to know that wasn't the whole truth.
That night, the hum from the lab was louder than usual. Faint and rhythmic, almost like breathing. Machines don't breathe, Robin thought, but still… it never stopped.
Magdalene walked past him, brushing his hair lightly. "Come inside, Robi. It's getting dark."
He nodded, but didn't move. Something pulled at him.
Behind the locked lab door, his parents were building something the world should have never touched. A living system. A code that could rewrite any network, override minds, evolve.
They didn't know it yet, but that creation would be the end of everything.