I couldn't sleep for shit after the practice room incident.
Throughout the night, Josh was snoring like a faulty generator, a constant, irritating rhythm that my noise-canceling headphones couldn't entirely filter out. But it wasn't just the noise keeping me awake. It was that fucking girl. Hailey. The hurricane in the denim jacket.
A MIDI controller.
The insult stuck in my throat like a fish bone. It was inefficient. It was clearly bullshit. I had played Bach flawlessly. Yet, her words had caused a blood pressure spike in my brain. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her messy hair and those accusing amber eyes telling me I was doing it wrong. That bitch.
By morning, my battery was already sitting at 40%. Josh was up early, chugging something called "Monster Energy" and vibrating with an intensity that made me tired just looking at him. American energy.
"Big day, Femi! Strategy class with Professor Vance. Word on the street is he eats freshmen for breakfast. You ready to get your brain wrinkled?"
"My brain is adequately wrinkled, thank you," I muttered, shoving my laptop into my bag. I grabbed an apple from the mini-fridge, nothing else—and headed out into the biting Cambridge air.
The class was "Applied Strategy and High-Stakes Decision Making." It was one of those legendary "unicorn" courses at Harvard that people talked about in hushed tones. It was supposed to be multidisciplinary, drawing students from economics, political science, and pre-law.
I was taking it because it sounded like the only thing on campus that operated on pure fucking logic.
The lecture hall was cavernous. It looked more like a United Nations assembly room than a classroom. Tiered seating curved around a massive central stage dominated by a screen the size of a billboard. The air conditioner hummed with expensive efficiency. It smelled of old money and intense anxiety.
I found a seat near the back, right on the edge of the aisle—my usual anchor position. Good sightlines, easy exit route. I pulled out my laptop and watched the other students file in.
They all looked the same. Polished, confident, wearing clothes that cost more than my father's car back in Lagos. They chatted loudly, dropping names of senators and CEOs they interned for.
NPCs.
The lot of them.
They were running pre-programmed scripts of privilege. Fucking drones.
The room filled up. Two hundred seats, almost at capacity.
Then, the door near the front stage opened, and a glitch walked into the matrix.
It was her. Hailey.
She looked exactly the same as yesterday—same dangerous amount of hair, same ripped jeans, same beat-up messenger bag. She looked around the intimidating room with an expression of mild amusement, like she'd wandered into a zoo by mistake.
My brain threw up a critical error. What the hell was a music major—one who didn't even respect the mathematical purity of Bach—doing in a high-level strategy course? This made no fucking sense.
She scanned the crowd, and for a second, those intense eyes locked onto mine in the back row.
She winked.
She Actually winked. Then she dropped into a seat in the front row, kicking her boots up onto the chair in front of her.
Unbelievable.
The sheer audacity.
Before I could process her presence any further, the room lights dimmed. The noise of two hundred conversations died instantly.
Professor Vance walked onto the stage.
He was a small man, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit. He didn't look like he ate freshmen; he looked like he owned the bank that held their mortgages. He didn't carry notes. He just walked to the center of the stage, hands clasped behind his back, and stared at us until the silence grew uncomfortable.
"Strategy," Vance said, his voice quiet but amplified perfectly by the room's acoustics, "is not about winning. Any fool with a bigger stick can win a fight. Strategy is about survival when you have no sticks left. It is about making the choice that hurts the least when every choice is agonizing."
He clicked a tiny remote in his hand. The massive screen behind him flared to life.
It was a map. A sprawling mid-sized American city, nestled between two rivers. Population data scrolled on the side: 500,000 residents.
"This is Scenario Delta," Vance announced. "At 0400 hours today, a bio-weapon was discharged in the central subway station. It's a hemorrhagic fever. Airborne. Highly contagious. Mortality rate is 100% within 48 hours. There is no cure."
A ripple of nervous energy went through the room. This wasn't abstract economics. This was some real-life shit.
"The contagion model," Vance continued, pointing to a spreading red stain in the center of the city map, "indicates that Patient Zero has already infected hundreds. By noon today, thousands will be carriers. The National Guard has surrounded the city limits, but they are overwhelmed by panic. People are trying to flee."
He turned to face us, his eyes cold. "Your objective is simple: Ensure the survival of the human species. The simulation model predicts that if a single infected carrier breaches the city limits, the global pandemic resulting from it will wipe out 90% of humanity within six months."
He gestured to a console on the stage. It was running a complex simulation interface. "Who wants to save the fucking world?"
The room was dead silent. This was a trap. Even I could see that. A real Kobayashi Maru.
A hand shot up in the front row. A guy in a crisp polo shirt. He strode down to the stage, looking confident.
"I'd mobilize the CDC immediately," Polo Shirt said, tapping commands into the console. "Set up quarantine intake centers outside the city. Rush medical aid in. We have to try to save those people."
Vance just watched. The simulation sped up on the big screen. We saw little blue dots—National Guard—trying to funnel thousands of panicked yellow dots into camps.
It was sloppy. Too many fucking variables.
Suddenly, a red dot slipped past the blockade line on the northern highway. Then another. The infection counter on the side of the screen jumped. The global map zoomed out, showing red lines spreading across the continent like spiderwebs.
GLOBAL INFECTION: 92%. SPECIES STATUS: CRITICAL.
"You failed," Vance said drily. "You tried to be a hero. You killed nine billion people. Sit your ass down."
Polo Shirt looked devastated. He slunk back to his seat. What an amateur.
Another student tried. A girl who claimed her father was a general. She tried a phased evacuation, prioritizing children. The simulation laughed at her. The virus didn't give a shit about age. The panic caused a riot at the southern bridge. The cordon broke.
GLOBAL INFECTION: 94%.
Another failure.
I watched three more students try. They were all smart. They all had good intentions. But they were all thinking like civilians. They were obsessed with the 500,000 people inside the circle. They were trying to win a firefight when the objective was to win the goddamn war.
They were bots. Lagging in their thinking, unable to process the harsh reality of the game in front of them.
I looked down at Hailey in the front row. She wasn't looking at the screen with tactical eyes. She looked horrified. Her hand was over her mouth as the fourth student failed and the death toll climbed. She was feeling it.
Inefficient.
My leg started bouncing under the table. Tap, tap, tap. The familiar rhythm.
The math was simple. It was brutal, but it was simple.
"Is there no one else?" Vance challenged the room. "Are you all just going to watch the world burn because you're afraid to get your hands dirty?"
I stopped tapping.
I stood up. My chair scraped loudly against the floor. Heads turned. I felt the familiar rush of adrenaline, the same focus that hit me when it was a 1v4 clutch situation in game. The lecture hall faded away. The students were just background noise. There was only the interface, the objective, and the tools available.
I walked down the long aisle to the stage. I felt Hailey's eyes on me the whole way.
I stepped up to the console. It was a sophisticated UI, but underneath, it was just inputs and fucking outputs.
"Name?" Vance asked.
"Adefemi Kehinde."
"Alright, Mr. Kehinde. The city is panicking. The virus is spreading. What is your first move to save them?"
I looked at the map. I didn't see people. I saw data points. I saw compromised assets.
"I don't save them," I said into the microphone on the console. My voice was flat.
The room went very quiet. A stunned silence.
My fingers moved across the interface, finding the military command options.
"The 500,000 inhabitants are already statistically dead," I explained, my voice devoid of inflection. I was just reading the obvious lines of code. "They are compromised variables. Any attempt to interact with them introduces an unacceptable risk of containment breach. This is basic fucking probability."
I selected the National Guard units. I changed their orders from 'Containment and Aid' to 'Lethal Enforcement'.
A collective gasp went through the room. I ignored it. Weaklings.
"I am rerouting all engineering corps to the four main bridges leading out of the city," I said as I entered the commands. "They are to be detonated immediately. No entry. No exit. Burn the fucking bridges."
On the big screen, the bridges on the map flashed and disappeared in simulated explosions.
"I am establishing a hard perimeter one mile outside the city limits," I continued, working fast now, setting up the kill-zone. "Automated turrets and air support. Anyone attempting to cross this line is to be neutralized on sight. No exceptions. Not a single fucking one."
I hit the 'EXECUTE' button.
The simulation ran at high speed.
Inside the city on the map, the red stain consumed everything. The death counter for the city skyrocketed. 100,000. 300,000. 500,000. Total casualty rate. It was a digital massacre.
But the goddamn borders held. No red dots slipped past my kill-zone.
The global map stayed green.
The big screen flashed: OBJECTIVE ACHIEVED: SPECIES PRESERVED.
I stepped back from the console.
The silence in that massive hall was heavier than anything I had ever experienced. It wasn't respectful. It was appalled. Two hundred wealthy, educated American students were staring at me like I was a fucking monster that had just crawled out of the darkest corner of the dark web. "Are Nigerians that scary?" One whispered as I stood.
Even Professor Vance looked slightly disturbed. He stared at the screen, then turned slowly to look at me.
"Explain," he said. It wasn't a request. It was an order.
I adjusted my glasses. "It was a math problem, sir. The previous attempts failed because they operated under an emotional bias. They wanted to save the immediate victims. That desire is inefficient when faced with an existential threat. It's a fundamental flaw in people generally you see..."
I looked out at the sea of horrified faces. "By the time the scenario started, the city was already lost. Trying to save them was a gamble with a 90% probability of global failure. The only mathematical certainty for global survival required the total isolation and sacrifice of the compromised sector. It's not complicated."
I shrugged. "It is a tragedy. A real one. But it is also the only winning move. The only way from keeping the species from reaching the cold hands of oblivion."
I turned to walk back to my seat.
As I passed the front row, I made eye contact with Hailey.
She wasn't winking this time. She was staring up at me, her face pale, her jaw slightly slack. She looked utterly terrified. But beneath the terror, there was something else in those intense amber eyes.
Something like recognition. A spark of understanding in the face of horror.
She wasn't looking at a MIDI controller anymore. She was looking at something she didn't understand, something dangerous, and for the first time since I arrived in this country, I felt seen. Truly seen.
I walked back up the aisle to my seat, the sound of my own footsteps the only noise in the entire building. I sat down, opened my laptop, and waited for the class to resume.
The weirdo from the concert hall was staring at me. And I knew, with cold certainty, that she wasn't going to let this go.