Obscura #1: Awakening

TWO

>Chinatown

>Nuevo Lagos (Population–12 million)

>Lycan Federation

"Come on, come on." Lemi Okri's teeth were clenched, the insistent clacking of old-school keyboards was drowned out by the thumping bass of music in the congested, oval-shaped lab.

    Lemi's gaze was glued to the holographic monitors that formed a semi-circle around him. Five years previously, if any clairvoyant shine-touched person had predicted that he'd be working for the F.R.A., the inventor would have laughed in the person's face and had them thrown in a Fringe Gulag, both for treason and for magic use since shine-bending was prohibited in Lycan Fed.

    No one ever returned from that muddy abyss with their faculties intact. Lemi was once faced with the daunting prospects of such a treacherous fate as being detained at a Fringe Gulag. But he had managed to wriggle out of the situation with his dreadlocks intact. In Lycan Fed., the inventor had learned to rely only on his instincts and his inventive acumen to survive.

    The scientist's lab was concealed dead-centre of Chinatown, in the chilly basement of an apartment complex owned by an F.R.A. mole. Vertical columns of ceramic pillars surrounded the room. At the centre of the lab, the scientist sat at his computer station, hands blurring over two keyboards. The holographic monitors in front of him streamed lines of algorithm too fast for a curious observer to comprehend. A separate table was infested with jutting wires and tech scraps.

    Lemi had learned to code when he was just nine years old, hiding in his secluded alcove at the orphanage home where he grew up, dodging bullies and liberating leftover food from the kitchen on some nights. He had practiced programming on Lycan-web until he had stumbled upon an underlying construct that piggybacked onto the mainframe of Lycan-web and gave space for the more unsavoury transactions to take place virtually.

    The Lycan cities were a vast web of binaries to the inventor—he frequently boasts to his anonymous employers about his ability to access any piece of information given enough time and energy boosters.

    The custom-built lab was a hive of technological feats—fibre-optic cables sprouted from the top of the ceramic pillars and snaked around the circular white walls. Lemi called this technology the EFC- Enhanced Faraday Cage. It restricted external signals from breaching his systems and allowed him to crawl the Lycan-web with deft stealth.

    Lemi's bloodshot eyes widened, a weary smile played on his lips then morphed into an elated cackle. "I actually did it." he chuckled dryly, running a spindly hand through his thick locks. The former Lycan scientist's hand quavered faintly as he did so. He briefly caught his fatigued expression on the reflective desk—the two bags under his eyes were defined, and there was a tangled two-day stubble on his chin. Lemi couldn't keep his hands from shaking—he didn't know if the palpitations were the result of fatigue or the elation sparkling through his insides, and frankly, he didn't care.

    The streaming lines of code formed a pseudo-matrix in Lemi's mind's eye. In the matrix, the array of code told him that he had successfully exploited the weakness in Mori's Neuro-Platform, his own technology, a mind-controlling technology he had created six years previously with the baseline of his mother's abandoned research.

    Lemi vividly recalled proposing the experiment to the man who would later declare him an enemy of the state:

    A younger Lemi stood in front of five small statured Echelons and Prime Minister Nzeogwu in an important looking conference room. His lanky legs were jelly. His short-spiky hair quivered as he gave his halting speech to the Echelon of Lycan Co. in his rapid-fire dialect that was beginning to permeate the talking patterns of the younger generation.