The heat of Lagos on that Friday morning was a living thing. It wasn't the dry, baking heat of the desert but a thick, humid presence that wrapped around you the moment you stepped outside, slicking your skin with a film of sweat and making the air feel heavy in your lungs. It was the thirteenth of June, 2025, and the city was singing its usual, glorious, chaotic song. The thousand-strong choir of generators provided a constant, rumbling bassline, the city's stubborn heartbeat against the fickle pulse of the power grid. Above this drone, the melody was a riot of sound: the impatient blare of car horns, the high-pitched calls of hawkers weaving through the gridlocked traffic, the distorted thump of an Afrobeats track blasting from a passing danfo bus, its sides scarred from a thousand near-misses. For Adekunle, this wasn't noise; it was the sound of home.
He sat on a worn, blue plastic chair that had been bleached pale by years under the relentless sun. It was his perch, his observation post outside his uncle's electronics repair shop. A heavy philosophy textbook, The Republic, lay open on his lap, but his eyes weren't on the dense paragraphs of Plato's dialogue. They were lost in the endless river of life flowing down the street. A woman, her back ramrod straight, glided through the throng with a tray of roasted groundnuts balanced perfectly on her head, her gele a magnificent, starched crown of orange and gold. Two men in ill-fitting suits, their ties loosened against the heat, were locked in a passionate, gesticulating argument about the previous night's football match, their voices rising and falling in a familiar cadence. Life in Surulere was a constant, unfolding performance, and Adekunle had long ago resigned himself to being a member of the audience.
"Kunle!"
The voice, sharp and laced with practiced irritation, cut through his reverie like a hot knife. His Uncle Ben stood in the shadowed doorway of the shop, a hulking silhouette against the dim, cluttered interior. In one hand, he held up a tangled mess of wires and circuit boards—the dissected remains of a high-end stereo amplifier that probably cost more than the shop's monthly rent.
"If you are quite finished with your dreaming," Ben said, his voice a familiar gravelly mix of Yoruba and English, "this rich man's toy is not going to fix itself. The owner is a lawyer. He will be back tomorrow expecting a miracle, and you know how they are with their big grammar and no patience."
Adekunle let out a soft sigh, a puff of air that barely disturbed the humid stillness. He carefully placed a folded receipt to mark his page and pushed himself to his feet. At twenty-two, he was a study in contrasts: tall and lanky, with the long, graceful fingers of a pianist but the calloused palms of a labourer. He had the thoughtful, distant eyes of a scholar, yet they were sharp enough to spot a cold solder joint from a meter away. This was his life—a student of abstract philosophy at the University of Lagos, paying his way by untangling the very concrete problems of other people's machines.
"I'm coming, Uncle," he replied, his voice calm.
The shop's interior was a different world. The air was thick with the smells of ozone from a sparking transformer, the sharp, metallic tang of hot solder, and the faint, musty scent of decades of accumulated dust. It was a cave of technological wonders and forgotten relics. Towers of old, pot-bellied CRT televisions leaned against walls lined with shelves of meticulously organized components: tiny capacitors like colourful beads, resistors sorted by their coloured bands, and spools of wire in every gauge. Uncle Ben was already hunched over his workbench, a magnifying lamp casting a pool of intense white light on the amplifier's motherboard. His soldering iron glowed, a miniature wizard's wand ready to channel lightning.
"They pay ten times what this is worth," Ben grumbled, a familiar refrain in their daily symphony. He didn't look up from his work. "And they expect it fixed in a day. In my time, we would save for a year to buy a simple radio, and we would treasure it. Now… now it is all disposable. They break it, they bring it here. If we cannot fix it, they throw it away and buy another. No respect for the craft."
Adekunle didn't answer. He had heard this lament a hundred times. He picked up a precision screwdriver, its magnetized tip finding a satisfying purchase in the first screw of the amplifier's casing. His mind, however, drifted back to the book on the chair outside. To Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He felt an unnerving kinship with those prisoners, chained in the dark, watching shadows dance on the stone wall and believing it to be the whole of reality. The shop, the university, the endless hustle for naira, the constant pressure to succeed—they were his shadows.
For months now, a strange feeling had been growing inside him, a low hum of spiritual static beneath the noise of his daily life. He'd always felt that there was something more, a brighter truth just outside his perception, but he couldn't turn his head to see it. It was this feeling that had led him away from the church his aunt dragged him to every Sunday. It wasn't a loss of faith, but a dissatisfaction with the answers on offer. The pastor's booming sermons about fire and grace, about prosperity and damnation, felt like more shadows on the wall—louder and more colourful than the others, perhaps, but shadows nonetheless. The quiet, certain whisper of God he'd felt as a child, a feeling of being watched over and known, had faded, replaced by a vast, questioning emptiness.
"Hand me the multimeter," Ben grunted, the command snapping Adekunle back to the here and now.
He passed the tool to his uncle, their hands brushing for a moment. Ben's were thick and scarred, a roadmap of a life spent wrestling with stubborn machines. Adekunle's were different. Nimble, sensitive. He had a peculiar knack for this work, an intuition that went beyond schematics. He could sometimes feel the faintest current in a wire, diagnose a faulty capacitor by the subtlest variance in the heat it gave off. His uncle called it a gift. "The soul of the machine speaks to you, Kunle," he'd say, half-joking, half-serious. "You listen to its whispers."
They worked in comfortable silence for the next hour, a well-rehearsed ballet of knowing gestures and shared tools. The city's song continued outside, a constant, living backdrop to their focused work. Adekunle methodically traced the amplifier's complex circuitry, his mind finally quiet, absorbed in the logic puzzle before him. He found the problem after another twenty minutes of patient searching. It wasn't a burnt-out component or a failed chip. It was a single, minuscule break in a trace on the circuit board, a hairline fracture in the path of the current, almost invisible to the naked eye. It was a flaw in the connection. An interruption in the flow.
As he prepared a delicate wire to solder a bridge across the gap, a strange thing happened. The fluorescent lights in the shop didn't flicker; they dipped, the white light turning a sickly, jaundiced yellow for a fraction of a second. Simultaneously, the triumphant wail of a car horn outside was sliced clean in half, ending in an abrupt, unnatural silence. The ever-present hum of the neighbourhood generators seemed to thin, to lose its depth, becoming a frail and reedy sound.
Adekunle froze, the tiny wire held perfectly still in his tweezers. "Did you feel that?"
Ben grunted, squinting at the circuit board through his magnifying glass. "NEPA is playing their games again. The voltage is unstable. It is a miracle the entire city has not burned down."
But it wasn't that. Adekunle was sure of it. This was something else. He felt a deep, resonant vibration in his bones, a tremor that had nothing to do with electricity or machinery. The very air in the shop suddenly felt thin, charged with a weird, prickly static. He set his tools down carefully, stood up, and walked to the doorway, peering out into the street with a sense of profound unease.
Everything looked the same, and yet it was all fundamentally wrong.
The relentless, crawling flow of traffic had become confused, disjointed. A sleek, black Lexus had swerved without reason and crashed gently into a fruit vendor's cart, sending oranges and pineapples rolling across the hot tarmac in a slow, silent wave. But the driver wasn't getting out to scream or argue. The driver's side door was wide open, swaying slightly, and the seat was empty. Further down, a danfo bus was idling in the middle of the road, its passengers not shouting at the driver but looking around in a state of dazed, collective confusion.
Then he saw it. The source of his unease.
The woman with the magnificent gele, the one who had walked with such regal balance, was gone. But her gele, the proud structure of orange and gold fabric, lay on the dusty pavement. Beside it, her wrapper and blouse lay in a colourful, empty heap. And her tray of groundnuts was scattered around them, as if she had simply evaporated from within her clothes, leaving them to collapse where she stood.
"Uncle," Adekunle said, his voice barely a whisper, a dry crackle in his throat. "Come and see this."
Ben grumbled about lazy boys and endless distractions, but the strange, tight urgency in his nephew's tone made him push his stool back and rise from the workbench. He came to stand beside Adekunle in the doorway, wiping his greasy hands on a rag. For a long moment, he said nothing. He simply stared, his mouth slightly agape.
It was happening everywhere. A small pile of clothes—a boy's school uniform—lay on the sidewalk, a single, scuffed shoe beside it. An okada driver was staring at his own handlebars, his passenger's helmet lying on the seat behind him, empty. He patted the space, then patted it again, his face a mask of utter disbelief.
The first scream was high-pitched and animalistic. It came from a woman who had been walking hand-in-hand with her husband. Now she was on her knees, clawing at an empty shirt and trousers on the ground beside her, her voice a raw, tearing sound of grief and confusion. That first scream broke the spell of silence. It was a trigger. Another followed, then another, a domino effect of panic rippling through the street, contagious and terrifying. The city's familiar song had instantly become a discordant symphony of terror.
"What is this?" Ben breathed, his hand gripping Adekunle's shoulder, his knuckles white. "What devilry is this?"
Adekunle's mind raced, desperately trying to find a logical framework for the impossible. A new kind of weapon? A mass hallucination triggered by a gas leak? But his eyes were not lying. He saw a man running, his face a canvas of pure fear, and then in the space of a single stride, the man was just… not. His clothes, his shoes, his phone, all clattered to the ground in a heap, and the empty space he had occupied was filled with the swirling dust of the street.
The world had not exploded. It had not been consumed by fire. Something far more intimate and terrifying had happened. The world had developed holes. People were being deleted. Erased from existence.
The primal instinct to flee, to run anywhere, was a physical force, but Adekunle's feet were rooted to the spot. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the rising tide of screams. He looked at his uncle, whose face, usually a mask of gruff certainty, was now slack with a terror that seemed to have aged him ten years in ten seconds. He looked at the chaos erupting on the street—cars crashing as their drivers vanished, people running in every direction, their faces wild with a terror that had no name because there was no name for this.
And through the noise, the panic, and the dust, Adekunle felt that profound, hollowing emptiness he knew so well swell up inside him. But this time, it wasn't just inside him. It was outside, too. It had bled out into the world. It was everywhere. The world itself had become the void.
He turned his head, his gaze falling on the textbook still sitting on the chair outside the shop. It was open to the same page, Plato's words about shadows on a cave wall. A chilling thought, clear and sharp as a shard of glass, cut through his fear.
What if they weren't just gone? What if they had all just woken up?
And he, and all the others left screaming in the dust, were the only shadows left behind.