“What is the Nigerian dream?” the man’s companion asked.
The man responded with a puzzled look, so his companion elaborated, “Like you know how they are always talking about ‘the American dream’ in those old American immersies; the whole life, liberty and pursuit of happiness thing. Shebi you don hear am before?”
The man and his companion were seated on a pair of ugly gray plastic chairs in a crowded beer parlor at the center of sector-121, which was the easternmost sector of the 856th level of the monolithic Biafra-5 supercity. The cacophony of voices shouting, laughing, and arguing made it so that the man and his companion had to raise their voices to hear each other. Biafra-5 was one of twenty-six solid superstructures that made up the modern Nigerian nation-state. Across the continent, there were thousands of concrete monstrosities just like it, each housing its two billion plus population. Each one towered seven kilometers into the sky and imposed a ten square kilometer footprint on the ground like fingers pointed accusingly at unresponsive ancestors. Beyond them, expansive fields of hungry solar panels interspersed with endless fields of genetically modified vegetation surrounded the towers like bizarre, silicon-cell pubic hair. Outside, the temperature was hot enough to kill an exposed man in a day. Inside, it was just warm enough to remind them of the terrible thing they had done to their planet.
The man scratched his sparse, knotty beard and said, “Yeah, I have. Who hasn’t? That old Hollywood nonsense is everywhere but what does that one have to do with us, and why have you not yet paid for the beer you owe me, Chuka? We need to get going soon.”
Chuka smiled an oily smile and leaned forward in his chair. He was wearing an old-fashioned ankara print shirt with short sleeves, and his bald head was distracting under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the beer parlor. On the low table between them, empty bottles stood in a row like sentries. At the far end of the parlor, a Quovision display deck crackled with high-resolution immersive holographic images of the new Persian prime minister in her purple hijab standing in a hall by the side of the suited up Chinese premier, the familiar faces of some other world leaders behind them. The man could not read the scrolling chyron below the image, but he took note of the words: immigration control. There wasn’t any mention of the violent clashes that were currently raging right below them on the 304th level of Biafra-5.
They’d known each other for fourteen years so the man knew that Chuka tended to become philosophical when he had been drinking. He also had a tendency to forget his cryptowallet code and insist that he would pay for drinks next time. Next time had been coming for a long time. But after this, there would be no more next time.
“Leave beer first and answer me jare. What is the Nigerian dream? Abi we don’t have?”
“Why you dey ask me? Na me born Nigeria? How am I supposed to know?” the man barked. He was getting anxious. He wanted Chuka to settle the bill and all the others that had been perpetually postponed so that they would not miss their window of opportunity.
Chuka nodded, as though acknowledging something profound. “Exactly. Na my point be that. You don’t know. Most of us don’t. But if you look closely at our history, you will see it. Since before the first war sef.”
Then Chuka gestured earnestly at his chest. “It’s inside here my brother,” he said, banging the left pocket of his Ankara shirt with a hardy fist. “How many of us have ever cared about the country or our fellow country people? Not our tribe or state o, I mean the country itself. How many? We live in it, and we survive it. But last last, once we get a chance, most of us we leave. That is the sad truth. Always has been. This is a made-up country. Invented for colonial convenience. One oyibo just wake up one day, draw line for paper, begin talk say make we dey together, like say we no get our own kingdoms and republics before them come our land.” Chuka hissed and continued. “Some people have even wanted to leave right from inception. Others have just been reluctant participants. We didn’t choose this place, we didn’t fight for it, and so we don’t love it. In your heart, you know that the Nigerian dream is to leave Nigeria.”
The man cocked his head, silent for a beat, and then laughed, waving his bony right arm. It was covered in scar tissue from an incident involving a malfunctioning water filter in the Ibadan-1 superstructure on his first smuggle run. “That’s it? That’s your big insight? Abeg, my guy, pay for beer, make we go. It’s almost time.”
Chuka was visibly disappointed at the reception his speech had received.
Beckoning to the dour-faced waitress, the man said, “I thought you were even going to say something that makes sense. Whose dream is to leave a place? Leaving a place is what you do in pursuit of a dream. No one wants to leave their home unless their home has become a place with teeth. And even so no one dreams of the going. Trust me. I know. No one aspires to be displaced. You of all people should know that. The dream is the reason you leave. The destination is the place where the dream is. And everyone has a different dream. The very concept of a national dream is a joke. Dreams are personal and private things. Na too much film do you. Or maybe na the beer or even . . .” The man trailed off, not wanting to bring up difficult memories.
Chuka grunted but said nothing. He swiped his palm in front of the smooth black panel the waitress presented and keyed in his wallet codes. When she left, the man pulled out a similar panel and placed it on the table. Chuka took it and repeated the gesture, transferring a significantly larger number of credits to the man’s account: for the beers he owed and for services about to be rendered.
The man smiled. His new business was proving to be very lucrative, even this run, for which he had given Chuka the friends-and-family discount.
Chuka’s face remained humorless. He had just parted ways with almost every credit he had to his name.
“Don’t squeeze face my guy. Your own dream is about to come true.”
Chuka snorted.
The two men rose briskly and rode an express intercity service elevator they would not have had access to if not for the man’s well-placed bribe to his contact in city security. It took four silent minutes of descent to reach the ground floor of Biafra-5, where gigantic access ports were carved into the eastern service wall, and machines constantly ferried harvested food in and treated waste out.
“Follow me and do exactly what I do,” the man said.
Chuka nodded.
They crouched low and moved quickly past a row of cuboid, metal behemoths with hundreds of small articulated legs, like giant millipedes. They kept moving until they came to a row of smaller machine units of assorted shapes and sizes. The man stopped, pushed against one of the units, and a hatch that Chuka could have sworn wasn’t there before, yawned open. They slipped into a small, silver-skinned oblate pod with a transparent base. It was a repurposed monitoring pod. Thanks to another bribe, it had been disguised as part of a larger cassava transport unit nearby. On the official books, it was damaged and pending repair. In reality, it was a smuggler’s ferry. The man took a seat and put his finger to a control panel. The pod hummed to life at the man’s touch, ascended, and began to move. It quietly slid past the other units and through the supercity’s heavy titanium gate without interrupting the steady motion of the other machines. The city exhaled them into the open field. Above, an angry yellow sun raged in the brown sky.
“Did you tell Lara’s mother you were leaving?” the man asked Chuka as they sped over the green and silver surface below.
Chuka nodded, unconsciously touching the strip of fair flesh on his finger that marked where his wedding ring used to be before the thief that shot his wife near the elevator entrance to level 304 took it. “My guy, nothing remain here for me. Country don spoil. The whole planet sef don spoil.”
The man guided the pod onto the bright yellow line on his screen that marked the route to the border with Cameroon. It was where the man’s business associates were waiting with a new identity chip for Chuka. One that would give him a new name, a new history, and grant him access to the Chinese-run mining supercity Jian-3 in the heart of the Congo.
“But they say those mining supercities are secure and spacious. Them say you fit get pass one thousand credits per day just programming drill rig units inside the lower levels as long as person no mind twelve-hour work shifts.” Chuka sighed. “I no mind hard work. So, yeah, once I reach there, I go hustle, I go hammer. I go dey alright.”
The man had seen many others like Chuka desperate to get to places like Jian-3. Men, women, whole families. He made his living off their hope, thriving off their desperation in the very place they thought was hopeless because they couldn’t see beyond their difficulties and the tantalizing lures of a foreign land. Yes, Nigeria was a difficult, made-up place. But his own Nigerian dream was to thrive in Nigeria, in the chaos, whatever it took. He was tempted to tell Chuka what really waited for him in Jian-3: segregation, discrimination, exploitation to meet quotas, and violent immigration raids that never made it on the news. But business came first, and he was not going to lose a customer just because they were in-laws, so he simply said, “Mmm hmm. Na so them talk. I just hope your dream will be worth the journey you are making for it.”
“Thank you,” Chuka said.
The man looked away to hide the sting of his conscience and stared down through the transparent base of the pod as the world blurred green and silver beneath them.