📍 Private Jet, En Route to Geneva
🕡 6:47 AM
The air in the jet was unnervingly still, carrying only the faint scent of chilled lemon verbena. Maka pressed her forehead to the cool window as the landscape below shifted from rugged mountains to perfectly carved fields and mirror-blue lakes. Everything looked curated, arranged—too controlled to feel alive.
David stared through his own window with the reverence of a pilgrim. "No interference. No noise. Imagine coding here," he breathed. "Pure bandwidth. Heaven."
Layo groaned, sinking deeper into her leather seat. "Heaven is loud. Heaven has danfo horns. Heaven smells like diesel and hot puff-puff. This—" she waved at the sterile perfection below—"is a silent nightmare."
Bayo sat rigid beside Maka, stylus tapping lightly against his knee. The return to Geneva was cutting him open in ways he hadn't prepared for. His old world lay below them, polished and gleaming, but he was arriving not as a prodigal heir—rather as the architect of a rebellion.
His knee brushed Maka's. That simple point of contact steadied both of them.
Maka's tablet pulsed with the schematics Amara had sent: the Regulatory Immune Protocol. It was flawless—elegant logic, near-impervious encryption, autonomous legal rerouting. A masterpiece.
And yet—
"It's armor that restricts movement," Maka murmured. "It protects the river by freezing it."
Bayo looked at her sharply, but said nothing. He knew she was right.
The jet landed with surgical quiet. As they stepped into the cold Swiss air, the silence pressed against their chests—so absolute it felt like a warning.
---
📍 Adebayo Compound, Lake Geneva
🕢 7:15 AM
Amara's estate was a cathedral of glass and reflected water—expansive, deliberate, inhumanly calm. Staff drifted through the halls in near-silent efficiency. Every surface gleamed.
Layo whispered, "If a ghost sneezes here, the walls will echo."
David elbowed her gently. "Behave."
But he was awed too.
---
📍 Dining Terrace
🕣 8:30 PM | Same Day
Dinner was as immaculate as the home: delicate courses plated like exhibitions. Amara observed them from the head of the table, surgeon-sharp in her calm.
"The Poison Pill was bold," she said, sipping her wine. "Brutal—even childish. But effective." Her gaze slid to Maka, sharp as a scalpel. "You announced you can break the system. Now you must prove you can build something the system cannot afford to lose."
Layo bristled. "Build? Or tame?"
"Stability is not submission," Amara replied. "Chaos clears ground, but it cannot build nations."
Her eyes flicked to Bayo. "Your father believed in fear. I believe in resilience."
The words were flawless, polished. Yet they wrapped around Maka like velvet restraints. Advice disguised as direction. Guidance with teeth.
They were being prepared. Shaped.
Maka felt the cage even in the open air.
---
📍 Gallery of Modern Art, Geneva
🕤 9:15 PM
The gallery was an ocean of light sculptures and digital installations worth more than Bello's Provisions had earned in a decade. The four of them wandered into a secluded viewing room where Chioma—cool, sculpted, unreadable—stood waiting.
"We misjudged you," she began, not bothering with greetings.
She tapped the large screen behind her. A live, silent feed of a ministerial building in Abuja filled the wall. Government officials clustered around a document. A red countdown blinked in the corner:
04:17:03
Bayo exhaled. "My father's final move."
"Correct," Chioma replied. "The National Digital Security Directive. They intend to classify Kudi River as an unstable, unlicensed financial threat. Nigeria will block every local IP from accessing your system."
David paled. "That… that would cripple everything."
"Kudi River will suffocate," Chioma said simply. "Unless you accept a stabilizing partner."
With a flick, the display shifted. A visual of Kudi River's vibrant mesh intertwined—absorbed—into Phoenix Group's sleek, grey lattice.
"A merger," she said. "Your river gains global infrastructure. You gain protection. And we gain… your genius."
A velvet noose.
No one spoke.
---
📍 Compound Living Room
🕥 10:15 PM
The argument detonated the moment they returned.
David slammed his laptop shut. "We have to consider it! If Nigeria cuts us off, millions lose access overnight!"
Layo threw her hands up. "So the solution is slavery? Becoming a pretty widget in Phoenix's empire?"
"They're offering survival!" David shot back.
"At the cost of our soul!"
"It's not that simple!" Bayo snapped, the strain in his voice centuries old. "We cannot fight governments and corporations with hope and ideology."
He faced Maka.
"Say something."
She steadied her breathing. "Surrendering our architecture is not survival, Bayo. It's assimilation."
His composure cracked. "I left everything behind! My father's name. His empire. His future. And I did it to win! Not to drown in moral purity while the people we care about starve!"
The words struck her like physical blows. Pain tore through her voice.
"And becoming Phoenix's polished weapon is winning? Sitting here in your aunt's curated palace, pretending we're building something new when we're walking straight into the world your father wanted?"
The room froze. Even the air seemed to recoil.
Bayo flinched—wounded, furious, lost.
Without another word, Maka walked out.
---
📍 Lakeside Balcony
🕚 11:00 PM
The air outside was razor cold, slicing through the heat in her chest. She gripped the railing, breath shaking. She had never felt so far from home—or from herself.
Everything she'd fought for seemed to be slipping away. Her parents. Aunty Bisi. Millions of people who believed in their dream. Was she about to fail them all?
A burning shock flared at her wrist.
Her quartz bracelet blazed crimson.
She gasped and grabbed it—only for a luminous, three-dimensional schematic to erupt from the stone.
The Atlantis Node.
Not a tool.
Not a protocol.
A vision.
A living, breathing digital polity—nodes as citizens, threads as relationships, the network itself acting as a sovereign identity. A self-governing digital protectorate. A nation without borders. A world stitched together not by laws, but by shared participation.
A watershed.
A future.
The cold dissolved into awe.
Footsteps approached behind her.
"I'm not trying to be him," Bayo said quietly. "I'm just terrified. Terrified that you'll lose everything because of me."
She didn't look away from the glowing architecture. "I'm not afraid of failing, Bayo," she whispered. "I'm afraid of building something we'll one day have to overthrow."
She turned to him, her face illuminated by the blueprint.
"You were right—we need to be smarter. But not by shrinking into their structures." She pointed toward the constellation between them. "This is how we survive. Not by joining their ocean, but by becoming the rain."
He studied the floating design—seeing its scale, its inevitability, its genius. Then, slowly, he smiled. "A digital nation…"
"A home without walls," she finished.
He stepped closer, covering her hand with his. The bracelet softened from frantic red to warm gold.
The apology didn't need words.
---
📍 Compound Media Room
🕐 1:00 AM
One hour later, they stood before a global livestream.
Layo's graphics rendered the idea beautifully: a river growing into a tapestry, then into a constellation.
David monitored the core system, steady again.
Maka faced the camera.
"We did not come to merge," she said. "We came to evolve."
Across the world, screens flickered as a new interface appeared.
BECOME A FOUNDING CITIZEN OF THE KUDI RIVER DIGITAL PROTECTORATE?
[Y/N]
"You are not just users," Bayo said beside her, voice steady. "You are citizens. The power was always yours."
In Surulere, Aunty Bisi tapped Y without hesitation.
In Nairobi, CampusCoder did the same.
In Manila. In Accra. In Mumbai. In São Paulo.
A digital supernova erupted across David's console as millions of affirmatives linked simultaneously—reorganizing the architecture from within.
A nation was being born.
---
📍 Ministerial Building, Abuja
🕑 2:00 AM
A panicked aide shoved a tablet into the official's hands.
He stared at the flood of global confirmations. His pen hovered uselessly above the blockade order.
His decree was now obsolete.
One cannot blockade a sovereign digital identity.
---
📍 Compound Media Room
🕒 3:00 AM
The main screen split into a thousand live feeds—faces from every corner of the world joining a digital homeland.
Maka exhaled, the bracelet warm at her pulse.
They had come to Geneva seeking protection.
Instead, they had created independence.
They hadn't found shelter.
They had founded a nation.
And this time, no one could take it from them.