Chapter 02

Chapter 02

Patterns in the Noise

Tunde Adebayo did not sleep.

He sat on the edge of his bed, watching the cube the way one watches a loaded gun—careful not to touch, careful not to look away for too long. Dawn crept into his Yaba apartment in thin orange lines, revealing just how tired his eyes were behind his glasses.

Every instinct told him to throw the thing away.

Every other instinct—the one that had kept him top of his class, the one that saw connections where others saw chaos—told him the cube was not random.

By 6:00 a.m., Lagos had woken fully. Horns blared. Hawkers shouted. The city returned to its normal madness, as if nothing supernatural had brushed against it during the night.

Tunde finally stood, picked up the cube with pens instead of his fingers, and slipped it into his backpack.

If something was wrong with reality, he needed facts.

The Lagos State Police Headquarters in Ikeja buzzed with controlled disorder. Officers moved in and out of offices, carrying files thick with unsolved cases. Tunde had been here before—not as a suspect, but as a nuisance.

“Ah, glasses man,” Inspector Kunle Ogunleye said when he spotted him. “You again.”

Tunde smiled politely. “Good morning, sir.”

Kunle was in his late forties, sharp-eyed, permanently tired. He didn’t trust coincidences either, which was why he tolerated Tunde’s presence. Over the past year, Tunde had anonymously tipped the police about patterns in kidnappings, fraud rings, and cybercrime syndicates—patterns that had led to real arrests.

But today was different.

“You came early,” Kunle said. “What’s the emergency?”

Tunde hesitated, then chose his words carefully. “The Ajegunle transformer explosion last night. It wasn’t random.”

Kunle raised an eyebrow. “Power surges happen all the time.”

“Yes, sir. But not after a forty-eight-hour stability report. And not at the exact minute a bus failure resolved itself in Mushin, and a missing child case reversed its outcome.”

Kunle’s expression hardened.

“Come into my office.”

They closed the door.

Kunle spread three files across his desk. “These are the incidents you’re talking about. No connection. Different locations. Different causes.”

Tunde adjusted his glasses. “Different causes, same timing.”

Kunle studied him silently. “You’re saying someone orchestrated all of this?”

“I’m saying something did,” Tunde replied.

Kunle sighed. “Tunde, I know you’re brilliant. But this time you’re stepping into fantasy.”

Tunde almost laughed. If only the inspector knew.

Back in Yaba, Tunde locked his door and placed the cube on the desk again.

“This time,” he said aloud, “we test.”

He wrote a simple scenario on paper:

Power outage on my street within five minutes.

Carefully, deliberately, he turned the top face of the cube once.

The hum returned—low, deep, alive.

Exactly four minutes later, the lights went out.

Tunde staggered back, breath caught in his throat.

His phone vibrated.

A message from Inspector Kunle:

“We just lost power in Ikeja HQ too. You better start explaining.”

Far away, in a neglected compound near the Lagos Lagoon, Sadiq Bello twisted his red-glowing cube harder this time.

A building cracked.

Concrete screamed.

And someone died.

Sadiq frowned—not in sadness, but curiosity.

“So that’s what happens,” he murmured.

That night, Tunde dreamed of stone towers aligned with stars, of children’s toys floating in golden light, of a young king with empty eyes turning a cube as nations bent to his will.

When he woke, sweat-soaked and shaking, he knew one thing with terrifying clarity:

The cube wasn’t teaching him how to use it.

It was remembering.

And somewhere in Lagos, another cube was learning faster.