The day it began, Accra was drenched in heat and tension. A ceiling fan buzzed overhead in the NubisTech operations room, pushing stale air in circles while outside, the midday sun roasted the city's concrete backbone. The energy grid was already on edge—rumors of rolling blackouts floated across online chatter—but Kweku Mensah wasn't one to traffic in speculation.
He sat at his terminal, sipping lukewarm sobolo from a faded plastic cup, watching dashboards pulse with shifting data. NubisTech was only three years old, but its software now handled transaction protocols for over a dozen regional banks. It wasn't flashy work—at least not on the surface—but to Kweku, every backend line told a story. And sometimes, the story tried to speak back.
At precisely 11:23 AM, something cracked.
First came the outage—no warning, no static hum, just darkness swallowing the monitors. UPS units blinked to life, bathing the room in eerie blue glow. Within seconds, the backup systems were up, and Kweku's fingers were already moving. He scanned the logs, running a trace across the subnet traffic.
One line made him pause.
`--Initiated: Eban Sequence--`
He leaned in. That wasn't a diagnostic alert. It was deliberate—formatted like a command but written in a syntax too dated for NubisTech's current frameworks. Kweku furrowed his brow and pulled up the archive index. Most folders were locked behind admin privileges, but there was one—untitled and timestamped over a decade ago—that matched the origin signature.
Curiosity stirred something deeper. He wasn't supposed to access files without clearance, especially folders labeled "Restricted: Legacy Experimental." But Kweku had always trusted his instincts over protocol. Using a bypass script he wrote in his final year at university, he cracked the first layer. The folder unlocked.
Inside, just one file.
eban_core-init.sys
He clicked it.
The screen flickered—no graphics, no interface, just raw code spooling down. Lines filled with phrases that read more like prophecy than logic:
If history repeats, sequence must break. Authority shall scramble. Memory will reshape.
Kweku's pulse quickened. What kind of project had NubisTech buried?
He barely noticed when two emails auto-populated in his inbox, both from internal security. The subject line of one read: Unauthorized Query Detected — Level 3 Alert. The other was simply blank, except for an attachment—a JPEG image titled `node_ebankura.jpg`.
He opened it.
The image showed an aerial view of Osu, but distorted—as if filtered through heat waves or corrupted data. In the center, a symbol hovered above the street grid: a hexagon wrapped in interlocking rings, all drawn with unnerving symmetry. It looked more ritualistic than technological.
A sudden chill gripped him, despite the heat.
He snapped back to his workstation, now showing a new notification.
System Patch Initiated. Please restart core operations.
But he hadn't approved any patch.
Kweku sat still, watching the lines build like sand dunes on a digital horizon. Around him, the office remained quiet. His colleagues hadn't noticed yet—they were dealing with the power dip and scrambled client requests. Only he had followed the thread far enough to see the message hidden beneath the grid.
And somewhere, just beyond the physical infrastructure, something—or someone—had activated Eban.
Kweku leaned back, the name echoing in his head. Eban. It meant "fence" in Akan. A boundary. A protection. Or maybe… a prison.
He wasn't sure which.
And yet, he couldn't stop now.
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