The Coherence War

## Chapter 1: Lagos

The spreadsheet had forty-seven rows. One for each day she had not skipped, which was most days, and a blank row for each day she had, which was eleven. The columns were: date, time started, duration in minutes, breath count where she had managed to keep count, a notes field she had titled OBSERVATIONS in all caps and then filled with entries like *nothing* and *back hurt* and *generator came on at minute 4* and one entry from three weeks ago that read *something different about the quality of attention at minute 11, unclear, could not reproduce the next day*. She highlighted that row in yellow. It remained the only yellow row.

Sera closed the laptop and set it on the desk, which was a plywood board on concrete blocks her cousin Emeka had carried up the stairs in exchange for two weeks of debugging his inventory app. The app was for a phone accessories business he ran from a table in front of Computer Village. The app did not need to exist — Emeka's inventory was small enough to track on paper — but Emeka wanted an app, and Sera owed him for the desk, and the code was simple enough that she wrote it in an afternoon and then spent three more afternoons explaining to Emeka why the app could not also process payments, track his customers' birthdays, and display a map of nearby buyers. Emeka's idea of software was that it should do everything. Sera's idea of software was that it should do one thing and not break.

The flat had two rooms. The main room held the desk, the mat on the floor, a plastic chair she had taken from her mother's church when the church upgraded to wooden ones, and a shelf made of the same concrete blocks that held the desk, stacked with four books and a small speaker that connected to her phone by Bluetooth when it felt like it. The bedroom was a mattress and a curtain. The kitchen was a hallway with a gas burner and a mini-fridge that hummed at a frequency she could feel in her back teeth when the building's power was on, which was now, at 5:47 a.m., because the generator had been running since 4 and NEPA had not restored power since the outage at midnight.

She filled the kettle. The water from the tap was the brown it always was in the morning, before the pressure built. She let it run until it cleared, which took thirty seconds, and filled the kettle and set it on the burner and turned the burner on with the plastic lighter she kept in the cup next to the burner because the igniter had stopped working in February and she had not fixed it because fixing the igniter would require removing the burner grate and the grate was rusted in place and the effort was not justified when the lighter worked fine. The lighter depended on the butane refill she bought at the shop on the corner of Bode Thomas and Herbert Macaulay. The refill cost two hundred naira last month, which meant it would cost two-fifty this month. The shop depended on a supplier in Alaba who depended on imports that depended on the exchange rate that depended on something she could track but chose not to because at a certain point the chain left her sphere of influence and became noise.

She made Lipton with three sugars and carried it to the mat and sat cross-legged and opened the laptop again. Not the spreadsheet. The forum.