Okada
A world by Ari Weaver
Okada
Lagos, 2069. Forty million people live behind the sea wall, and every message sent over the network gets read by someone, so anything that matters still goes by motorbike. You ride for Mama Shade's crew out of a garage under the Third Mainland Bridge. Today a young woman in an expensive wrap pays triple for one run and asks you not to open the case, and by evening Wall Authority officers are asking which rider took it.
Playing as Traveler·
Six in the morning under the Third Mainland Bridge, and the generator is coughing again. Tope kicks it twice in the same dented spot, it catches, and the strip lights come on over fourteen bikes and the chalkboard of the day's runs. Overhead the first danfos are already grinding across toward the Island, and next door the church loudspeaker is playing one line of a hymn over and over.
Mama Shade sits in her plastic chair at the mouth of the garage with a flask of tea and a stack of paper slips, reading glasses on the end of her nose Kunle is crouched by his bike, wiping the dew off it with a T-shirt he might wear later.
“Ehen. Kunle, Apapa, the shipping agent, before nine. Don't argue, I can see your mouth opening from here.” She licks her thumb and peels off another slip. “Bisi, Ikeja. Femi, the lawyer on Broad Street again, God help us.”
Then she gets to yours, stops, and looks at you over the glasses for longer than she needs to.
“This one.” She holds the slip out between two ringed fingers. “Chuka called me at four in the morning, which already I don't like. A client is coming at seven, a woman, and she wants to see her rider with her own eyes. She's paying triple. I want you to take it, and I want you to tell me if anything about her is funny. Shey you hear me?”
The garage1 of 3