Neon Rain

The drone pilots of Lagos Lights stopped work at half past six on the first Saturday of October 2035, and by the time Teo Albuquerque's air taxi came down out of the rain onto the lagoon forty minutes later, eleven million people were watching him arrive and none of them knew there was nobody left to fly the show.

The counter sat in the corner of his left lens, where Iris put it for anyone who asked. Eleven million in Elsewhere, standing as avatars on a copy of the Lekki shore built down to the last lamp post. Another four hundred thousand on the real one, in the rain, under a sky that had just gone dark. The Lekki–Ikoyi Link Bridge was lit pink along its cables, and the rain coming down through the light was pink too, and green where it passed the festival's screens.

Ruud met him on the control barge with a towel and the news in the same breath. Ruud was his events director, Dutch, and had produced half the Olympic ceremonies of the last decade, and he had never once in Teo's hearing raised his voice.

"Three hundred of them. All of them. Laptops shut, at six thirty, on the dot."

The pilots did not fly the drones, exactly. The show's flight paths were loaded into all five thousand of them before take-off, and each drone flew its own. What the pilots did was watch: each had a block of sixteen or seventeen on a laptop, and a red key on the keyboard that would put any one of them, or all of them, down in the water. Five thousand drones over half a million people was legal in Nigeria because three hundred human beings had their fingers near three hundred red keys. Except for the finale. The finale was Teo's idea, and it was live.

"They want the 2033 rate," Ruud said. They had all been booked through Agora Work, the company's own gig platform, which had cut what it paid twice since then. "Back-dated to January. For everybody on Agora Work. Not only them."

"How many is everybody?"

"In Nigeria? Forty thousand."

He went to the awning himself, because he had started this festival five years ago so that Africa would love Agora, and he did not believe there was a crowd he could not talk round.

They stood in a long line under the white canvas with their laptops shut under their arms, in T-shirts printed with the words he had driven past in Geneva: WHO ARE THE SAVINGS FOR? The woman who stepped out to meet him was perhaps twenty-five, with her braids tied up off her neck and a Tenants badge pinned to her strap. She had flown his shows for three years. She told him so before he could pretend to remember.

"Tonight's rate, doubled," Teo said. "For tonight's three hundred. Cash, before the finale."

"We're not asking about tonight." She had to raise her voice over the rain on the canvas. "Your app cut us twice. Forty thousand of us. You can see every one of us on your dashboard, Mr. Albuquerque. You can see what we eat."

"If I do it for forty thousand here, on Monday it's Kenya."

"Then on Monday it's Kenya," she said, and behind her somebody laughed, not unkindly.

He looked along the line. Nobody moved. He walked back to the barge with the rain running inside his collar, and the counter said twelve million.

The backup was a company in Singapore that had pitched him in August. It needed no pilots. Its model flew the whole swarm from the cloud, live, choreography computed second by second and streamed down to every drone, which was exactly what Teo's finale needed: a flower that opened as fifteen million people in Elsewhere counted down together, and breathed when they breathed. The pilots' laptops had only ever been able to do a crude version of it. The vendor had flown the New Year show in Jakarta that way. Its four grey crates were already on the barge. The vendor had asked in August to keep its kit on site at every show, at its own cost, in case; Ruud had said yes, because nobody refuses free insurance. They held radio relays, not drones. The vendor's software went into the drones themselves, over the air, in forty minutes, the way an update went into a phone.

"Where's the cloud?" Teo asked.

Ruud checked. "Sarn."

"Is that a problem?"

"It's legal. They're not in the Compact, but nothing stops you renting from them. Half of Asia renders there." Ruud lifted one of the festival's drones off the rack and turned it over. It was the size of a dinner plate, white, with a little square flight board under its belly and Lumen's lime-green mark on the board. Everything that flew had one. "The aviation people will want to see the vendor's certificate."

The aviation people were one man, an inspector from the civil aviation authority in a soaked windbreaker, who had been on the barge since four checking registrations, all five thousand of them. He read the vendor's certificate on his tablet for a long time.

"It is valid," he said at last. "Singapore, Jakarta, Dubai. But I approved this show with pilots, Mr. Albuquerque. Not with Singapore."

"Call your director," Teo said gently. "I'll wait."

The inspector looked at him, and then at the half-million people on the shore, and went to the back of the barge to make the call. Teo made one of his own, to the governor's office, and through it to the security service. The vendor would cost more than the pilots tonight. On Monday it would cost nothing.

Marta Kovalenko found him in the barge's little office, changing his shirt.

She ran Agora's trust and safety, which meant she was the person in the company whose job was to know what went wrong with everything. She had built and flown drones in Ukraine for three years before the line froze, and she had come to him in 2029 with a degree in nothing and a notebook full of failure modes. She was wet through. She had a document in a clear plastic sleeve, printed, and she put it on the desk.

The cover page had his own logo, her name, the word DRAFT and a date in 2031.

"I've just given your inspector section four," she said. "He read it. He says the certificate's good, and it is good. Section four says what a swarm does when it loses its link: every drone flies itself home to its barge and lands. That's written in the firmware. Tonight the firmware is Singapore's and the link goes to Sarn."

"It flew Jakarta."

"Jakarta had nobody under it." She took her badge off its lanyard and laid it on top of the report. "I'm resigning. Tonight, so it's on the record that it was tonight."

"Marta."

"Section six was the recommendations," she said. "You didn't read that either."

She went out. Through the rain on the window he watched her walk along the gangway to the shore and past the awning, where the young woman with the braids said something to her and Marta stopped, and answered, and then the two of them stood together at the end of the line and did not leave.

He put the report in the drawer of the desk and closed it.

At eight minutes to nine the inspector came back wetter, with his phone still in his hand, and without looking at Teo said that the director had approved the change, on the condition that the vendor's operator could land the swarm at any time. The vendor's operator, a quiet young man from Singapore, said that he could.

Teo blinked twice at the contract Ruud had sent to his glasses, which was how you signed things now.

The rain eased a little before half past nine. Along the lagoon shore, from the Link Bridge east past the toll plaza as far as anyone could see, the four hundred thousand had become something like half a million. Hawkers worked through them with cold sachets of water and sausage rolls in paper sleeves, calling prices that had gone up with the rain. They sang in Yoruba and English and Pidgin, songs that Teo did not know and the Elsewhere crowd hummed along to anyway, a beat behind.

He co-hosted from the stage barge with a Lagos actress who had a show on every screen from Accra to Nairobi. He was good at this. He told the half-million about the café he had run in São Paulo at nineteen, on a car battery when the power went, because the kids came whatever the power did, and the story worked the way it always did. He told the fifteen million in Elsewhere that tonight, for the first time, they and Lagos would look at the same sky at the same time, and they cheered from five continents in a sound his engineers had spent a year making feel like a crowd. He did three moves of capoeira on the wet stage, badly on purpose, and the counter went to sixteen.

Behind the stage, at the vendor's console, the young man from Singapore watched five thousand green dots and one line of status text. LINK: NOMINAL. At the back of the barge, beside the network rack, stood the engineer Meridian had sent to look after the uplinks, since Meridian ran Elsewhere's servers: a small woman with a shaved undercut and an accent Teo could not place, who had argued with Ruud for ten minutes about the Sarn relay and lost. Teo had shaken her hand on the gangway when he landed and forgotten her name.

"On your cue," Ruud said in his ear.

Teo raised his hand to the half-million, and dropped it.

The five thousand came up off the four launch barges all at once, white points rising through the last of the rain, and the whole shore made a sound he had never heard a crowd make, a long, rising breath. They climbed to three hundred metres over the black lagoon and hung there. Then they began to move.

They drew the lagoon first, in blue, its shoreline and its islands, so that the city could see itself from above. They drew a canoe, and then the face of the actress beside him, and the face turned and smiled and half a million people shouted her name. They drew the Link Bridge in gold, and the real bridge was lit in gold beneath it, and the two of them lay one above the other in the dark. Teo stood at the front of the stage with rain on his glasses and found that he had stopped looking at the counter.

Then the five thousand gathered into a single point, very high, and on the screens fifteen million people in Elsewhere began to count down from ten.

At three Teo glanced back at the console, the way he always checked on the people who could ruin him, and past it, at the back of the barge, the Meridian engineer was looking at her phone. Then she looked up at the sky, and he saw her face, and did not understand what he saw in it.

The flower took eleven seconds to bloom. It was the biggest thing he had ever seen made of light: a lotus a hundred metres across, every petal edged in white and filled with a soft pink, turning slowly over the water. Under it the half-million had gone completely quiet.

In his earpiece, through Ruud's channel, the young man from Singapore said, "I've lost the link." His voice was very calm. "I haven't touched it. They should be going home to the barges. They're not going home."

Teo turned and looked for the awning, and his lens drew it close for him, the way Iris drew close anything you stared at. The young woman with the braids had her laptop open, and Marta was beside her, and the woman was pressing her red key again and again with two fingers. Iris put a soft label under her face, as it did for everyone on Agora. Adaeze Okafor · Agora Work · 3 yrs.

Above the lagoon the petals turned red.

They did it from the edges inwards, petal after petal, slowly, the pink draining out and the red coming in behind it, so that for a moment it was still beautiful, and some of the crowd cheered, because they thought it was part of the show.

On the inside of Teo's left lens the number of people watching began, very fast, to climb.