There is a reason every home in Nigeria has the face of Jideọfọ hanging somewhere on their walls. He is typically framed by dark, well-polished wood—gilded, if you have the means. He rises from the base of the frame, a creature of navy pinstripes and silk cravat, as domineering as one can be when reduced to a single moment for all eternity.
And indeed this is Jideọfọ’s single remaining moment.
He was an artist. A painter. One tormented by the heartlessness of modern technology—photography, most of all. He hated the exacting laziness of it; the flattening of reality. There was so much more to life—he knew—than a single picture could tell. And if nothing was done, these photographs would destroy culture. Would destroy the world as they knew it.
The story goes that in 2094, he began working with Cirkel Digital, a subsidiary of Sodener Corp., on their new product Romulus—the world’s first full-scale digital wipe program. During that time, he managed to wipe himself completely from the virtual world.
78 years later and this one photo—pinstripes and silk cravat—is all the world has left.
Aanu Shodipe has Jideọfọ on the wall of her guest bathroom, mostly out of sight. Though she loves and respects his legacy, she is a bit sick of his face. In this photo, Jideọfọ’s eyes are closed and his head has just the slightest tilt upwards. You can see the power in his jaw; the flat, wide, regal nose that all other features seem to revolve around. In this photo, his cheekbones are more defined and the skin on his face is sunken; visible signs of wear and tear from the ravages of pancreatic cancer. In this photo, his hands lay delicately over his chest, one crossed over the other. In this photo (and there is no denying it, here) Jideọfọ lies dead.
The man loathed to be photographed. But there was a decision that he was too important to not be photographed; so they waited until he could no longer object.
What defines morbidity, Aanu has always wondered. In any other scenario, keeping the framed photo of a dead body on your wall would be just that. But not when it comes to Jideọfọ. Jideọfọ, the man who was so great he ceased to be a man. Have you ever seen the humanity loved out of somebody? That’s what they did to him—a tragedy of veneration.
Though Aanu never liked the idea of having his face on her walls, decorum demanded it. He was the greatest thing they had ever produced, after all. He single-handedly pulled Africa into the 22nd century. So she put the picture in the guest bathroom and forgot all about it.
But today, as she dresses for work, her mind flits back and forth between that photo and the stories she’d been told about him in school.
Jideọfọ, the great problem solver.
On her office wristband, she punches in a 6-digit passcode. A new message blinks at her on the small screen. She feels a rush of excitement as she swipes up and the image jumps out, hovering just over her palm. It’s her new virtual keycard. It reads: Simulator Aanu Shodipe, Kansi Simulator No. SE000847, Room SR13. To the left is a small photo she’d taken the week before—her eyes practically bleeding with excitement.
Jideọfọ, the opener of new worlds.
She packs up the last of her electronics and crosses the living room into the lobby. The home system winds down behind her as the doors close.
The elevator’s glass bowl hangs over the side of her apartment building, where the world looks back at her with a lazy morning glare. From her vantage point, she looks over the sprawling mega-city of Eko: skyscrapers as far as the eye can see and interspersed by paltry plots of carpet grass and trees (just enough to meet the city’s building requirements).
In the early 22nd century, the world spent decades focused on construction, struggling to catch up with the ever-rising population. Now there were buildings stacked on top of buildings, towers sitting on towers—but even that wasn’t enough. If not for Jideọfọ, well… who knows if it would have ever been enough?
She swipes her wristband across the reader by the door and the elevator is pulled downwards. Music blares to life—songs from the playlist she had organised the day her promotion was first announced. Victory music. Through the glass dome above her, she watches the yolk-yellow sky as the sun crawls overhead, pale enough to feel almost unhealthy. And even that couldn’t faze her.
Jideọfọ, the victorious.
The elevator halts its descent and, with a small crick crick crick, begins to move left towards the office spaces. The world flies by faster now, enough that the giant grey buildings start to look like a mass of smoke blown about by the wind. Her first clients would be getting on the road soon. The Abasis, they’re called. She’s had almost a dozen phone calls with them over the past week but still can’t place them. They don’t seem wealthy, yet they paid full procedural costs upright. The husband seems to make all the decisions but his wife says all the words. And they have six children. Six! It isn’t illegal anymore, but it certainly is strange. You’d be hard-pressed to find three these days, talk less of six.
Their request had been odd too. Aanu went over the sketches eight times but could not shake her uncertainty. But really, who wouldn’t feel unsure with a demand like that? A tiny, ugly bungalow—complete with worn paint and cracked glass. Who wanted to live in that sort of home? Who would pay this much to live like that?
The elevator opens to the brown-carpeted, brown-walled office lobby and she turns right—to the Simulation Block. To her new office: SR13.
She’s studying the sketches when the Abasis arrive. All eight of them, to her surprise. She stands and crosses her desk. “You’re the Abasis?”
Samuel Abasi, 58, has a subtle peppering of white spots across his face, neck, and the exposed parts of his arms. Vitiligo, Aanu imagines. A wealthier man could cure that in a matter of days. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Simulator,” he responds. “I’m Samuel, the patriarch.”
The patriarch.
It doesn’t sound all that convincing.
A woman stands just behind him, her arms held meekly by her sides. “Henrietta,” Aanu reaches a hand out to her. “Thank you for coming. Please—everyone, sit down.”
The six children take the sofas while Samuel and Henrietta move to the desk chairs. “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” Henrietta is saying as Aanu takes her seat. “You were very patient with us on the phone.”
The kids fidget quietly in the background—the oldest of which can be no older than fifteen. Aanu doesn’t understand why they were brought here to begin with. Simulator consultations are boring enough for her, a 27-year-old professional. It must be hell for the children.
“So,” Aanu starts. “You’re still sure about what we discussed, then? Nothing more you want me to suggest?”
“We’re absolutely sure,” Henrietta confirms. “We want it just the way we described. We even have pictures; I know you don’t really—”
“We don’t take reference from pictures,” Aanu interjects. In school, she barely passed her desk-top manners classes—she just didn’t have the patience to answer asinine questions. “It’s one of our oldest policies. The oldest, in fact.”
“We know,” Henrietta sighs. “But all the same, what we want is an exact replica of our house. But I really can’t understand why you won’t just use pictures. Isn’t it all the same?”
Jideọfọ must be rolling in his grave.
“Pictures are perversions,” Aanu says. “Experience is a more accurate measure of reality. It’s not just about the way your house looks, Ms. Abasi. It’s about the way it feels and smells. It’s about the essence. A photograph cannot capture a soul.”
“Well, do we at least get a discount if we opt out on the soul?” She jokes.
Aanu manages a weak smile.
The husband clears his throat. “Simulator Shodipe, we’ve heard—”
“Aanu,” she corrects.
Samuel nods. “Aanu, we’ve—”
“Simulator Aanu, Mr. Abasi.”
He smiles sheepishly. “Simulator Aanu, my apologies. We’ve heard amazing things about y—er, well, about your family. You come from a long line of innovators, so we thought it would be fitting to come to you. Our request isn’t typical, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“You want me to make a bungalow,” Aanu says, ignoring the comment about her family. “One that’s less than a plot large and surrounded by slums.”
“Surrounded by the homes and streets of New Epe,” he corrects.
“Slums,” Aanu repeats. “I don’t understand. With this type of money, you could at least get a decent duplex or riverside home.”
“We want our house,” Henrietta explains. “In our neighbourhood, on our street. We want it to be like we never left.”
“Then why leave?” Aanu demands. “Why not just stay in your normal house—why spend so much making something you already own?”
Samuel leans into his chair with a sigh. “Our house burned down,” he says. His voice is strained, as if the truth is a lump crawling painfully up his windpipe. “It was my great-grandfather’s. We had it before the boom, and he fought tooth and nail to keep it in the family while new residents flooded the area. It might not look like much, but believe me when I tell you it’s one of a kind. The most precious thing in the world.”
Henrietta holds her husband’s shoulder with a comforting grip and leans into him, her face sunken with grief. “ We want to keep this new home in one of the surviving rooms,” she says. “The same spot we used to keep our picture of Jideọfo–before it was lost in the fire. That way, it will be like none of the ugliness ever happened.”
It’s all a bit too theatrical for Aanu. She raises her wrist and taps into their file. “Have a look,” she swipes up and the sketches hover between them. Another pull with her fingers and the images enlarge.
They spend the next half hour going over minute details—smoothing curves here, sharpening corners there and, to Aanu’s discomfort, throwing on some extra cracks and wrinkles. She’d never seen a new house look so… worn.
Samuel is the first to give up, leaning back in the chair and sighing. He looks sickly, like he can barely hold his own weight. “We like it,” he says.
Aanu doesn’t respond immediately. She looks, instead, at his wife. “And you, ma?”
“We like it,” the woman repeats, a bit more forcefully.
The six children in the back are quiet as ever. The youngest, who must be no older than three years old, is asleep on her brother’s lap and drooling so much it leaves a dark patch on his yellow shorts. Aanu realises they’re all wearing some type of yellow. A yellow bracelet for the tween boy and a yellow beret for the sleeping girl. Two yellow shirts for the twins that look around 8, and a pair of yellow socks for the oldest. Even the parents are in on the theme, with Samuel’s yellow glass rims and Henrietta’s yellow dress that covers the length of her arms.
A colour-coordinated family is as common as sand around Eko. It shouldn’t register as strange–yet it does. Like with Jideọfọ’s picture in her guest bathroom, Aanu gets a sordid feeling. A revulsion growing just under the surface of her skin.
“We’ll get to work on construction,” she assures them. “Correspondence will remain open for about a month, so make sure you call me or my assistant the moment you want to change, remove or add anything. After that, it will be in the lab for the next year and even I don’t have clearance to get in there. Keep in mind that, beyond a certain point, any extra additions will incur extra costs. For the full cost breakdown, you’re free to meet with one of the accountants on the bottom floor. Your new home should be ready next July, all things being equal. Thank you for using Kansi, the pioneers of simulated home ownership.”
* * *
The first time Aanu entered a simulated home, she vomited all over the simulated ground.
She’d been 13 at the time. Ariyo Shodipe had been called in to investigate the complaints of liminal spaces in his paintings. His first stop was a townhouse he made three years earlier that hung on the wall of a Simulator Housing Storage Unit on Snake Island. The SHSU was just a few stops from Aanu’s school, so he made her a promise.
“I’m going to take you into the painting,” he said. “I’ll give you your first tour.”
Aanu was equal parts excited and nervous. She asked about a thousand questions on the drive to the SHSU alone.
“Well, what did your teachers tell you about how it works?”
She shrugged. “They said, ‘something, something, Theory of Relativity. Something, something, Elementary particles.’ I don’t understand anything they’re talking about.”
Ariyo, who loved little more than to talk about his work, gave it his best try: “Imagine there is space folded inside space, which is folded inside more space, and then on and on and on. Every inch of our world is made of infinite folds of space that can be opened up to create new places for people to live.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, but yes, in essence,” he said. “Jideọfọ spent his entire life working on it. The first space was simulated just months before he died. Although, not successfully. It fell apart in minutes.”
“So, we unfold the spaces… and then we paint them?”
“We create building blocks,” he explained. “Because an unfolded space is just a void. Everything is a void, really. Even all of this—” he waves his hands about, “is void. But we don’t see it that way, because there are things here. There’s a steering wheel,” he bangs his wheel, “and a door, and there’s bitumen underneath it. And there’s colour! So we create the mould, and then the scientists throw around some light particles to make it solid.”
“And we can’t use pictures,” Aanu offered.
“Pictures are perversions,” he agreed. “No picture can do what a human hand can do. They tried it once after Jideọfọ passed—misguided as it was—and it all fell apart immediately. A photograph cannot capture a soul.”
Still, when she entered the painting later that day, she did not feel any “soul”. What she felt was violent nausea and a coldness crawling up her spine.
For Aanu, it is unnerving—repulsive, even—to climb into a painting and watch the two-dimensional world stretch into a third. To watch the oil-on-canvas colours blend into something almost real. To feel the impossible feeling of tile and stone and carpet beneath your feet. This townhouse had been one of her father’s best: a medium-sized, 19th-century style Parisian townhouse—all white-marble and glass windows. The path to the front door was laid with sandstone. Every inch of the surrounding outdoors was covered in gravel and thick foliage, landscaped to perfection. But to Aanu, there was still something irreparably grotesque about the whole thing.
She only had time to warn her father before upending her breakfast and lunch onto the gravel.
* * *
Ariyo Shodipe worked in Simulation for 15 years before his first complaint investigation. Tife, her mother, never got one her entire career. Aanu considers this as she stands in front of the Abasi house, two years after their first meeting. It’s got to be some kind of record, she thinks. A complaint on your first ever Simulation. She takes in the cracked fence, the hopelessly rusted gate, and the undeniable… lack of any fucking wreckage.
Burned down. Burned down, her foot.
A week ago, the police found the body of one of the Abasi twins by the door of the house. Her skin was drained of colour and riddled with uneven white patches. The autopsy said her internal organs were almost completely desiccated—a symptom of Hypersimulation.
But that’s so rare it’s almost impossible, she told her superiors. Not like they listened. “This is unprecedented, Simulator Aanu,” is all they said. “This is unprecedented,” “This is unprecedented,” “This is unprecedented.” Like parrots.
The Abasi house is just like she had painted—the cracks in its windows, the worn shingles of the roof, the shabby pillars that look seconds from falling apart. She remembers the horror of hearing Henrietta Abasi’s request all those months ago, realising she’d have to sketch what was, without a doubt, the most unimpressive home ever created. But it doesn’t look nearly as bad in person as she’d assumed. Really, it’s almost endearing.
There are officers everywhere when she enters—they haven’t given the home a moment to itself since the girl’s body was discovered. “Deposited,” the officer who spoke to her over the phone said. “Like a fucking Jumia package!”
The rest of the family has been declared missing but—and this is straight from the horse’s mouth, here—the department is itching to switch out “missing” for “wanted”.
Detective Unigwe is a burly man with a bald head and dour disposition. He spots Aanu from across the empty living room and beckons. “You’re the Kansi simulator?” he asks, drawing a frown out of her. Nobody but a detective, she thinks, can make a simulator sound like a common plexiworker.
“I’m Simulator Aanu Shodipe, yes, from Kansi Simulators.”
Detective Unigwe nods absentmindedly. It looks like he’s somewhere else. “I’m supposed to share everything I know with you, and see if you can go in there and get them out.”
He moves out of the living space and into a smaller room with dilapidated counters. The kitchen, she assumes. “How do you know they’re inside the painting?”
“Well, they’re not out here,” he answers without turning around. Police officers brush past them, all in different states of anxiety. “We have more surveillance than the country has eyes, and we haven’t been able to comb them out. The painting is the only place they can be.”
“Why is the whole house empty?” Aanu asks as they step into a bedroom. Its walls are a faded green and browning at the corners. Unlike the kitchen, there’s not a lick of furniture. Not even a mattress. “And why does everyone seem so worried? Since when did missing persons and murders from New Epe cause such a stir?”
Detective Unigwe stares at her, eyes narrowed. “Simulator Shodipe,” his voice is strained. “Did you bother to question how the ‘Abasis’ got their money?”
She blinks. “No? That would have been rude.”
“It would have been helpful,” he says. “Did you notice anything strange about them at all?”
“It’s been almost two years, detective. If I did, I don’t recall.”
He sighs and walks out of the room. There’s nothing but silence as they round a corner. Officers in reflective grey suits zoom past them, talking into their wristbands so fast it sounds like a different language. “My wife was a simulator,” the detective says. “She’s passed now.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” they enter a small storage closet (also empty) and abruptly walk out. “My point is, she kept track of these things. Finances, names, faces, descriptions. I assumed it was general practice.”
Aanu frowns. “Those are things you learn on the job,” she defends. “I couldn’t have known to do any of that with The Abasi case—it was my first job.”
“Unfortunately for all of us,” he mutters.
They round the rest of the house, enter and exit rooms, pull open closets, and dig into tight corners. “What are we searching for?” She finally asks.
“The painting.”
Aanu freezes. “My painting is missing?”
Detective Unigwe turns. “You’re telling me you didn’t know?”
“Who was going to tell me?”
He opens his mouth, pauses, and then sighs. “Simulator Shodipe, are you aware that the Abasis—that’s an alias, by the way—have been linked to numerous large-scale frauds and scams across Eko, Ogun and Ife?”
A wave of understanding–and guilt–floods her. “I didn’t know…” she shakes her head. “I thought it was a loan, or maybe a lottery, or a new job or—”
“They defrauded dozens of people, used the money to pay for a simulated home, and then vanished. By the time we arrived, everything was gone. Except for the 10-year-old girl we found on their doorstep, of course. And then, to top it off, the girl’s parents have come forward. Her real parents.”
“You can track the painting,” she suggests weakly. “All of them come with a regis—”
“Their registration was faked,” he replies.
“I can ask around the registration department? I have a few friends on that floor who—”
“No,” he says. “We have to keep it quiet.”
She frowns. “So what do you need me for?”
“For when we find the damn painting,” his voice lowers. “You’ll take some of these officers with you to retrieve the family. They’ll keep you safe, but you’re the best person to guide them in.”
“And if they’re not in there?”
He shrugs. “Then they’re not in there. But we search all the same. We will make sure.”
“How many times have you and your people searched?”
The detective stops in his tracks, and behind him, Aanu watches his shoulders sag.
They enter the master bedroom, which is still mostly furnished. There’s a queen-sized bed, a dresser with a broken leg, and a tiny wardrobe. If this is how they lived, she thinks, no wonder they resorted to defrauding people. She’d probably do the same.
In the bedroom, Detective Unigwe begins his search in silence. Aanu watches the way he works the room—skipping over bumps in carpeting, curving around sharp corners, reaching for objects without looking—and realises he must have done this many times before. At least half a dozen.
He takes out a small metal square from his pocket and pushes down on it. The square stretches, slowly, with a soft buzzing sound. And then with a click, it’s grown to the length of his torso. He drops to his knees and sweeps the metal bar, now emitting a pale yellow light, under the bed.
She doesn’t ask him how many times he’s tried this. She just watches as he gets back up and sweeps the bar randomly—frantically—across the walls, over the furniture, and behind the massive photo of Jideọfọ leaning against the wall. When he’s done, he sighs and hangs his head. He doesn’t just look tired; you can see the exhaustion pouring out of him. “I guess I’ve shared all the information I have,” he says. His dourness is understandable now. “I’ll reach out if we find anything new. Please do the same.”
* * *
The house stands alone later that night when Aanu returns. She’s covered from ankle to forehead as she approaches the backdoor—not worried in the least about the cameras.
It’s silent when she enters. Still, like a dead body.
She doesn’t wait to take it in. Her feet carry her again to the master bedroom, the light from her wristband pouring out just softly enough not to draw any suspicion from the outside. She avoids the mess the officers left behind—stacks of books, broken bits of ceramic and empty plexiglass boxes. She crosses into the bedroom and marches towards Jideọfọ—pinstripes and silk cravat.
The photo stands taller than her, resting heavily against the weakened wall behind it. Ignoring the maddening beat of her heart, she pulls out a small knife and reaches for the top. The paper gives easily beneath her blade, and for a few seconds only the sound of ripping, intermixed with her shallow breaths, can be heard.
She sees it before she’s even done: the ugly house with cracked windows and worn shingles. Her first simulation, all gone to shit.
Painting now uncovered, Aanu reaches for the master key in her pocket. It’s small and circular, perforated evenly with holes. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
She holds down the centre button and it all begins to vibrate—the key, the painting, her bones. “Okay,” she keeps whispering. Her breaths have quickened—she’s nervous. But she’s excited too.
Just like the first time.
The painting shivers as its boundaries melt away. Colours dim with the deep blues of nightfall. In a matter of seconds, the picture frame becomes a door. It gives way to open air and—as she steps through—cement. She’s outdoors again, but it’s an eerier outdoors than the one behind her. There’s one thing modern simulation tech has not and may never be able to solve, and that is the silence. It’s haunting.
And then there is, of course, the repulsion bubbling inside her. Again, she wonders how anyone could possibly live in simulated spaces without crawling out of their own skin.
She approaches the house, this time through the front entrance. To her confusion, the living room is as empty as the one outside. Nothing but a flattened beanbag and a half-eaten bowl of what looks like mould-covered garri. She walks around, tracing Detective Unigwe’s steps from earlier in the day: first the kitchen, and then the children’s bedrooms, followed by the storage closets. Everything is empty, empty, empty, empty. The master bedroom is bare too—not even a bed. Just, leaning casually on the wall, another massive photo of Jideọfọ.
Her knees shake—slightly—but she does not stop.
She pulls out her knife and rips again. And again, the photo gives way to a painting of their home; this time, someone else’s. She can see the logo of Layola Simulations—one of their top competitors—carved into a corner of the frame. It’s not a bad painting. The shingles on the roof are still old and beaten-down, but the windows are intact. She pulls out her key and presses down.
This time, when she steps through, the first thing she feels—before the sturdy cement or the cool night air—is dizziness. Her stomach roils and her head spins. She walks in, again, and again finds the place empty. In the master bedroom is another photo of Jideọfọ. She cuts, pulls out her key, and steps in.
This is unnatural.
Bile floods her mouth the moment she lands on the cement. She drops, spewing the contents of her stomach out, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. She’s on her hands and knees as she enters this house. And finds it empty, again.
She should turn around.
The master bedroom holds another painting, and it’s Jideọfọ but… no pinstripes. No cravat. He’s wearing a deep green, expensive-looking agbada, the sleeves rolling off the arms of his chair and falling to the floor like drapery. She’s not certain but he looks alive. His eyes look open.
It’s the complete opposite of everything she’d ever known him to be. Healthy cheeks and a gloss to his skin. And his mouth—curved upwards as if he was actually smiling. Actually, willingly posing for an unseen camera.
His eyes are open.
But Aanu is too delirious to focus on it. She’s frantic–single-minded in her quest to find the Abasis. She crawls to the photo with her knife out. Her body is sweaty and wracked with pain. She feels sick. She is sick. Her hand extends to cut into Jideọfọ’s face but someone grabs onto her waist and pulls her back.
“Wait!” She’s screaming. There’s no response. The stranger just wrestles the knife out of her hand and shoves her face to the floor. “Stop! Wait!”
Something collides with the back of her head and pain blooms down to the base of her spine. Her hands drop, drained of all fight.
“I’m sorry,” her assaulter says. “That picture is priceless. You can’t destroy it.”
Aanu is being pulled—no, dragged—across the room.
“Is that really Jideọfọ?” She asks. Her throat is dirt dry. “Did he really pose for that?”
Her assaulter leans her against a wall and stoops down. “We found it,” they confirm. “He didn’t manage to get to it. We found it, and we hid it. It’s the most precious thing in the world.”
Aanu’s vision clears only enough to notice the patches of white on her assaulter’s slender arms. She takes a guess. “Henrietta?”
“You don’t have to understand us, Aanu Shodipe.”
Aanu feels a hand close firmly around her throat.
“You just have to leave us alone.”
* * *
A few days later, Aanu Shodipe’s body turns up at the door of the Abasi house. Detective Unigwe is flooded—with both calls from the media and his own unwieldy guilt.
The painting was still in the master bedroom; uncovered, most likely, by Aanu. In about 20 minutes the officers had suited up and traversed the most convoluted, abominable tunnel of simulated realities anyone had ever seen. Until they found the one they were looking for.
The press conference that followed was short, and the detective took no questions.
“Seven bodies were recovered; two adults and five kidnapped children—all of them living multiple simulations deep.” Gasps fill the room. “Autopsies are still being conducted, but all signs point to Hypersimulation. Their identities have not been confirmed and, to avoid speculation, it’s worth mentioning that no suicide note was recovered from the scene.”
In fact, the suicide note read:
“We were born out there, but we have died in the only place we were truly alive—and with Jideọfọ smiling over us.”
That evening, Detective Unigwe takes his first sip of alcohol in almost fifteen years. The photo of Jideọfọ on his wall, even with its eyes closed, seems to be taunting him. And right beside that is a photo from his wedding. He’s wearing a brown tuxedo and Henrietta is in her favourite yellow dress. Her hands are wrapped around a Mahlstick like a bouquet, and her eyes are full of humour, like she’s just begging you to see the joke.
Well, Unigwe doesn’t find it so funny anymore.
About the Author:
Adesire Tamilore is an emerging voice from Lagos, Nigeria. She currently lives in British Columbia and is working towards a degree in Journalism. Her stories often lean towards the improbable, which she uses as a tool to explore the human condition. You can reach out to her on Twitter: @AdesireTamilore, or read about what’s bothering her on Substack: https://adesiretamilore.substack.com/.
Isele Magazine 