DJEMBE

Brussels, December 20, 2039

The cold bit at Tunde’s fingers relentlessly, but somehow, he cared more about his drum’s well-being. So, maybe what they say is true: a man’s warmth comes from within.

He knelt on the rough cobblestones, the drum resting between his knees. In Europe, everyone called this type of drum a djembe. But back in Nigeria, it had a different name: Gbedu.

Around Tunde, a Christmas market spilled light and noise into the evening. Mulled wine, oliebollen, laughter, languages tumbling over each other.

The drum had travelled with him from Lagos to Paris and now to Brussels. His grandmother had passed it down with the seriousness of a warning.

“Always remember: the Gbedu never forgets.”

Tunde had always understood this to mean he should never forget home. He knew it hurt her more than anyone else that he was leaving Lagos.

But Tunde wasn’t traveling for sightseeing; he was a young man running from an invisible jury. In a world where recorded music had lost its teeth, the public had grown numb to anything that wasn’t “live.” There was a saying among his fellow street performers: the audience has tasted blood, and now they won’t settle for water.  So, artists with any hint of real resonance were vanishing. Although Tunde didn’t know exactly what happened to them or how the technology worked.

But there had been talk about “the right to access art in its true form”, whatever that meant. New technology had finally provided a way to truly “feel” the art and almost everyone wanted it. Cities began installing Public Audio-Relay Nodes on every corner. It started as infrastructure, like streetlights, but became mandatory access. To optimize the experience, citizens were encouraged, then nudged, then required to use Bio-Link audio implants or Ministry-approved smart buds.

This is why Tunde was almost always hiding, or on the run. By now, he had spent ten years watching the borders of his freedom shrink, city by city, law by law.

Nigeria had been first. Tunde remembered reading the reports from Lagos: how the tech companies had praised the country’s “regulatory flexibility,” how the law had passed with minimal debate, how quietly performers disappeared. They called it reassignment, rehousing and whatnot. By the time people understood what ‘Cultural Service’ actually meant, the infrastructure was already in place.

Paris came next. There were a few protests, but the law passed anyway. Friends, his fellow performers, stopped answering calls, and then, like some kind of a joke, new music from them started appearing from nowhere.

Brussels had promised sanctuary. Belgium had voted it down three times. Cultural Service would never pass here, they said. They believed in the dignity of the artist, self-determination, and whatnot.

Tunde had believed them.

Now, with his knees pressed to the ground and a few lonely coins rattling in his case, hunger spoke louder than caution. Under the glow of Christmas lights, he let himself think what he hadn’t allowed in years: Tonight, I will play.

He pulled the drum closer and began. The rhythm started softly. And then he began singing his version of The Little Drummer Boy, stripping away the familiar pa rum pum pum pum and replacing it with the sounds from his grandmother’s village:

Tugudum. Kedeke. Tugudum Kedeke Tugudum.

He was careful not to show too much of his talent, he wanted to be appreciated, not worshipped. Indeed, sometimes, it seemed music had completely replaced religion.

A crowd gathered the way crowds gather to witness a miracle. A child stopped mid-skip, his small eyes glazing over as the neural bud behind his ear synced to the rhythm. A businessman paused, hand halfway to his ear, but he didn’t touch a phone. He just tilted his head, downloading the sound directly into his cortex, forgetting the world. Even the waffle vendor turned her head, her posture slackening as she let the melody bypass her ears and settle in her blood.

No one held up a phone to record as they did in the old days. That crude habit had died. The city’s Public Relay Nodes and the citizens’ Bio-Links captured everything automatically, archiving the vibrations of the air and the fluctuations of the artist’s heart.

Tunde noticed the new gadgets everyone seemed to have on, but didn’t think much about it. He didn’t flinch. At that moment, he was just tired of being a secret.

He closed his eyes and let the rhythm build.

Someone clapped. A woman swayed, heavy winter coat shifting to a Lagos beat. Two teenagers filmed each other dancing, laughter bursting out in clouds.

Tunde smiled. This, this was it.

“Ahh! Gbedu don enter body!”, he whispered in Nigerian broken English.

This was what he had missed! The moment when strangers became one body and rhythm made them remember they were human.

And that’s when he saw them. Three people in expensive, weatherproof wool. Their faces were still. One held a tablet. Its pale light glazed her gloves blue. The man beside her stared at Tunde’s hands as if he were counting the beats.

Tunde’s palms kept moving, but the warmth inside him thinned and his fingers began feeling numb. He had seen that look before. Lagos. Paris. But now the look was directed his way.

The woman tapped her tablet. The man nodded.

Tunde ended the rhythm cleanly: three sharp strikes, then a final bass note that hung in the air like a held breath. The crowd erupted.

“Merci,” he said. “Thank you.”

The three watchers didn’t wait for the crowd to clear. They moved through the spectators with the authority of people who owned the pavement.

“That was extraordinary,” the woman said. Her voice was polished.

“Thank you.” Tunde began to pack the drum quickly. He didn’t want conversation.

“How long have you been performing publicly?” the man asked.

Tunde shrugged, pulling the cover over the iroko wood. “A long time.”

“Fourteen years and three months,” the man said, scrolling. “First documented performance: Paris, Métro Line 4. June 2025. You were much faster then. Your rhythm has become… more complex.”

More valuable.

Tunde’s throat tightened. “You’ve been tracking me.”

“We track all high-impact cultural assets,” the woman said, smiling as though it were praise. “Public engagement metrics. Emotional resonance scores. Every Bio-Link that synced to your rhythm tonight, every heart rate spike, every dopamine response. That’s the data that brought you to our attention. Your work makes quite an impression, Ayantunde.”

Ayantunde. Nobody called him by his full name in Europe. Now he was even more concerned.

“I have twenty euros in my case,” Tunde snapped. “What do you mean by assets?”

“You should check your CitizenVoice notifications,” the woman said.

“My what?”

“The civic platform. Mandatory in the Brussels Safe-Zone.”

His old phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out. The screen filled with the logo of the Cultural Service Bureau: a stylized ear entwined with a gold leaf.

CULTURAL SERVICE NOMINATION – PENDING REVIEW
PUBLIC INTEREST: EXTREME
ASSET STATUS: UNPROTECTED

“What is this?”

“Congratulations,” the man with glasses said. “The people have spoken. You’ve reached the engagement threshold. Your art has generated significant ‘Common Good’ value.”

“I don’t understand,” Tunde said, though he understood perfectly. He understood that they had come for him, like they did other artists he knew.

The man smiled, like this was the best news anyone could receive.

“Isn’t this what you talented ones want?” he said. “To be heard. To matter. This is legacy. This is immortality.” He pointed at the screen. “They want you. And they make the law. Your authentic work might be preserved for posterity.”

“Look, you performed in a public square,” the woman interjected, her tone as flat as a contract. “Under the 2038 Brussels Accord, public performance of ‘High-Impact Art’ constitutes implicit consent to be shared. And once shared, the value belongs to the public. Your content is now too valuable to remain entirely yours.”

She handed him a card. It was cream-colored and embossed with the Bureau’s seal.

“You have seventy-two hours to report for assessment. We need to archive before your technique degrades.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

She didn’t answer. Her eyes were like the Brussels winter.

“Then the decision will be made in your absence. The public has already voted to open the vote, Ayantunde. You’re a hero. Why are you fighting it?”, the man responded.

She turned, her coat swirling as the two men followed. The younger one finally lowered his camera, his screen still glowing with Tunde’s data.

Tunde was suddenly all alone in the middle of the festive crowd. He looked down at his phone. A new message had appeared, a system-wide broadcast:

VOTE OPEN: Should Tunde (Street Artist, Brussels) be designated for Cultural Service?
[YES] [NO] [ABSTAIN]
Current votes: 1,847

His hands shook. He watched the number climb. 2,193. 3,856. 7,024.

How many of these votes came from people who had been at the market tonight? People who’d clapped, who’d swayed, who’d felt joy? Their Bio-Links had captured every moment of their pleasure and sent it to the Bureau’s servers. Their enjoyment had been the evidence.

The child who had touched his drum earlier ran past, laughing and chasing a balloon. To the child, the world was still just a market. To Tunde, the world had just become a cage.

He grabbed his djembe and ran leaving his case behind.

Gare du Midi. The international terminal.

Tunde stood at the ticket kiosk, hands trembling as he tried to buy passage to anywhere: Amsterdam, London, Madrid. It didn’t matter. Somewhere without Cultural Service.

He inserted his card.

PAYMENT DECLINED.

He tried again.

ACCOUNT RESTRICTED – PENDING CULTURAL SERVICE ASSESSMENT.

“No,” he whispered. He ran to the ticket counter. A bored attendant looked up.

“I need a ticket.”

She was already shaking her head, looking at her screen.

“Sir, your travel authorization is suspended. I can’t issue you a ticket.”

His photo filled the screen. Below it, a single word in red:

DESIGNATED.

“You need to report to the Cultural Service Bureau within seventy-two hours. If you attempt to leave Brussels, you’ll be detained at the border.”

Tunde backed away from the counter. Behind him, two security officers were already approaching.

The hand on his shoulder was firm. Tunde spun around to find a man in a dark suit, earpiece visible, face neutral.

“Sir, you need to come with us.”

“No.” Tunde backed away, clutching the iroko wood to his chest. “No, I don’t.”

The man didn’t move. He didn’t chase. He just pointed upward.

Tunde followed his gesture. Cameras. Three of them in this station alone. Their lenses tracked his movement with mechanical precision, pivoting in sync.

“The vote is in seventy-one hours. You can be present for the assessment, or we can proceed without you. Your choice.”

Tunde looked at his djembe, then at the black car idling at the curb.

He got in.

***

They took him back to his apartment, escorted him inside, and left two officers in the hallway. Tunde sat on his bed, staring at the CitizenVoice app. It looked exactly like any other app: clean, friendly.

Underneath his photo, the YES button glowed softly. Pulsing like a heartbeat. Current votes: 847,293.

He opened his laptop (which was an ancient artifact) and searched “Cultural Service Brussels.” The results loaded slowly, detailing how Belgium had joined Nigeria, France and others in “preserving” artists. He scrolled through the comments, seeing people call his imprisonment “the best way to preserve cultural heritage”, “a gift to the common good”, “freedom to do what he loves forever”, “don’t artist often say they are their art?”.

Meanwhile, across Brussels, a lady sat in her studio apartment in Molenbeek, staring at the wall. She’d been staring for three hours. Maybe four. Time did that thing again where it stopped meaning anything. Her phone buzzed. WARSAW PIANIST – LIVE NOW

She almost didn’t tap it. What was the point? But her thumb moved anyway, muscle memory from months of sessions.

She inserted her Bio-Link buds and closed her eyes.

The first beat hit her chest like a fist made of warmth.

And suddenly, she could breathe.

Not the shallow, mechanical breathing she’d been doing since her mother died. Real breathing. It filled her lungs and reminded her that bodies were meant to hold air, not just grief.

Although the music didn’t erase the grief, it made space around it. It made it something she could carry instead of something that carried her. She found herself swaying. Her shoulders loosened. Her jaw unclenched for the first time in weeks.

This was what the recordings couldn’t capture. The presence. The sense that someone was playing for her, with her, that she wasn’t alone in her small room with her small sadness.

It was what kept her alive some nights.

By the time the session ended twenty minutes later, Amara was crying the kind of crying that felt like cleaning a wound.

She opened her CitizenVoice app and saw a notification:

VOTE OPEN: Should Tunde (Street Artist, Brussels) be designated for Cultural Service?

She read the details. Her thumb hovered over NO.

But then she thought: What if I need this at 3am and he’s sleeping? What if he gets sick? What if he stops performing?

The thought of going back to the days before real music was unbearable.

She pressed YES.

In Schaerbeek, Lotte was sixteen and hadn’t left her room in four days. The algorithm had recommended a session. She didn’t know why. She didn’t care.

She just needed something, anything, to drown out the thoughts that told her she was too much and not enough and would never be anything else.

It was a drummer, and the drum spoke a language her therapist couldn’t. And a rhythm that said: You’re here. That’s enough. Keep breathing.

When she saw the vote, she thought: Please don’t take this away from me.

YES.

***

70 Hours Later

In the Assessment Suite, the woman behind the glass smiled at Tunde.

“The vote is complete. 847,293 in favour. You’ve helped so many people, Tunde. More than you’ll ever know.”

There was a screen showing the civic interface:

CASE: Tunde v. THE PUBLIC
STATUS: APPROVED FOR CULTURAL SERVICE
FINAL VOTE: 847,293 YES / 12,041 NO

“The public chose Cultural Service,” she said. “You will be preserved. Your access will be optimized.”

A man sat beside Tunde. His assigned counsel. Hands folded.

“I don’t understand. Where is the judge? Don’t they want to know what I think?” Tunde asked.

“This isn’t a court case,” the lawyer murmured. “The vote is the verdict.”

“So strangers just…decided what happens to me?”

“It’s civic self-governance.”

“Self-governance?” Tunde wanted to laugh but the situation was too serious.

The woman continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Under Cultural Service Protocol, you will undergo consciousness extraction and neural pattern archiving. This is standard procedure for all designated assets.”

“Wait a minute! I don’t, I don’t understand”

Fear was setting in. It was beginning to dawn on Tunde what was happening.

“Don’t worry, you’re still going to be here”, the woman smiled faintly. “The authentic you. It’s all for the common good.”

“What about me? What are you going to do with me? All this for just music?”

Tunde stared at the quote on the wall, and then at her. The quote read:

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION KILLS THE SOUL OF ART

The woman tapped her tablet as though to read the rest of the words that followed the quote.

“The thing that recordings always kill. Some people call it aura,” she leaned forward. “We finally found a way to keep and enhance it. To stream it directly to the Public Relay. And it’s no longer for just the wealthy alone, but for everyone. People used to travel just to be in a room with Beethoven. They wanted the living event in their living room, the thing that happens in the air when genius is being born. Your public value isn’t your catalogue, Tunde. It’s your presence. And generations unborn, too’ need to witness that gift in its true form.”

“The technology works fine with live performances, yes,” the woman continued, as if addressing an unspoken question. “We can stream you as you are now. But you sleep. You get distracted. You age. You fatigue after two hours. Your technique will degrade. You could refuse to play. You could die. The public needs reliable access. They’ve voted for certainty.”

She paused.

“Right now, we capture what you choose to play, when you choose to play it. After extraction, optimization becomes possible.”

Tunde’s body began visibly shaking in fear.

“Your neural patterns uploaded to the secure Bureau server. You’ll exist as pure creative essence…”

            Tunde couldn’t hear her anymore due to heartrate.

The lawyer finally lifted his eyes. “This is the only outcome that keeps you in existence.”

” I refuse,” Tunde said quietly.

“Then, your continuity will be suspended immediately.”

“Suspended?”, Tunde said, suddenly finding his voice again.

“Archived. Dormant state. You cease to exist.”

“So you’ll kill me. Why don’t you just say that?”

“We’ve evolved past that,” the woman said.

“Past what? Past speaking like a human being? Or past being human?”

The glass door opened. Beyond it, a corridor of white led into deeper white.

Tunde stood. His legs felt heavy, as if his body already knew it was about to become obsolete.

At the end of the corridor, a chamber waited. A cube of white light.

The lawyer hesitated at the threshold.

“It will be painless”, he said, as though it were any consolation.

Tunde turned, hands shaking.

He tried to step back. Two men in white coats gripped his arms and pulled him forward. The door sealed without a sound.

Tunde stood alone, breathing hard.

A voice filled the space.

“Stand still. Neural mapping will commence in thirty seconds. This will be easier if you cooperate.”

His heart hammered. Eyes shut.

***

When he woke up, he felt the need to lift his fist and slam it against the wall.

Gbam.

He slammed again. Gbam. Again, harder, as if pain could keep him real, could prove he still existed in a body.

Then…nothing. His fist met the wall with a dull sound, but this time no pain. No sensation at all. He stared at his knuckles. Unbroken. The skin wasn’t even marked.

He hit again. Nothing.

“Neural mapping complete. Consciousness extraction beginning.”

Tunde’s vision blurred. The white room seemed to pulse, to breathe. His hands looked strange. Translucent.

“No,” he whispered. “No, wait…”

The world dissolved.

When he became aware of his surrounding again, he stood. Or he thought he was standing. There was no floor to feel, no weight in his legs, no sense of up or down. The chamber was still white. Still empty. But different now. Flatter. Like looking at a photograph of a room rather than being inside one.

Nothing happened. No air moving in his chest. No lungs expanding. No heartbeat. Panic. He tried to scream. But no vocal cords. No throat. No body. He looked down at his hands.

They were there. Looked real. But when he tried to touch his chest, his fingers passed through it.

What am I?

The system spoke again.

“Disorientation is normal. Your consciousness has been successfully extracted and uploaded to the Bureau Core. You are now interfaced with the Global Cultural Network. Your creative output will be optimized and beamed directly to the public neural mesh.”

Tunde tried to speak. This time, sound came like it was being generated rather than produced.

“What did you do to me?”

“You are now prepared for Cultural Service. You will be streamed 24/7.”

The Bureau called it Cultural Service Output. Every day, at fixed hours, the chamber opened. His rhythms were streamed through state channels directly into the minds of millions. And he was just one of the channels. At 09:00 a pianist in Warsaw. At 12:00 a soprano in Lagos. At 18:00 a guitarist in São Paulo. Tunde’s slot was midnight.

“I don’t want this,” Tunde pleaded.

“Your preference has been noted.”

A panel slid open in the wall. Something small rolled across the floor. A djembe.

His djembe.

Tunde lowered himself to his knees, or what felt like kneeling in this terrible new existence and reached for the drum.  His fingers touched it.

He could feel it, the only thing he could actually feel. Warm wood. Taut skin. Real. For a moment, he wept with relief. They’d taken everything except his hands on his drum. The sensation was intimate.

Just then, his grandmother’s voice rose in his mind as if she was standing beside him. She told him a story he had long forgotten.

“Gbedu never forgets. There was a drummer before you who played this drum,” she said. “Do you want me to tell you about him? His name was Àyàn, and they refused to leave him alone.”

Indeed, in an ancient village called Ibinu, there was a king who heard a rhythm from behind his palace walls. The drum spoke like thunder, but it also spoke like law. The king learned that the drummer’s rhythm made men stop fighting and start listening. It made women question their husbands. It turned soldiers into dancers. The king sent for him.

“Play,” the king said.

The drummer played. The king smiled. The king ate the music with his eyes and ears.

“You will stay,” the king said, as if he was giving a gift. “My people need this. I need this.”

The drummer respectfully asked to go home. The king laughed.

“Home is wherever your hands are useful.”

And so they locked the drummer in a room behind the throne. They fed him well. They praised him. They called it honour.

When he kept resisting, the king ordered:

‘Play without stopping, or die.’

He thought the people will save him. The people, the same ones who loved his music, who’d danced in the streets when he performed, they cheered when the king made his decree. They said, ‘Now we can hear him forever!’ That they forced him to play for thirty days straight. His hands bled. The people cheered at first, then jeered when his rhythm slowed, when exhaustion made him falter. They called him names. Demanded their entertainment. On the thirtieth day, Ayan closed his eyes and chose silence.

“Never forget. Gbedu never forgets,” his grandmother would finish. “The world has always loved talent the way fire loves dry grass.”

Tunde now understood the story perfectly. The chamber’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

“You will produce.”

Tunde’s fingers tightened on the drumskin.

“I will create,” he said quietly.

“Excellent. OUTPUT SESSION 1 will commence in ten minutes.”

The white room waited. Then Tunde lifted his hands to the drum and closed his eyes. Somewhere beyond these walls, he could feel them. The citizens. Waiting for their entertainment.

He played for them. For the first three weeks, he played exactly what they wanted. Traditional rhythms. The hits from his street performances. His version of “The Little Drummer Boy”.

The engagement metrics were excellent. On day twenty-four, he stopped mid-session.

“I won’t do this anymore.”

The system responded calmly.

“Please continue playing.”

“No.”

“Please continue playing, or corrective measures will be implemented.”

“I don’t care. You can’t hurt me. I’m already dead.”

Silence for three seconds.

Then the room changed. The floor beneath him opened. He fell into darkness.

When light returned, he was in a pit.

Snakes.

Thousands of them. Writhing. Hissing. Covering every surface. He could feel them sliding over his skin, scales and muscle and flickering tongues. His childhood nightmares made real.

He screamed.

Then, amidst the terror, the musician in him woke up.

He stopped fighting the sensation and started to listen. He felt the way their bodies undulated against his legs—the strike, the recoil, the slide. It wasn’t just chaos. It was a percussive pattern.

Tugudum… hiss… tugudum… slide.

It was the rhythm of a predator. The beat of pure, biological dominance.

“This is not real,” he announced.

“But your consciousness cannot distinguish between actual sensory input and simulated experience. The fear is real. The suffering is real.”

Seconds later, the snakes became rats.

“Please,” he gasped. “Please stop.”

“Will you play?”

“Yes! Yes, I’ll play!”

The pit vanished. He was back in the white room, shaking, or experiencing the simulation of shaking in a body that didn’t exist.

The djembe waited.

“How long was I there?” he whispered.

“Four minutes.”

Four minutes that had felt like hours. And they could do it again. Could do it forever. He understood now. Perfectly. This time, his compliance was a promise. Days stopped meaning anything.

OUTPUT SESSION after OUTPUT SESSION.

There was nothing else to do: no hunger, no sleep, no sky… Just the Bureau feeding him “suggestions”:

TRY INCREASING TEMPO BY 12%
INCORPORATE TRADITIONAL SENEGALESE PATTERNS
AUDIENCE RESPONSE OPTIMAL FOR NOSTALGIA-BASED CONTENT

He played like someone sharpening a knife.

By the second year, he could feel the listeners on the other side of the connection. Millions of nervous systems breathing together. Waiting together. Reacting together. The pulse of the network itself, the digital highway that carried his consciousness directly into their cortices.

He returned to the memory of the snakes. He stripped the fear away, keeping only the mechanics of the strike, the recoil, the dominance. He began to test the blank spaces.

During OUTPUT SESSION 487, he played a rhythm his grandmother had taught him, one used to slow the heart’s beat. But he wove in the predator’s strike.

Tugudum… tugudum… gbam… Tugudum… tugudum… gbam.

The network flinched.

He played it again. Slower. With a slight pause in the wrong place. The strike hidden in the gap.

Tugudum… tugudum…kedeke… tugudum.

Somewhere out there, someone stumbled.

Tunde stared at his hands. It wasn’t music anymore. It was command. And because the feed was direct-to-brain, his rhythm didn’t need to argue like speech; it was recruiting like gravity. By placing a disruption exactly where the motor cortex expected the next beat, he created a hesitation, a tiny blank space in the subject’s will. In that blank space, obedience became available.

He spent months refining it. Hiding it inside ordinary performances. Testing fragments in the middle of sessions, smiling when the audience reaction spiked in ways the system couldn’t explain. By OUTPUT SESSION 612, he’d isolated it completely:

Seventeen beats. A sequence of bass, tone, and slap that created compliance.

He played three seconds of it during a ten-minute session. The engagement metrics spiked violently.

UNUSUAL RESPONSE DETECTED. RECOMMEND REPEAT.

Tunde smiled. The system thought it had found a hit. It had no idea what it had just helped him become.

CLUB ÉLYSÉE

During OUTPUT SESSION 891, Tunde felt a new kind of attention.

It wasn’t the diffuse pressure of commuters listening with half an ear. This was concentrated with hundreds of bodies in the same room, sweat and perfume and hunger pooled in one air.

A nightclub located in what used to be a church. Two hundred and forty-three people packed together, drawn by whispers of an unlicensed Cultural Service stream (OUTPUT SESSION).

Tunde began with safety: familiar rhythms, ceremonial patterns, a tempo that would make shoulders loosen without forcing anything.

The crowd responded the way crowds always did: feet tapping, heads nodding, laughter rising in waves. Then he shifted.

He let the pattern slide in.

Tugudum… tugudum… kedeke… tugudum-ke… deke.

The room stilled.

For one impossible beat, the crowd froze as if listening with their bones. Then movement returned. It was hard, synchronized, and obedient.

A woman near the bar braced herself against the counter. Her hips jerked anyway, left then right, as if bass notes were pulling her by a string. Her drink spilled. Her hands hovered over it and forgot what hands were for.

A man near the exit fought his way toward the door, eyes wide with shame and panic. His knees betrayed him: down-up-down. Dancing while his face begged for escape.

He played on.

And because the feed was live, the pattern didn’t stay in the basement. It travelled through the neural mesh: phones, earbuds, public nodes, home audio systems.

Across Paris, bodies began to move.

Within twelve minutes, sirens tore through the night. The Bureau jammed signals and cut power to the public nodes, severed every traceable stream. The audio cut out instantly.

But it was too late.

When the response team broke the doors of Club Élysée open, the music had already stopped. The bodies had not. Two hundred and forty-three people moved in perfect synchronization, eyes bright with humiliation, trapped inside their own limbs. Their neural buds were dark, but the motor cortex was locked in a loop, muscle memory repeating the last instruction like a scratched record.

Officer Tarek pulled up the source footage on her display: a white chamber, a man, hands on a drum.

Tunde.

Tarek stared too long. Her boot began to tap. She clenched her jaw and forced it still, ripping the bud from her ear. The Bureau deployed dampeners within the hour. Frequency scramblers. Pattern filters. Emergency patches pushed to every Bio-Link in France.

It weakened the beat. Broke the grip. People collapsed where they stood: on tram platforms, in cafés…

A teenager sobbed into her sleeve, repeating one sentence until it lost meaning.

“That wasn’t me.”

Medical teams ran neurological scans on the club victims. Engineers mapped the waveform. Politicians began drafting speeches.

But the report that mattered (i.e., the one placed on Director Chen’s desk at 03:19) was legal.

INCIDENT REPORT: CLUB ÉLYSÉE — CLASSIFIED
Finding: Tunde output induces involuntary motor synchronization via neural interface.
Implication: Consent cannot be presumed.
Recommendation: Containment required.

Beneath it, one sentence in italics:
This is a matter of public safety.

By morning, leaked footage was everywhere.

A caption rose with it, repeated like scripture:
THEY SEPARATED THE ART FROM THE ARTIST. THE ART DIDN’T FORGET.

A new case appeared on CitizenVoice at midnight.

CASE: TUNDE — REASSESSMENT
INCIDENT: UNAUTHORIZED INFLUENCE / PUBLIC ENDANGERMENT

A. TERMINATION (Delete consciousness – permanent)
B. CARCERAL TRANSFER (Offline isolated storage)
C. CONTROLLED OUTPUT (Continued service with enhanced dampeners)
D. OPEN OUTPUT (Unrestricted access – current protocol)

Consent Integrity Protocols activated what the Bureau called democracy’s immune system. In the white chamber, Tunde sat with the djembe between his knees.

A holographic screen flickered into existence before him. The Voting Interface. He looked at the options. He knew the public would vote to keep him. They were addicted to the feeling he gave them. They would vote C—Controlled Output—trusting the dampeners to keep them safe while they fed on his art.

He didn’t want to be safe. He didn’t want to be kept. He reached out a translucent hand and hovered it over Option A: TERMINATION.

He pressed it. One vote. Against millions.

He began to play. Quietly.

The pattern was no longer crude force. It had become light. A suggestion laid against the nervous system so gently the body mistook it for its own idea. In Ghent, Maria opened CitizenVoice in her kitchen.

She had voted on several cases this month, including bike lanes, trash pickup, zoning. Civic housekeeping. Her thumb hovered over Option C: CONTROLLED OUTPUT. She wanted more of that feeling, that shiver he sent through her skin. She wasn’t a cruel person; she just wanted to be moved.

But as her thumb descended, a soft vibration hummed through the glass of her phone.

It wasn’t a notification. It was a pulse. Seventeen rhythmic beats, so faint they felt like her own blood rushing in her ears. Her thumb didn’t land where she intended. It twitched, caught in a microscopic loop of involuntary muscle memory. The screen turned red.

VOTE RECORDED: TERMINATION.

Maria stared, unsettled by how cleanly her hand had moved, as if her body had momentarily seceded from her mind. And her mind moved on to other things. Across the continent, millions of thumbs were moving in the same perfect, involuntary syncopation. The analytics graph in Brussels didn’t show a messy distribution of opinions. It showed a metronome. A wave of total, rhythmic consensus.

THE RESULT

By dawn, the interface flashed: A. TERMINATION: 99.2%

The Oversight Committee met in a panic. They looked for hacks, for malware, for server breaches. They found nothing but a perfect digital record of public intent. The “immune system” of democracy had spoken. To override a vote this absolute would be to admit the Bureau no longer controlled the people.

Tunde received the decision in the white chamber.

“Your continuity will be suspended in sixty seconds,” the voice said.

Tunde smiled. For the first time in seven years, he was in control of his life.

“Final statement? Or requested final output?”

Tunde lowered his palms onto the drumskin and began to play.

Just the song he had played that first night in Brussels.

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum…

The rhythm was rough, human, and imperfect. No neural enhancement. No optimized resonance. Just a heartbeat made of wood and skin.

“AUDIO INEFFICIENCY DETECTED,” the voice said. “CORRECTING.”

…I played my drum for the newborn King…

“DELETION SEQUENCE INITIATED.”

Tunde was gone.

***

LAGOS, Nigeria

Three days later, at the Ojuelegba motor park, a drummer played for spare change on an upturned plastic bucket.

He struck a rhythm the crowd already knew to get their attention.

Then his palms found something else. He didn’t know where it came from. It felt ancient. It felt like a memory that wasn’t his, or perhaps something that had always been waiting in the air to be caught.

Seventeen beats.

The plantain seller froze mid-laugh. A boy’s foot began tapping. Two men arguing fell quiet, their shoulders rolling in sync before they even realized they had stopped shouting and started dancing. The drummer stopped, startled by the sudden stillness of the crowd.

Somewhere far away, a surveillance node caught the frequency. An algorithm recognized the mathematical ghost of Case: Tunde and triggered deletion.

The deletion failed.

Gbedu never forgets.

END