Chapter 17: The Megastructure

The air in Lagos was warm and wet and heavy with smells I had no names for, sweet floral scents mixed with something green and vegetal and, underneath it all, the rich earthy smell of food being cooked over open heat. It hit me like stepping into a greenhouse from a cold street. San Francisco's cool, dry, somehow-simultaneously-foggy air was forty-two minutes and half a planet away.

I started to laugh. The same helpless, whole-body laugh that seemed to be my default response to the impossible. Edward let me laugh. He already knew.

The tube station was inside the mega-structure itself. We flowed up through escalating levels of the station, which became the building around us seamlessly, no boundary between transit and city, and then through a set of broad doors onto what I can only call a street, except it was indoors, on about the fifth level, and I stopped.

What I was looking at was not a city. It was a single structure. It rose from the earth like a mountain that had decided to become architecture, an enormous mass of biostock and glass and green that stretched in every direction and climbed so high that the upper levels vanished into a haze of light and hanging gardens. It was curving and organic, the surfaces flowing into each other in shapes that reminded me of the inside of a seashell. Terraces jutted from it at every level, heavy with tropical plants I couldn't name, and the whole thing seemed to breathe.

I had seen the San Francisco towers up close. I had stood inside one, touched the warm biostock walls, ridden the elevator to the fortieth floor. That had prepared me for this the way wading in a swimming pool prepares you for the ocean.

"Edward," I said. "What am I looking at?"

"New Lagos. It was built about forty years ago, on higher ground east of the old city. About thirty-five million people live in it."

"In it. One building."

"One connected structure. About a hundred levels. The ceilings are five or six meters high, some much more."

I tipped my head back. Enormous diagonal shafts cut through the building at various angles, open channels that rose from ground to sky. Through one I could see blue sky and clouds, and through another a bright wedge of afternoon sun. The columns were wider than in any building I'd seen, oriented to catch not just light but wind, so that warm breezes moved through the interior even on the highest floors.

"The light columns," Edward said. "They were the key design problem everywhere these structures were built. How do you make something this large without the center feeling like a cave? The answer was to cut the building open. There's no point inside, even the dead center of the hundredth floor, that doesn't feel like you're near the outdoors."

We walked through an entrance twenty meters wide, with trees on either side and a stream running in a channel through the floor. Inside, the scale was disorienting. The ceiling rose at least six meters, and the space stretched in every direction, filled with trees and benches and pools of water and people moving at the unhurried pace I was accepting as normal. Living walls rose on every side, dense with moss and ferns and orchids, and light from the columns fell in warm shafts across the floor. The air smelled of growing things and water and, from somewhere, roasting plantains and spices.

I could see all the way up through one of the light columns, a hundred stories of terraces and gardens receding overhead, softened by distance into a glowing green haze. It was like standing at the bottom of a canyon in a rainforest, if the canyon had been designed by someone who wanted you to feel embraced rather than dwarfed.

"How did they build it?" I asked.

"The info designed the structure. Humans participated in every design decision, debated every detail, but the engineering, the materials science, the logistics, that was the info. The construction was a combination of biostock growth, which is fast, and human labor. People wanted to build it. It was the biggest project on the continent. Volunteers came from everywhere."

"And the people who lived here before? Old Lagos?"

"The old city is still there, toward the coast. Some people prefer it. But most of the population chose to move here because they'd spent years helping design it. Every floor, every neighborhood, every common space. Whole communities relocated together, kept their neighbors, kept their networks."

Edward led me to what looked like an open shaft in the floor, a wide circular column maybe four meters across, extending upward out of sight. Through the opening I could see platforms, flat discs of biostock about three meters across, moving steadily upward, spaced maybe five or six meters apart, with plenty of room between them. They rose continuously, without stopping, at the speed of a brisk walk. A parallel shaft beside it carried platforms downward — they looped over at the top and came back down the other side, so there was always one going your way.

"You step on," Edward said.

"That's an elevator?"

"It never stops," Edward's info said. "There's always a platform coming. You step on, ride to your level, step off."

I watched the platforms rise. They moved smoothly, silently, with a comfortable gap between them, wide enough to step through without hurrying. A woman ahead of us stepped onto one without breaking stride. A man with a child on his shoulders did the same. Nobody hesitated.

"What if someone falls in?" I said. "What if a child—"

Edward was already shaking his head, smiling. "The info sees everyone approaching. If there's any risk, any risk at all, the platforms slow down or stop. If kids are roughhousing near the column, the whole thing pauses. Happens now and then. People yell at the kids." He shrugged. "It's the most common cause of delays. But it's literally impossible for anyone to get hurt. There hasn't been an injury in decades."

"In your time," Edward's info said, "there were still people in developing countries who had never ridden an escalator. The first time was genuinely frightening. They had to learn the timing, the balance, the confidence to step onto a moving surface. This is exactly like that. You just need to get the hang of it."

I took a breath and stepped on. The platform was solid under my feet, no swaying, no vibration. Like standing on a piece of the floor that happened to be rising. Edward stepped on behind me and we rode upward past level after level, each one a glimpse into a different world: a food-growing floor dense with greens under full-spectrum light, a residential level with wide corridors and warm light from open doorways, a workshop where someone was shaping biostock with their hands, a gathering space where people were eating together.

We stepped off at a level about forty stories up. The view was staggering: outward through a light column to the green landscape beyond, and inward across a floor that stretched away for what must have been a kilometer, dotted with trees and ponds and low structures, neighborhoods inside the mega-structure.

"Now watch," Edward said.

Above our heads, platforms were gliding in every direction, horizontal and diagonal, carrying people across the vast interior. One descended smoothly toward us and lowered to floor level.

"Step on," Edward said. There were railings along the edges if you wanted to hold on, but Edward just stood in the center with his hands in his pockets, so I did the same. The platform rose and then moved horizontally. I braced for the lurch. It didn't come. The platform tilted subtly as it accelerated, adjusting its angle so that the force pressed me gently into my feet rather than sideways. Like standing on solid ground. I didn't need to hold on to anything.

"It tilts," I said.

"It adjusts constantly. You always feel like you're standing on a flat surface, no matter how fast it's moving or in what direction. You don't even notice it."

We rode the platform across the interior, passing over gardens and ponds and a group of children playing on a field that existed on the fifty-second floor, and I stared down at all of it and tried to reconcile it with what I knew about Lagos.

"In my time," I said, "Lagos was one of the biggest cities in Africa. Tens of millions of people. And most of them were incredibly poor. Whole neighborhoods with no running water, no sewage, no paved roads."

"Yes," Edward said. He didn't flinch from it.

"And now it's this."

"And now it's this."

Edward's info spoke. "The technology, the materials, the construction methods, the info itself, all of it was shared freely under the international compact. But I think what you're really asking is how a city this poor became a city this prosperous. A hundred years before your time, there were American and European cities completely full of slums. London, New York, Chicago, Paris. Poverty just as extreme, disease just as rampant, infrastructure just as absent. The transformation of those cities took less than a century. The transformation of Lagos took less than that, because the technology was better and the political will was stronger."

On a lower level, the floor became transparent, and through it I could see water. Not a pond but the actual ocean, lapping against the foundations. The mega-structure had been built to accommodate the risen sea.

"The flooded district," Edward said. "The parts of old Lagos that went underwater are preserved down there."

I looked through the glass at old buildings beneath the water, rooftops and walls softened by decades of submersion, coral and plant life growing on what had been streets. A whole city drowned and preserved.

"In my time," I said, "people argued about whether sea level rise was even real."

"We know," Edward said.

Edward's family was waiting for us on one of the upper terraces. His grandmother Adaeze had grown up in this part of Lagos, and when Edward had told his relatives that he was bringing the woman from the capsule — apparently that was what people called me — they had insisted. We were expected. We were, I gathered, the occasion.

They came at us in a wave. An elderly woman I took to be Adaeze's sister or cousin — I never quite sorted out the exact relation — seized both my hands before I'd finished stepping off the walkway and said something rapid and emphatic in Igbo that made everyone laugh. Edward translated: "She says you look too thin and she's going to fix that today." A younger man clasped Edward's hand, pulled him into a shoulder bump, slapped his back. Children circled, staring at me with undisguised fascination. A girl of about eight asked me, in perfect English, if it was true that I had been frozen, and when I said yes, she asked if it had hurt, and I said yes to that too, and she nodded gravely, as though this confirmed a theory she'd been working on.

I was the guest of honor. There was no ambiguity about it. They led us to a long table on a terrace overlooking the water, and the food came out immediately — a spicy stew over pounded yam, fried plantains, jollof rice served by an elderly woman with a theatricality that suggested she knew exactly how good it was. People ate with their hands, and I followed their lead.

The woman with the jollof told me, through Edward's translation, that her grandmother had lived in old Makoko, a neighborhood built on stilts over the lagoon. When the water rose, Makoko was one of the first places to go. Her grandmother had been part of the group that designed this section of the mega-structure and had insisted that the eating spaces face the water, so nobody would forget.

"You speak Igbo with your family," I said to Edward. "But she's speaking —"

"Yoruba," he said. "Different language, different people. Lagos is Yoruba. My grandmother's family is Igbo — they came here from the east. I can follow Yoruba but I'm not fluent."

"And she could speak English or Mandarin if she wanted to."

"Of course. But this is Lagos. This is where Yoruba lives."

I thought about the linguists of my era who had predicted globalization would kill local languages. They had been wrong. Not because globalization stopped, but because the info made every language learnable and therefore survivable. Yoruba didn't need to compete with English. This woman's grandchildren spoke both, and six other languages besides, and Yoruba was the one they used at home, the one they told jokes in, the one they used to describe the taste of their grandmother's jollof, because some things could only be said in the language they were born in.

After the meal, the terrace filled. More people arrived — friends, neighbors, extended family — carrying instruments and more food. It became clear that this wasn't a casual gathering. This was a party, thrown for us. For me. The woman from the capsule, come to Lagos.

"We have a show to catch," Edward said, checking the time.

"Five more minutes."

"You said that twenty minutes ago."

"Five more."

He let me have ten, and then we descended to the station, the party's music fading behind us. Lagos had a quality I hadn't felt in San Francisco, a warmth that was more than temperature, a way of pulling you in and making you feel like you'd been there before.

"Sao Paulo?" Edward said at the platform.

"Sao Paulo."