Read an extract from Tade Thompson’s science fiction novel Rosewater

Rosewater: Opening Day 2066

now

Forty minutes into my job at Integrity Bank, anxiety hits me. This is how a normal day starts. This time, it’s for a wedding and final exams, but it’s neither a wedding nor an exam. From my window seat, I can see the city, but I can’t hear it. This high up in Rosewater, everything is orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic slowly winding around the dome. From here, I can see the cathedral. The window is to my left, and I sit with four other contractors at the end of an oval table. We’re on the top floor, 15th. A three-foot-by-three-foot skylight opens above us, and all that separates us from the morning sky is a security grid. The blue sky is dotted with white clouds. The sun isn’t shining yet, but that will come later. Despite the skylight being open, the air conditioning in the room is adjusted. It’s a waste of energy, and Integrity Bank is fined every week. They’re happy to cover the cost.

Bora, to my right, is yawning. She is pregnant and has been very tired lately. She also eats a lot, which I think is natural. I have known her for two years, and she has been pregnant the entire two years. I don’t fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and never grew up around pets or farm animals. My education was nomadic and I never had a strong interest in biology, except for microbiology, which I had to pick up later.

I try to relax and focus on my bank customers, and the wedding anxiety kicks in again.

A holographic teleprompter rises from the center of the table. Right now it’s made of random swirls of light, but within minutes it will project text. Next to ours is a room where the night shift is drawing to a close.

“I hear you read Dumas last night,” Bora says.

She’s just having a conversation, it doesn’t matter what the other shift people are reading, I just smile and say nothing.

The wedding is just around the corner in three months. The bride has gained some weight and is wondering if she should change her dress or get liposuction. Mullet is prettier during pregnancy.

“You’ve got 60 seconds,” a voice said over the loudspeaker.

I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They’re not dressed as formally as Bora and I are. They’re wearing tank tops and T-shirts, with metal jewelry in their hair. They have implants in their phones.

I hate implants of any kind. I have one too. It’s a standard locator with no extra features. It’s really boring but my employer requires it.

Exam anxiety fades away before you can identify and investigate its cause, and that’s fine by me.

The metal pieces in the young men’s hair are from plane crashes — planes have been shot down on every route in Nigeria since the early 2000s, in Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano and everywhere in between — and they wear pieces of the planes as talismans.

Bora noticed me staring, winked, and then she opened her snack. It was a cold moin-moin, a few pieces of old-fashioned orange tofu wrapped in a leaf. I looked away.

“Go,” the bullhorn says.

Plato’s Republic Ghostly holographic shapes scroll slowly and steadily on the cylindrical display. I, like the others, begin to read, silently and then out loud. We enter the xenosphere, we configure the bank’s firewall. I feel the usual momentary dizziness. Text swirls and becomes transparent.

With around 500 customers making financial transactions at the facility every day and staff making transactions all over the world every night, it’s a 24-hour job. Rogue sensitives probe and push, and criminals try to pluck personal information out of the air. Dates of birth, pin numbers, mother’s maiden names, past transactions — it all lies dormant in each customer’s forebrain, working memory, waiting to be plucked out by a hungry, untrained, misdemeanor-happy sensitive.

Contractors like me, Bora Martinez, and Metalfan are trained to fight these off. And we do. We read the classics, flooding the alien sphere with irrelevant words and ideas, creating a firewall of knowledge that reaches into the subconscious of our clients. A professor once did a study on this. He found a correlation between the material used for the firewall and the client’s activity for the rest of the year. Even people who have never read Shakespeare will suddenly find bits and pieces of Shakespeare. King Lear It pops into my head for no apparent reason.

While it’s possible to track the intrusion, Integrity isn’t interested. Crimes committed on alien space are difficult and expensive to prosecute. If no lives are lost, the courts aren’t interested.

The queues at the cash machines, the crowds of people, the worries, desires, passions… I was tired of filtering other people’s lives through my own mind.

Yesterday I went to Piraeus with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to make a prayer to the goddess, and to see how they celebrated a festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants, but the Thracian procession was just as beautiful, if not more so. Having finished our prayers and admired the spectacle, we set out in the direction of the city.

When you enter the alien sphere, there is a projected self-image. Untrained wild sensitives project their true selves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, selected self-image. Mine is a Gryphon.

The first attack today was from a middle-aged man who lives in a townhouse in Yola. He appeared to be thin and with very dark skin.

When I warned him, he backed away. A teenager quickly took his place, which made me wonder if they were in the same physical location as part of a hacker farm. Crime syndicates sometimes round up sensitive people into “Mumbai Combos,” a call-center model run by serial criminals.

I’ve seen it a lot before. There aren’t as many of those attacks now as there were when I started. I think they’re frustrated by how efficient we are at our work. Either way, I’m fed up.

Copyright Tade Thompson

This is the excerpt below Rose waterpublished by Orbit Books, is the latest selection from the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up here to read along with our members.