In the late twenty-first century, under the influence of a now discredited foreign movement, Africa rejected the Singularity that transformed the rest of mankind.
The official reason was that we wanted to find our own path.
This may have been the greatest mistake ever.
Today, the African Federation is finally ruled by technocrats. Even so, it will take us two hundred years to catch up. Our goal is to reduce this interval as much as possible.
A network of highways and high speed rail is spreading across the continent. New factories are opening daily. Lagos and Dar es Salaam have already become the largest cities in history, with forty million inhabitants each.
Yet somehow it doesn't feel real. Life seems like a dream or an epilogue.
Something important is missing: the world.
We have all seen the images of the immense Wall at the Strait of Gibraltar and the former Suez Canal.
No one knows what's on the other side.
An irresistible taboo prevents us from looking over the Wall, or sending probes across.
Normally, we can't even discuss the Forbidden Lands! It pains me to speak these words.
The shock of Singularity Second and the subsequent Great Taboo eventually made our grandfathers overthrow Emperor Bamba I, but not before he finished his Wall. Of course none of the construction workers survived.
Our fishing fleets harvest the abundant sealife off the continents, but they won't venture within sight of land. Much of the Southern Pacific is off limits. Shipwrecked sailors will kill themselves or vanish without a trace.
Our satellites also can't look down at the Forbidden Lands, though we can send probes to other planets.
Still, there are ample clues that the other continents have changed beyond recognition:
All Eurasian and Western Hemisphere river-spawning fish are extinct. The same is true for intercontinental migratory birds.
At night, solar neutrino levels drop to zero.
Reflected earthlight off the moon has decreased by 5%.
Weather patterns have changed radically. Africa is now surrounded by conveyor belts of jet streams that are greening the Sahara.
This Taboo is too strange to exist for our benefit.
I believe that Post-Humanity is attempting to disguise the fact that most of mankind has Transcended.
While it controls our lives, the Wall is intended to deceive alien intelligences.
To them, mankind appears stuck in the twenty-first century. We're still radiating high power telecom signals. Our cities could be detected from lightyears away.
Yet our technology is a deliberate dead end.
There must be brutal competition among the universe's Post-Singularities. The youngest ones are particularly vulnerable.
This means that we will probably never Transcend.
You'll notice I'm permitted to talk about a subject that most of us can't even think about. There's a reason for that:
As Africa's senior technocrats, there are certain changes we must make. If we don't make them soon, whatever's behind the Wall will make them for us.
I recommend we go ahead and unfreeze Bamba's clones.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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