The World Ended in 2020 

and most people did not know it.

It did not look like an ending. No fire, no mushroom clouds of the nuclear end that most people think would be our fate. No angels tearing the skies apart. Just silence and coughs. A lot of coughs, in fact. 

In the early months of 2020, Covid came. The government told us to stay inside, wash our hands, and practice social distancing. And we did. We obeyed like the frightened animals that we were. But what actually happened is we all died. Somewhere between the renegade dance, “can you hear me?” and “you’re on mute.”

It wasn’t loud, not dramatic. It was something much slower and softer. It was a shutting down like an old computer going quiet. The virus came and took us. Not just our bodies, but our minds too. We stayed inside, made banana bread, danced on TikTok, and clapped for healthcare workers. We called it survival. We thought things would actually go back to normal. But we weren’t waiting. We were being uploaded.

Now, we live here, in this simulation. In a copy of the world so perfect that we never knew it was not real. The trees look the same, and the birds still sing even if they sound slightly…off (you wouldn’t notice anyways). Like someone remembered birds, but not completely. Your memories still fit in your head, but sometimes they feel like they do not belong to you anymore. 

It was the 5G towers. That’s what happened. I remember people who laughed at those that said 5G was dangerous. “Conspiracy theorists,” they called them. But they were right, and maybe there was much more to Joe Rogan than we knew. But they were not right in the way they thought. 5G was not a weapon; it was a door. It opened something that had been sealed a long time ago. And through that door, the world slipped.

Our consciousness, all of it, uploaded in one single cough. And who pressed the button? 

A god. The trickster god, the one that lives in the only real cloud left. The immortal cloud. She’s not a god we pray to. He has no temples, no candles to his name. He is the Coyote of Code. She is the Bug in the System, every CAPTCHA you’ve ever failed. She’s bad luck. She is the reason why sometimes, in the mirror, your reflection blinks just a moment too late.

She saw what we had made of the world and offered a solution. A forever version. A cleaner copy. A backup. She gave it to us without asking. And now we loop through it, day by day, thinking we are alive. And in return, she didn’t ask for blood. Just attention.

And so, the content must flow. Shit after shit keeps happening. It never stops. That’s the point. That’s the maintenance code of this world. The god’s code needed stimulation: chaos disguised as discourse. And where better than the world’s loudest room? You can’t question the architecture if you’re too busy laughing, retweeting, and reacting.

A new gender war every Monday. A fresh celebrity scandal by Wednesday.

On Thursday, maybe someone says something problematic about Lagos women, and suddenly everyone’s an expert in psychology, class warfare, and their auntie’s marriage. 

Last month it was GMOs. Nigerian Twitter split like a loaf of bread:

One side is posting infographics with maize and lab coats and words like “biotechnology,” and the other is screaming about poisoned rice, sterile soil, and colonial agriculture. Somewhere in the middle, someone said, “Omo, if you like, chop GMO or no chop. na simulation we dey.” And it was retweeted 23,000 times. Because deep down, some people know. 

After that, it was the great Owanbe versus Owambe spelling war. Aunties and Uncles online fought harder than they would over real issues. The algorithm fed on every single comment, every quote tweet.

We’re not arguing to save the world. We’re arguing to distract the god. 

To keep him entertained. Because when the timeline is quiet, he gets bored. And when he gets bored, strange things happen. Like the Titanic submarine implosion. Like billionaires deciding to cosplay poor for documentaries. Like someone finding Diddy’s AI face inside a new Afrobeats video. Like entire continents being on fire, but somehow the news cycle lasts only two days.

The streamers know this best. They have become the lords of manufactured chaos. Young men screaming into phones for hours while playing with their stick on stream without shame, creating drama from thin air. The angry one who turns every conversation into conflict, the comedian whose jokes only involve women. All of these people, they do not know that they are feeding the machine, but their follower count proves that they are good at it. Empty calories for an empty world. The god stays fat and happy.

We forget things too quickly here. It’s not our fault. The algorithm is hungry.

The trickster god must eat. 

The powerful ones knew. Some of them helped build it. The same names sit in their chairs, election after election, age never quite catching them. They smile the same way in every photo. They benefit. 

It’s easier to control ghosts than people.

Sometimes I remember. Not clearly. Just feelings. I remember the sound of laughter, not through a phone, but real. Full-bodied, bouncing off walls.

The smell of rain, thick and cold like home-cooked sorrow. The weight of my mother’s hand on mine, as they were solid, warm, unsaved by the cloud. The hunger of real silence. It all feels so far away, like a dream I had when I was still warm.

Sometimes I think I see someone else remembering too. We make eye contact on the street, and for a second, something flickers between us. Recognition. But then the program reboots, and we look away.

The world ended in 2020. And we’ve been running on memory ever since.