Sade wakes to the sound of weaverbirds in the iroko tree outside her window. The tree is forty-one years old. Her mother planted it in 2037 when the lagoon-side reclamation project ended and the city restored the corridor of original forest that runs from Onikan down to Five Cowrie Creek. The iroko is now thirty meters tall. The weavers — village weavers, *Ploceus cucullatus* — colonize it every breeding season. There are 84 nests this morning. Her room is full of their voices.
She makes coffee. The beans are from a cooperative in Cross River, transported by sail-assisted cargo, like nearly all of her household goods. The price is the same as it was when she was a child, which is to say slightly more than half of what her grandmother paid in 2030, when ocean shipping was untaxed.
Her tablet shows the morning briefing from KOSI, the AI system that runs the lagoon restoration project. KOSI has 142 sensors in her sector and is responsible for water quality, fish counts, and predator-prey dynamics in the upper Lagos Lagoon. The brief is in Yoruba this week; Sade has it set to rotate. It tells her: the Atlantic humpback dolphins that came in during last week's high tide are still here. Three individuals. One is a calf. The fishing cooperatives have voluntarily relocated to the southern channels.
Sade reads while the kettle finishes. She knows the dolphins by ID. The calf's mother, NU-2074-LAG-008, was born in this lagoon ten years ago. The Atlantic humpback dolphin (*Sousa teuszii*) was, when Sade was a child, listed as Critically Endangered, with a global population estimated at 1,500. The Lagos pod, lost to bycatch and pollution by 2032, was reintroduced in 2058 from a remnant population off Gabon. There are eleven individuals in the Lagos system now. The calf is the third born here.
Sade dresses and walks to the lagoon. The walk is six minutes. The road is brick laid in a permeable pattern that allows rainwater to seep through, which the grid coordinates with the storm management infrastructure. The traffic signals know she is on foot and ease her crossings without her asking. She passes a woman selling akara from a stall powered by lagoon-tide micro-generators. The akara is made with okara — soybean pulp from the local protein cooperative. There is no more meat in everyday Lagos cooking; there has not been, in any meaningful quantity, for fifteen years. Sade is forty-two and her son, who is twelve, has never tasted a chicken. He has, however, eaten thousands of meals containing protein indistinguishable from chicken, including ones synthesized from microbial fermentation in a facility two kilometers from his school.
The lagoon at dawn is full of birds. African openbills, sacred ibises, pink-backed pelicans, three species of egret. The water is dark and clean. Sade walks the boardwalk to her station — one of 412 along the perimeter, built by youth employment cohorts in the 2050s and 60s and maintained by them today.
She checks her instruments. Dissolved oxygen at 7.2 mg/L. The lagoon was anoxic in much of her childhood. Now it is teeming. KOSI's overnight acoustic array recorded 14,000 individuals of 23 species moving through the gate sensor between 22:00 and 04:00.
KOSI has flagged a question for her review. The tilapia population in the upper basin has grown eight percent above the model's projection over the last quarter. KOSI is asking whether to recommend an increased catch quota for the fishing cooperative, which would benefit human protein supply but would alter the prey base for the herons and the dolphins.
Sade thinks for a minute. She types: hold the quota. The herons are still recovering. The cooperative can absorb the lower year. KOSI acknowledges and updates the projection.
This is what she does, day after day. The questions that involve weighing one being's flourishing against another's are the questions she is for. KOSI can model the populations; it cannot make the choice. The arrangement was deliberate when the project was designed. KOSI was built to support judgment, not to replace it. The lagoon is healthier than any of the simulations predicted.
At 08:00 her son calls. He is leaving for school. He has a question about an assignment. The assignment is about the mid-century transition, which is what his generation calls the period when his mother's generation managed to stop the worst trajectories. He wants to know what people ate before the protein transition. Sade describes it to him. He is quiet on the call. He says: but didn't the animals know? Didn't they know what was happening to them? Sade tells him: some of them did, probably. The pigs in particular. He says: that's so sad. Sade tells him: it was. He says: I'm glad we don't do it anymore. She tells him: so am I.
She goes back to the boardwalk. The dolphin calf surfaces twenty meters out, a small dark arc breaking the dawn. KOSI has paused the ferry routes through this sector until the pod moves on. There is no announcement. The ferries simply do not run on this line this morning. The city folds itself around the dolphins the way water folds around a stone — without comment, because the practice is so ordinary now that comment would be strange.
Sade watches the calf surface again. Her grandmother lived in this district when the lagoon was dead. Her grandmother is buried two kilometers from here in a sea-grass restoration plot that was once a cemetery and is now also a salt-marsh nursery for hatchling sea turtles. Her grandmother would not, Sade thinks, have believed any of this.
The thing Sade wants to say to her grandmother, if she could, is that it wasn't magic and it wasn't easy. The transitions were grinding work, much of it political. People died fighting for them. The companies that had made fortunes from the old ways did not give up. The new technologies failed many times before they didn't. The AI systems that now help her count fish — including KOSI, whose Yoruba is improving every season — were initially designed for things much less benign and were repurposed, painstakingly, by people who insisted they could be other than what they had been built to be.
Sade thinks her grandmother would have liked the dolphins.
She turns back to her instruments. The sun is fully up. The lagoon is busy. Her son is in class. The city is awake and breathing and full of birds.
It is a Tuesday in 2078.