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The morning started too quiet for a Monday. Our office, usually buzzing with early chatter and coffee smells, felt like it was holding its breath. Ada dropped a stack of files on the conference table, each page marked with strange symbols mixed into our usual project data. Kunle sat at the far end, eyes glued to his laptop, while Maya fiddled with a portable scanner. Me, I just felt like something is not adding up.

We were working on Project Orisun, supposedly a smart city monitoring tool that would make our company a leader in urban tech. The plan, at least on paper, was simple — track water, power, and traffic in real-time to assist city planners. But every time we ran the system, we found signals that no one could explain.

“Check the logs,” Kunle muttered. His fingers danced over the keyboard, pulling out packet captures and sensor feeds. Maya scanned one of the server racks with her infrared camera, and the display glowed like a heartbeat. “Is this how the server is alive,” she said, half-joking, but her voice got that edge, that meant she wasn’t joking at all.

We used every device we had — Raspberry Pi sniffers, SDR radios, old NFC cards that Tomiwa “borrowed” from the lab. The deeper we looked, the stranger the data became. Timestamps from 1999 appeared in our 2025 logs. Coordinates pointed to a section of the building sealed since before we joined the company.

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Ada drew up a plan on the whiteboard:
Step 1: Trace the data source.
Step 2: Enter the sealed lab.
Step 3: Find out why the system is still alive.
We laughed at “Step 3” like it was a joke, but nobody really laughed.

That night, when the rest of the building was dark, we went down two floors below. The door to the lab had a red light on the card reader, but Tomiwa swiped one of his mystery cards, and the lock clicked open.

The air inside was heavy with dust, and old monitors slept under white sheets. In the corner, a cabinet hummed faintly, like it had been waiting for us. A brass plate read MONSOON.

Kunle plugged in his laptop, and the screen filled with data — old, but not dead. This system was collecting information from the city long before Orisun even existed. It was tracking power grid fluctuations, water pressure changes, and pedestrian movement… all in real time.

“This is not an abandoned project,” Maya whispered. “It an hidden backbone.”

The truth was clear: Orisun was not a new idea. It was a repackaged version of MONSOON, a system built years ago but hidden away after a failed corporate merger. And somehow, our company was using it without telling anyone.

We argued for hours. Ada wanted to go straight to management. Kunle wanted to keep digging. Me, I just wanted to know if this thing was safe. Finally, we agreed on one path — rebuild it openly, with proper permission, so nobody would call it theft.

The next three days were chaos. We barely slept, taking turns fixing bugs in the old code, rewriting sections to make it secure. At one point, a power surge almost fried the whole server, but Kunle’s quick patch saved it. Maya designed a clean, transparent dashboard that could be shared with city officials.

When we finally launched our version — renamed Candlelight Protocol — the results were instant. It predicted a major water pipe burst in Odua District fifteen minutes before it happened, giving city crews time to fix it without shutting down the whole area.
Word spread fast. The mayor called our company personally to sign an agreement for official use. News outlets hailed it as a breakthrough in city management. Our company’s name shot to the top of industry rankings, and for once, we didn’t have to hide how we did it.

In the final meeting, Ada held up the brass MONSOON plate. “We keep this,” she said, “not as a secret, but as a reminder. Truth is stubborn, but if you face it, it will work for you.”

Now, whenever I pass our project board, I see a small box at the top labeled Truth. It’s the first step in every plan, and the one lesson we’ll never forget.

I invite @samuelbrilliant @imohmitch @promisezella to take part in this contest