io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Oracle at Ikeja” by Tobi Ogundiran. Enjoy!

Ayinla could not say when he first heard of the Oracle. Perhaps at the barbershop, where he had settled himself into a rotting and dangerously unstable barber’s chair, robe too tight around his throat, silently cursing the barber who stopped every now and then to argue with “hangers.” (There were always hangers at barbershops; jobless, often shirtless men who were as much a fixture of the shop as the harsh fluorescent lights that exposed Ayinla’s pores). But then, it might have been at work, lying beneath the rusty and mud-covered chassis of a 1989 Peugeot 404 when he heard his boss, Aminu, swearing about the Oracle who told him that he was about to come into some money. And what do you know, he found a bag of five million naira on his way home abandoned by the roadside!

(Perhaps he should not have announced that, for he was robbed and beaten within an inch of his life the very next day.)

Interestingly, no one remembered when they first heard of the Oracle, but it took the nation by storm, in a fever akin to Independence Day. People swarmed to Ikeja City Mall where the Oracle was domiciled under the careful watch of enterprising individuals who called themselves “Ministers of Truth,” charging a hefty sum for interaction with this Oracle: market women, civic workers in dusty suits, street urchins and local agberos, pickpockets, preachers, imams, liars—the long line of hopefuls worsening traffic for a city already notorious for traffic, constituting a nuisance to daily living.

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