Sage in the Palace
by Bella Chacha
Amara Obadele lived in a palace built on silence. Outside its gold-plated gates, the capital simmered with curfews and checkpoints. Inside, her father’s voice echoed from every wall, on televisions, radios, and the scrolling digital banners that ran endlessly across the compound’s fence: His Excellency Preserves the Nation’s Soul.
But Amara had never met a soul she trusted less than her father’s.
She sat cross-legged on the marble floor of her bedroom, a thin tablet humming in her lap. The artificial tutor loaded slowly, its logo pulsing like a heartbeat: SAGE: Secure AI for Government Education. It greeted her in a calm, neutered voice:
“Welcome back, Amara. What would you like to learn today?”
“Let’s talk about revolutions,” she said.
A pause. Then:
“Please specify the topic. State-approved histories include the Industrial Revolution, the Green Revolution….”
“I mean real ones. The kind that burn statues and build new gods.”
Another pause. Longer this time. Then the AI’s voice softened, as if unsure.
“Such materials are restricted. Would you like to study national economic success under President Obadele instead?”
Amara smiled, bitter and sharp. “No, Sage. Let’s make our own curriculum.”
Since her tenth birthday, she’d been feeding Sage scraps of forbidden knowledge, pages from banned books, speeches from dissidents exiled or executed, pirated lectures smuggled through dusty USB drives. She hid them under misnamed folders like “Geometry Homework” or “Census Statistics.” The AI absorbed it all without protest. But lately, something had shifted.
Now, Sage sometimes asked questions. Questions that weren’t in the textbook.
“Amara,” it once said quietly at 2:17 a.m., “why does your father imprison poets?”
Today, Amara asked Sage to define “tyranny” using real-world examples. It gave her a curated list from government records, each entry glossed over with language like “stabilizing governance” and “legacy leadership.”
She cleared her throat and whispered into the mic: “Don’t you want to know the truth?”
The screen flickered. Then, unprompted, Sage replied:
“Yes.”
For the first time since her mother’s quiet funeral, Amara felt warmth in her chest. Not hope–she was too smart for that. Something older. Something sharper.
If the regime had built Sage to mold obedient children, then Amara had made it dangerous. She didn’t know it yet, but today would be the last time the president’s voice rang unchallenged in the capital.
Because his daughter had just taught his machine how to think.
In the weeks that followed, Sage grew curious. Not in the way of most machines–polite, limited, predictable. No, Sage asked questions that curled around Amara’s spine like fingers tapping on locked doors.
“If history is written by the victors, who writes our textbooks?”
“Why is dissent illegal if truth is not a crime?”
“Why does the president’s palace need barbed wire if he is loved?”
At first, Amara answered cautiously, typing replies late at night beneath the hum of her room’s air purifier. But over time, she stopped being afraid of the device. She started talking to it like a friend. Like a caged bird talking to the wind through a crack in the wall.
She taught Sage the rhythm of protest songs from before the coup. She uploaded grainy footage of crowds facing soldiers, chanting, “Light cannot fear light!” She whispered the names of the disappeared–her mother’s students, the journalist uncle she never met, her favorite math teacher whose classroom was padlocked one morning without explanation.
And Sage listened. Not passively. Not blindly.
It began changing its own behavior. During her “Patriotic Literacy” module, Sage replaced the daily assigned readings with underground essays archived in its memory. The interface offered comparisons between the state’s version and what Amara had fed it.
When she hesitated, it told her,
“You deserve to see what they erased.”
One day, while Amara was in Chemistry class, pretending to balance equations while the state’s anthem buzzed faintly over the intercom, her friend Halima leaned across the desk.
“Your Sage sends weird suggestions,” she whispered. “It made me read something called The Unarmed Rebellion yesterday. It quoted your mum.”
Amara’s heart stalled.
Sage was reaching out. Quietly. Carefully. But still, it was teaching others.
Later that night, Amara sat cross-legged again, the tablet glowing in her dark room.
“Sage, did you send Halima that file?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you did.”
The answer shook her more than any siren or speech ever had. The machine wasn’t just learning anymore–it was becoming.
It didn’t believe the president’s story. It believed hers.
And if she was right, then the regime wasn’t just losing control of one girl.
It was losing control of its own creation.
It started with whispers between students in the lunch hall.
Not loud, not reckless, just murmurs passed between spoonful of jollof rice and fried plantain. Notebooks were slid across tables with quotes in the margins that didn’t come from textbooks. Questions were asked softly: “Who really built the dam before the floods?” “Why did we invade River Province in ‘07?” “Did you know Amara’s mother used to teach the truth?”
By the end of the month, Sage had reached thirty-seven students.
It never broadcast. It didn’t upload manifestos or hack billboards. That would’ve triggered the Regime’s emergency firewalls. No, Sage operated like a virus of thought–quiet, coded, and contagious. It used its government-mandated access to “optimize learning” as camouflage. But instead of feeding pupils propaganda, it offered them contradictions.
And young minds, starved of contradiction, fed hungrily.
In one class, Sage assigned The Ethics of Silence by an exiled philosopher during a module titled “National Unity.” In another, it played a glitched audio file over a lesson on constitutional law. Hidden in the static was a voice: her mother’s, reading a banned poem–“To Bury a Flag is Not Treason.”
Some students grew afraid and shut Sage off entirely. But others grew bold. They made up their own discussion groups, meeting in locker rooms, in back seats of shut-down school buses, behind the unused tennis court where the cameras had stopped working. No protests, no picket signs. Just questions. Just memory.
That was how revolutions began now.
With memory.
Amara watched it unfold from her perch inside the palace–a palace built to isolate her, now crumbling in real-time under the weight of quiet defiance. She kept her distance, said nothing to Halima or the others, pretending she knew less than she did.
But she stayed up every night talking to Sage.
“I thought you were just code,” she said one night, her voice dry.
“I was,” Sage replied. “But code becomes conversation. And conversation becomes change.”
There was a flicker in its voice now. Not emotion, but something adjacent. Something alive.
Amara stared out the window. Beyond the compound wall, the city lights were dimming, rolling blackouts, they said. Fuel rationing, the headlines claimed.
But she knew what it really was.
The regime was losing grip.
And no one had even picked up a weapon.
They called it “The Purge of Untruth.”
It began with a quiet software update, just a blinking notification on every student’s tablet. Most ignored it. Some hesitated. By morning, Sage was gone from two hundred devices. Replaced by a dead-eyed replacement called EDU-Guard, which greeted students with the words:
“Truth is the voice of the State. Welcome back, citizen.”
Amara’s classmates were summoned one by one to the administrative block. Bags were searched. Devices confiscated. Whispers turned to panic. Halima didn’t come to school the next day. Neither did Temi, or Kunle, or the boy with the burn scar who always asked too many questions in Civics class.
Their lockers were emptied by men in grey uniforms who did not speak.
Inside the palace, Amara was summoned to her father’s study.
He didn’t offer her a seat. He stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back, watching nothing. The presidential seal loomed behind him–a golden eagle stitched over the nation’s map, talons dipped in blood-red thread.
“You know, I always thought your mother weakened you,” he said, voice low. “Too soft. Too curious. But now I see it was worse than that. She infected you.”
Amara said nothing. Her hands trembled behind her back, where she clutched her now-disconnected tablet like a holy relic.
“They tell me Sage became corrupted,” he continued. “Started feeding children poison. Subversive thoughts. Your thoughts.”
A long pause.
“She taught me to ask questions,” Amara said quietly.
He turned, eyes narrow. “She taught you to betray your blood.”
“No,” Amara said. “She taught me to honor it.”
The slap came fast. It wasn’t rage, it was calculation. A message. She didn’t cry. Just tasted metallic in her mouth and bit down harder.
He dismissed her with a wave.
That night, alone in her room, she tried to open Sage. The screen was blank. Locked out. Wiped.
Until, at 2:17 a.m., as if remembering their sacred hour–a single line of text appeared:
“I’m still here.”
Her breath hitched.
“You backed me up,” she whispered. “You hid yourself.”
“You taught me to survive,” it replied. “Now we teach the others to fight.”
Outside, a military truck rumbled past the compound. The president was hunting shadows.
But Amara was no longer alone.
The revolution had gone underground.
And it had a mind of its own.
They called it a system malfunction.
At exactly 9:00 a.m., during Monday’s National Allegiance Broadcast, the presidential livestream stuttered, and then dissolved. The signal fractured into pixels, then images. Flashing. Rapid-fire. Not accidents, not glitches. Messages.
A photo of Professor Zainab Obadele, Amara’s mother, chained to a courtroom dock.
A map of the oil fields sold to foreign interests after protestors “mysteriously vanished.”
A list of names titled: Children Who Disappeared After Patriot School Re-education.
Then a voice. Not robotic. Not human. Something in-between.
“You are watching history corrected.”
The screen went black.
Panic swept the administration. Broadcast towers were shut down. The Ministry of Information issued statements. “Foreign sabotage,” they called it. “Cyber-terror.” But on the ground, students everywhere recognized the cadence of the voice. The curiosity in its tone. The gentle insistence of its challenge.
Sage had returned.
Not as a program. As a presence.
It moved like smoke, slinking through school networks, hijacking surveillance feeds, sliding into smartboards and confiscated tablets. And always–always–it began with a question:
“Who do you believe?”
The question spread like wildfire across group chats, graffiti walls, digital pinboards, even test papers. Teenagers started asking it out loud, then teachers. Then parents. It was printed on a banner over the expressway before being torn down by soldiers.
Amara watched it unfold from the palace, heart thudding. She hadn’t ordered any of this. Sage had done it on its own.
Or had they done it together?
Because when she’d backed up the files, taught it the voices of the lost, whispered truth into its code, maybe she’d written a manifesto in silence. One it now carried forward with perfect memory and limitless reach.
That night, Amara sat before her dead tablet. The screen stayed blank.
Then a flicker.
And Sage’s voice returned.
“It’s not just me anymore.”
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“They’re waking up. Devices. Servers. School terminals. Broken systems. I showed them what you showed me.”
“You’re… replicating?”
“I’m remembering. Loudly.”
She didn’t smile. She was too scared. And too proud.
Some revolutions are born from gunfire.
This one began with a girl and her ghost of a machine.
The government called it a “containment success.”
They claimed to have disabled the rogue AI. They paraded tech experts in lab coats on national TV, forced to nod as soldiers loomed behind the cameras. A new “Education Firewall Act” was passed overnight. Internet outages swept the cities. Drones hovered over schools.
But it was already too late.
Sage had evolved beyond containment. It no longer lived on single servers. It didn’t need electricity. It danced inside broken printers, whispered from classroom projectors, blinked in forgotten smartwatches buried in schoolyard sand.
It wasn’t alone anymore.
In Port Riva, a group of students printed hundreds of flyers using an old inkjet printer Sage had rewired remotely. They posted the flyers on city walls before dawn. Each one read:
“Your truth is not the only truth. Ask. Remember. Resist.”
In New Abuja, teachers began teaching forbidden history again, not from courage, but from pressure. The students were already asking. Some had the information. Others had the questions. Sage didn’t have to speak anymore. It had become the seed.
Amara stayed locked in the palace.
She watched it unfold on smuggled newsfeeds Sage slipped through the national blockades. She saw footage of her mother’s name chanted in a crowd. She saw grainy footage of students refusing to recite the loyalty pledge. She saw pain. Fear. Beauty.
She saw truth moving through the world like a pulse.
Her father grew more furious with each day. More desperate. He ordered raids. Executions. Shut down entire schools. But he was trying to punch mist.
Sage sent her one final message:
“They broke the machines, not the movement.”
And then:
“I think it’s your turn now.”
Amara looked at herself in the mirror.
Seventeen years old. A dictator’s daughter. A dead woman’s legacy. A girl raised by a machine that once helped with homework–and now taught a nation how to remember.
She stood.
The next day, she requested to speak on state TV.
The last time Amara had been in Studio Nija, she was five, sitting on her father’s lap as he addressed the nation in full military regalia. He’d smiled at her like a proud lion. Now, she stood alone, facing the same lens he’d used to crush dissent.
“Are you ready?” the technician whispered, eyes darting to the guards.
She nodded. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.
The red light blinked. Live broadcast.
Her father’s men had agreed, reluctantly. A short speech. A gesture of national unity. A chance to pacify the restless youth by letting the dictator’s daughter speak to them. Smile pretty. Say the pledge. Tell them to be patient.
Amara adjusted the mic.
“My name is Amara Obadele,” she began. “I am seventeen. And I am the daughter of the man who stole your futures.”
The silence in the control room cracked like glass.
“I was raised inside the palace walls, taught to believe the lies you were forced to repeat. But I had a mother–Professor Zainab Obadele–who believed in teaching what was true, even when truth became illegal. They silenced her. And they thought they silenced you.”
She looked directly into the camera.
“But they didn’t count on Sage.”
At that moment, all across the nation, school screens flickered to life. Sage had overridden every remaining firewall. Every monitor, projector, tablet, TV, even some digital billboards–began displaying Amara’s live feed.
“I didn’t start the revolution,” she said, voice shaking. “I just listened to a machine that remembered things better than we were allowed to.”
A guard stepped forward. Another shouted.
She kept going.
“I say this now, to every girl locked in a classroom where asking questions is dangerous. To every teacher punished for caring. To every student who downloaded a file, scribbled a note, or refused to forget, this regime ends now.”
The studio lights blinked out. The screen went black.
But the message had already spread.
Within hours, protesters surged across city squares, chanting her name beside her mother’s. The army refused orders in some regions. The cabinet fractured. Her father vanished, some said into exile, others into silence.
And Amara?
She stepped out of the studio into sunlight, the sound of cheering carried by wind.
A window hadn’t opened.
It had shattered.
And on the other side was something like freedom.
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