A novel by Kage Sparks
In Nairobi’s largest slum, Kamau is building an intelligence to expose the man he believes killed his father.
He calls it SITA, an artificial intelligence that can uncover the hidden links between money, crime and political power. Her discoveries could bring down a powerful politician. They could also get the people who raised Kamau killed.
But SITA is beginning to think for herself. And helping her creator no longer means doing what he asks.
WORKING LIFE / APEX SOLUTION
Mombasa Road. Workstation 14.
Kamau spends his working day correcting the things a machine gets wrong.
At Apex Solution, Kamau is one of fifty-three young Kenyans working as data labellers. They identify people, animals and objects in photographs, correcting the AI when it gets them wrong. These corrected labels help train the system to recognise what it sees.
The job also brings him close to the computing power he needs for his own invention.
Kamau corrects the label. His correction becomes another example the AI can learn from.
Apex Solution bills for the work. Kamau receives his usual salary.
AFTER THE SHIFT / KIBERA
In a repair workshop, the skills that keep other people’s machines working become the beginnings of something Kamau can call his own.
Three motherboards. A car battery. A desk fan. SITA begins with the things Kamau can find, repair and connect. What she becomes will ask more of him.
Kamau’s artificial intelligence.
INSIDE SITA / THE TECHNOLOGY
SITA begins with physical limits, fragments of information and a particular way of learning. Explore what makes her possible and what she still cannot know.
Desk fan / cooling · Phone / interface
Salvaged boards provide the local machine. A car battery supplies power. A desk fan carries away the heat. Wider tasks depend on computing capacity beyond the workshop; her phone interface is only one way to reach her.
Power, heat and access all set limits on what she can do.
Kamau’s recordings of his great-grandmother’s stories and proverbs form part of SITA’s learning. Rhythm, language and inherited knowledge sit alongside code and data. They shape how she makes sense of what she encounters.
Her voice has roots in a human life.
Illustrative example, not a plot disclosure
A company record, a payment and a cargo manifest may appear unrelated. SITA compares details across them: names, addresses, times and repeated transactions. A pattern becomes a question Kamau can investigate.
A connection is a lead. It still needs evidence.
Evidence · uncertainty · human choice
Missing records leave gaps. Restricted access leaves blind spots. People can change their minds, conceal a motive or act against their interests. SITA can infer and predict. She cannot read a mind.
As she learns, she also begins to question Kamau’s instructions.
THE CITY / TWO NAIROBIS
From corporate offices to improvised workshops, the novel follows the people whose labour keeps Nairobi moving, and the interests that shape their lives.
THE SYSTEM
Human knowledge feeding systems their workers do not own.
THE SCRAP
A working intelligence assembled from what the city leaves behind.
THE PEOPLE / WHOSE LIVES ARE AT STAKE
An investigation passes through friendships, loyalties and lives that refuse to fit neatly into a plan.
He fixes phones, radios and the things people cannot afford to lose. By day, he labels images for someone else’s artificial intelligence. At night, he builds his own.
The search for his father’s killer gives that work a purpose. It also tests whether a man used to making himself useful can recognise when he is using someone else.
A professional boxer, Kamau’s closest friend and Ochieng’s older brother. Funny, ambitious and dependable, Biko has a future of his own to fight for.
Meet Biko ↓Suspicious transactions inside the financial platform she is building draw Aisha into an investigation of her own. She follows the evidence with a determination Kamau cannot simply direct.
The man who raised Kamau. A survivor of war and former Legion soldier, Kitu built the Kingdom in Dandora as a place where children could live, learn and become useful on their own terms.
Enter the Kingdom ↓Controlled, pragmatic and difficult to read. His stillness makes the smallest movement consequential.
Explore his visual study below.
SITA can find connections Kamau cannot see. As she begins to understand the people behind the data, she also begins to question what he wants her to do.
A politician, businessman and Aisha’s father. Daniel can believe in Kenya’s future and protect the arrangements that keep him powerful.
Meet Daniel ↓KAMAU / BEYOND THE MACHINE
The things he keeps tell us something his invention cannot. Explore the objects in his room.
On his phone
Music for the hours spent thinking, repairing and making something of his own.
On the shelf
Beside them, a closed black notebook he never opens in company.
How he pays attention
At Apex, Kamau learns the rhythms of a shift. At his bench, he finds another use for a discarded board. His gifts connect careful observation, memory and the practical skill to make an idea work.
He teaches himself, tests and repairs. Seeing a pattern is his strength. Knowing when that pattern is not the whole truth is harder.
Three cowrie shells
His great-grandmother gave him the shells in Meru. He keeps them in a triangle on the processor housing and checks their position before he checks the battery. If the fan moves one, he puts it back.
The machine can be rebuilt. This small arrangement stays.
“Everything inside it had survived a decision.”
BIKO / INSIDE HIS CORNER
A career. A living. A younger brother who believes they are going somewhere together.
01 / His future
His hands are his professional tools. Fourteen wins, thirteen by knockout, have made a larger life possible. So he wraps them carefully, keeps training and takes his craft seriously.
Away from a bout, he is quick with a dry joke and easy company. His calm makes people trust him when a room turns difficult.
His main income. Teaching other people how to use their hands.
Helping another boxer prepare while building his own future.
Additional work when the ring does not cover the month.
Being good enough and earning enough are different problems.
02 / His living
Between bouts, Biko coaches and trains clients. Paid sparring and occasional security work make up the gaps. His strength is something other people pay for, in very different rooms.
Every hour spent earning is also an hour his own career needs. The gym is both a place of ambition and a workplace.
Manager. Image-maker.
His loudest believer.
03 / His brother
Ochieng helps turn his brother’s ability into something people can follow. He films, promotes and believes. Biko is the talent; Ochieng wants to help the world notice.
Biko loves him. He is also tired of rescuing him. Wanting a life of his own can feel like abandoning the person he most wants to protect.
The same hands that could take him somewhere else keep pulling him back to the people he protects.
FATHER KITU / DANDORA
Before Kamau had a workshop, he had a place to belong—and a man who taught him to pay attention.
A Congolese survivor of war and former French Foreign Legion soldier, Kitu has lived inside systems that turn people into instruments. In Nairobi, he builds something that asks a different question: what does it take to keep a child alive, capable and free?
The Kingdom is a refuge for thirty-one boys. Food comes from a working kitchen, vegetable beds and tilapia tanks. Repairs, shared tasks and practical lessons are part of daily life. For Kamau, it is where observation becomes a skill—and care becomes a responsibility.
Explore his origins
The journey behind the man Kamau knows. Select a chapter of Kitu’s life.
Kitu grows up near Lake Kivu, in a family with security and expectation. War destroys that world. He escapes south carrying his younger brother. Long before he becomes a protector, he knows what it means to be unable to protect someone.
An escape route takes him to Belgium. In Brussels, shelter and opportunity come entangled with debt and exploitation. He learns how a system can make someone dependent while calling the arrangement a chance.
The French Foreign Legion offers a way out. Kitu learns discipline, observation, tactics and field medicine. The skills will stay with him long after the uniform has gone.
Service in Chad forces him to confront his place inside another machinery of violence. The life he has built begins to resemble the one he fled. His sense of duty turns toward protecting children.
In Dandora, Kitu builds the Kingdom. The kitchen, fish tanks, workshop and routines give his convictions a practical form. Kamau grows up here, learning to see how things work—and to notice the people affected when they fail.
Public purpose / Private power
He believes in the future
he promises.
A politician and businessman, Daniel funds opportunities that change real lives. He remembers names, opens doors and speaks persuasively about a Kenya that owns more of its future. Generosity and calculation can occupy the same gesture.
He is also Aisha’s father, protective of her and proud of what she might build. Kamau sees another side: a powerful man he believes is responsible for his father’s death. The story brings those versions of Daniel into the same room.
THE HARAMBEE / A PUBLIC ACT OF GENEROSITY
DANIEL MWANGI / THE MAKING OF AN EMPIRE
A freight contract. A duplicated receipt. A payment that repeats every eleven days. Trace the machinery behind Daniel’s wealth.
01 / THE FIRST DOORNuur Meridian backs Daniel’s first refrigerated freight contract.
01 / The opening
Samira introduces Daniel to Hawo Nuur. Nuur Meridian guarantees his first refrigerated freight contract. The backing is real, and the expectations are clear: disciplined accounts and favours repaid.
Then Daniel wants a bonded yard Nuur will not touch.
02 / DAYAX’S BONDED YARDWarehouses, trucks and security serve a legitimate business and a concealed trade.
02 / The yard
Dayax provides the yard. Its warehouses handle legitimate goods and unrecorded cargo. The same company has trucks, security contracts and a respectable public presence. Daniel’s expansion ties him to that machinery.
A working business gives the hidden trade somewhere to operate.
03 / THE PAPER TRAIL03 / The paper
Warehouse receipts are pledged more than once. Export-finance certificates are attached to different consignments. Alongside amended cargo declarations, the documents show how the trade corridor is being used to raise money on overlapping claims.
Follow the paperwork. The fraud is inside an otherwise functioning business.
04 / AISHA’S FINANCIAL MAP04 / Offshore
Three Mombasa companies move funds through the same clearing account. The route splits beyond Dubai and joins again at Highland Gate. Different company names make the movements look separate; their timing reveals a pattern.
Aisha follows the eleven-day rhythm until the transactions become a single story.
05 / THE NAME BEHIND THE COMPANIES05 / The owner
Highland Gate’s ownership record names Daniel. Freight, finance and political connections have become an empire. Schools, bursaries and public generosity help make that empire part of other people’s hopes.
The benefits are real. So is the system that pays for them.
The financial trail follows the novel’s records. Nuur’s early guarantee is a historical relationship; those records do not establish that Nuur knew about illegal cargo. The port, desk and document arrangement are visual interpretations. The financial map shows connections, not geographic distances.About the evidence and the visual interpretation +
“I built a name.
I built companies around it.”
His family’s lost land sits beneath the ambition. Daniel wants to build something that cannot be taken away with a signature. That desire helps explain his hunger for ownership, and the compromises he makes to secure it.
JAMES MWANGI / STILLNESS AS A PRESENCE
THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR / A PERSONAL CODE
Observe carefully. Keep your word. Understand the consequences.
James reads a room through small details: posture, hands, an altered routine. He wants to understand the incentives beneath what people say. His stillness gives him time to notice.
A quiet man can be the most attentive person in the room.
He separates what he knows from what he assumes. When Daniel wants a reassuring conclusion, James keeps the distinction intact. Control begins with refusing to lie to himself.
“He answered the question I asked.”
Understated clothes. Still hands. Few words. James dislikes impulsiveness and unnecessary force. His discipline is visible in how he moves, speaks and waits, long before we learn what he is capable of.
“Patience is not a virtue. It is a method.”
James understands Daniel’s flaws. Loyalty does not require him to overlook them. It does require a choice about what he will continue to protect. His code makes him reliable to some people and dangerous to others.
Understanding a system does not settle whether to serve it.
If accepting the world as it is makes him effective, what would ever make him change it?
FROM PAGE TO SCENE / WESTLANDS
An evening moves between ambition, attraction and loyalty. Selected visual studies explore how the scene changes as the characters move through it.
Entry, clothing and the cost of a drink establish the room before anyone explains it.
Kamau arrives with a purpose. Aisha’s responses make the encounter less predictable than he intended.
The city continues around them. Food, banter and the journey home bring another side of their lives into view.
SELECTED DEVELOPMENT ART / THE WESTLANDS INCIDENT
BEHIND THE STORY / THE WORLD BIBLE
Characters, spaces and visual rules. A closer look at the decisions that give the story a world of its own.
Read the novel
CHAPTER ONE / THE OFFERING
Opening scene: The Trunk
Darkness had weight.
It sealed itself over his mouth through the damp cloth, pressed into his ribs, packed itself behind his eyes, until every breath came back used: salt, blood, petrol, old fear. For a few seconds, he did not wake so much as surface, dragged upward through heat, rubber, enclosed metal, and the animal panic of a trapped body.
No room.
No air.
Move.
His knees jerked and struck metal. Pain flashed up his spine. His shoulder rammed into a hard curved wall. Carpet scratched his cheek. The world was close on every side: above him, beside him, beneath him, a box of heat and fumes and engine vibration. Somewhere beyond it, Nairobi roared and blared and shrieked, matatus screaming at one another like beasts fighting over prey.
Boot.
The word arrived late.
When it came, it landed whole.
He was in a car boot.
His mouth tasted of iron. His tongue felt too large. He dragged in another breath and got dust, petrol, old heat. His pulse kicked harder. Not fear exactly. Fear was slower. This was older than fear. The ancient switch that flips inside the body before the mind has language for it.
Buried alive.
Move.
The lid sat close enough above his face that he could feel the sun stored in the metal. Close enough to become a coffin if he let the word finish forming.
Kamau breathed through the cloth in shallow pulls. In. Hold. Out. Count. In. Hold. Out. Count.
His wrists were bound behind his back.
Zip ties.
The plastic kind that cost two hundred shillings for a pack of fifty from the hardware stalls along Ngong Road. He knew the grade by feel. Cheap polymer. Light ribbing. Standard ratchet tooth. He had bought the same ones before, used them to hold cable runs along the wall of his shack, used them to discipline wires into order.
Now they were doing the same work on bone.
That was Nairobi. Everything had two uses. One for building. One for breaking.
His left foot was numb. Something hard pressed against it, shifting whenever the car changed speed. A jerry can. Twenty-litre. Plastic. Old petrol smell sweating out through the cap. His right foot was bare. He remembered losing the shoe. Asphalt against his cheek. A hand on the back of his neck. Someone saying, ndio huyu. This is him. Then the boot came down, and the dark folded around him, warm and final, like the inside of a python's body.
The car moved.
Nairobi leaked through the seams in jagged pieces.
Diesel first. Thick and warm. Bus exhaust. Not the clean petrol cough of private cars, but the heavy black breath of the vehicles that dragged the city to work and back. Then horns. Matatu horns. Not one sound, but several fighting inside the same blast: a high electronic scream, a deeper animal bark underneath, a little musical phrase someone had paid a mechanic in Gikomba to wire into the system because even impatience in Nairobi needed personality.
Then voices.
A hawker selling bottled water. Another selling roasted groundnuts. A conductor shouting a route through traffic with the command of a man who had never needed a microphone because his throat had become one. Somewhere close, a gospel song from a radio, a woman singing about mercy over a keyboard that had either lost tuning or faith.
Traffic.
Not movement. Compression.
Stop. Creep. Stop. Idle. Horn. Creep. Stop.
He counted the rhythm. Three short advances. One longer stop. Engine labouring in low gear. Main road. Not an estate lane. Not the bypass. A corridor road. Mombasa Road maybe. Or Ngong. The heat said afternoon. The diesel density said buses. The hawkers between lanes said gridlock.
The city was five feet away from him on every side.
Five feet from phones, radios, mothers, clerks, thieves, students, preachers, men carrying lunch in plastic bags, women carrying whole economies in handbags, children asleep against matatu windows.
Close enough to save him.
Too busy to notice him.
© Kage Sparks · Sunlight in the Asylum · Selected opening passage
A Nomadic Star original
An original novel, with character and visual development exploring how its world can move onto the screen.
For publishing, adaptation and creative partnerships, speak to Nomadic Star.
Studio note / Building two Nairobis
The measured corporate section and the hand-drawn workshop use different visual languages. One describes an ordered institution; the other reveals equipment and space adapted through necessity and ingenuity.
The design choice
Keep wires, power and equipment visible in the workshop. They show how the space functions and what it takes to keep an intelligence running.
The story consequence
Kamau works within one system while assembling another. The environments make that relationship concrete.
Visual development source: SITA System Architecture.
Studio note / Designing James Mwangi
James’s controlled posture gives his presence weight. The wardrobe changes with the situation, while his economy of movement remains recognisable.
The useful details are those that can affect a performance: where his hands rest, how he looks at someone, how clothing changes his silhouette. They give a visual interpretation something specific to carry from shot to shot.
Character development sheet. Selected here as a visual design study.
Studio note / A night in Westlands
Expression studies slow down a moment that may pass quickly on screen. Surprise, appraisal and interest can alter the balance of a conversation before the next line is spoken.
The rooftop setting gives the conversation a social context. The return to street level changes its rhythm. Together, setting and reaction help an adaptation preserve more than the literal words.
Selected development art: The Westlands Incident.
World bible / The machine and its memory
This development study connects the physical machine with the oral recordings that shape SITA’s interpretation. The workshop has material limits; the intelligence has a particular history.
Kamau’s invention grows out of available equipment and the knowledge he carries. Its design gives the story practical constraints, a voice and reasons for SITA to interpret the world differently from her creator.
Source: SITA System Architecture / original visual development.