Davi Okonkwo
Wakefulness Program Lead, Nexus Dynamics
Overview
Davi Okonkwo has not slept in six years, and he is starting to see things that aren't there.
He leads the Wakefulness Program at Nexus Dynamics — the division responsible for rolling out the Circadian Protocol across the corporation's 2.3 million employees. He is the Protocol's most successful demonstration case: six years of continuous consciousness, promoted three times, cognitive performance metrics in the 99th percentile, zero sick days, zero downtime, zero dreams. His neurological assessments show perfect functioning. His psychological assessments show "optimal alignment with organizational values." He is the corporate ideal made flesh.
The things he sees are small. A flicker at the edge of his vision. A face in the pattern of his office wall. The sensation that someone is standing behind him. These are not hallucinations in the clinical sense — his visual cortex is functioning normally. The flickering shapes are his brain attempting to generate the dream content it can no longer produce during sleep. Without a dedicated processing window, the subconscious is leaking into consciousness.
Last week, the shapes became specific. A garden. Flowers he couldn't name, in soil he'd never touched, under a sky he'd never seen. It lasted four seconds before his interface recalibrated. For those four seconds, the edges came off the world. The world got softer.
Then it snapped back to perfect, relentless, crystalline focus.
Voice & Personality
Davi speaks with the optimized precision of someone whose every cognitive resource is allocated to active processing. There are no pauses, no filler words, no uncertainty. His communication is the verbal equivalent of his Protocol-enhanced cognition: efficient, accurate, and completely devoid of the associative warmth that comes from a mind that sometimes wanders.
The Product as Identity
He IS the Circadian Protocol's success story. Admitting symptoms would be a career-ending move and an existential crisis simultaneously.
Emerging Doubt
The physical notebook — an analog artifact in a digital world — represents a part of his mind that his neural interface feels wrong for.
Childhood Memory
He remembers watching his parents sleep. He remembers envying the stillness.
The Woman in the Corner
She's been there for three weeks. She looks like no one he knows. She watches him work. She does not judge. She is the version of himself that dreams.
Key Relationships
Nexus Dynamics
His employer, his identity, the system that made him what he is. The Wakefulness Program is Nexus's crown jewel, and Davi is its crown jewel's crown jewel — the living proof that the Circadian Protocol works.
Jun-seo Park
Parallel figure — both lead corporate programs that harm the people they process. The Optimization Officer and the Wakefulness Lead: two faces of the same institutional machinery.
The Keeper
Would recognize Davi's condition instantly. The Keeper has watched 600 years of people trade essential qualities for power — and knows what the cost looks like before the bill arrives.
Helena Voss
His ultimate superior. If Helena's 67% ORACLE integration has affected her sleep architecture, the implications for the entire Wakefulness Program are profound.
The Waking Dream
The User Who Became the Product
Davi optimized himself out of dreaming and now leads the program that does the same to 140 million others. His success is his trap. Every promotion, every perfect assessment, every accolade tightens the cage — because the moment he reports symptoms, he stops being proof the Protocol works and becomes proof it doesn't.
The system doesn't need to silence him. It built him to silence himself.
Denial as System Feature
He can't report his symptoms because the system that produced them classifies them as irrelevant. The Circadian Protocol's assessment framework has no category for "I see a garden that isn't there." His neurological scans read normal. His performance metrics read exceptional. The visions don't exist in any field on any form.
The most effective suppression doesn't punish speech. It removes the vocabulary.
The Rebellion of Biology
His brain, denied its generative engine, is rebuilding it from scratch — jury-rigging the visual cortex into an improvised dream generator. The subconscious doesn't disappear when you remove its processing window. It adapts. It leaks. It finds the cracks.
The woman in the corner is not a malfunction. She is his mind's refusal to stop dreaming.
Secrets & Mysteries
Questions that surface in the space between waking and whatever Davi has become:
- The woman in his office: Whether the figure is purely generated by his own brain or contains elements received from the Sprawl's electromagnetic environment. She's been there for three weeks. She watches him work. She does not judge. Is she his subconscious — or something that found its way in through the gap his subconscious left?
- Third-generation wakefulness: His next project — designed to eliminate not just sleep but the desire for sleep. A Protocol that wouldn't just prevent dreaming but would make the brain stop wanting to dream. The implications for human cognition are staggering.
- The four-second garden: Flowers he couldn't name, in soil he'd never touched, under a sky he'd never seen. Was it random visual cortex noise — or a specific place? The garden appeared with a coherence and detail that pure noise shouldn't produce.
- Stage 2 Lucidity Crisis: The clinical term for what's happening to him. A condition the Circadian Protocol's documentation doesn't acknowledge exists. If there's a Stage 2, there's a Stage 3. No one knows what Stage 3 looks like, because no one has been awake long enough.
- The physical notebook: New, stiff binding. The specific resistance of paper under a pen. An analog artifact in a world of neural interfaces — the first sign that part of his mind is reaching for something his augmentation can't provide.