The message stayed on her screen long after she had finished her nightly routine. The words—Do you remember?—burned brighter in her mind than the sterile lights of the apartment. She left it untouched, like a sacred object one didn't dare move.
Lyra lay in bed with her eyes open. Sleep, already a mechanical act, refused to come. Her thoughts wandered—reckless, spiraling. Remember what? A person? A place? Herself? The system said there was nothing to remember. That memory was a construct shaped by trauma and irrational sentiment. That stability required forgetting.
But the system never accounted for how silence could ache.
She awoke at 06:00 to the chime of the circadian alarm. She hadn't slept. The dreamless state her implant induced had failed for the first time in over a decade. A silent flag, somewhere in her neural report, would note it.
Her routine continued unchanged—because it had to. The nutripaste still tasted like nothing. The headlines were the same: statistics, efficiency, control. But she couldn't stop glancing back at the console. The message was gone.
Deleted.
By who? Or what?
She didn't touch the system logs. Curiosity was dangerous. Surveillance had no eyes, only data—and data never missed a beat.
The ride to the Neural Systems Center was uneventful, but her awareness had sharpened. She noticed details now. The way the worker beside her clenched their jaw too tightly. The faint tremble in the fingers of a supervisor. The way the affirmation screens stuttered before they corrected:
"Emotion is the source of all—"
The glitch lasted a single second, but she saw it. She felt it. Something frayed at the edges of the system. And it wasn't just her.
Her shift began in 4-C, same as always. The same chair, the same cold interface. The same endless neural stream. But as she linked her mind again, she felt a phantom resistance.
The system hesitated.
Just for a breath.
She began her scans, but her focus drifted. She checked background packets—data chatter normally filtered out. There, buried under diagnostics and routine transmissions, were fragments that didn't belong. Not errors. Not corruption. Something crafted. Language shaped like thought.
Not code.
Communication.
She saved a fragment silently, embedding it inside a dummy log meant for visual monitoring calibration. It was a small act of disobedience. The smallest. But her heart pounded with guilt.
That night, she decrypted the data by hand.
The message was brief:
"You are not alone."
Her hands shook.
The following days blurred into each other, but she began to build a new rhythm inside the old one. She worked. She ate. She obeyed. But beneath that, she searched. Subtle deviations in signals. Seams in the system's perfection. And with every tiny anomaly she found, she felt more.
She also began to remember.
Not whole memories—nothing clear. But flashes.
A woman's laughter, free and unregulated.A smell of citrus and rain.A hand brushing hers under a wooden table.
These were not memories permitted by The Oracle. These were pieces of another life, one buried beneath decades of compliance.
She wasn't the only one.
In the common corridors, she passed a man who looked her in the eyes longer than he should have. A woman whose steps didn't match the regulated rhythm. People whose silence had weight, not emptiness.
They were waking up.
And someone—something—was helping them.
Each message she uncovered was signed the same way:
- C
Cael.
On the seventh day, she received a new kind of message. It arrived through the environmental control system, woven into the airflow report. Hidden like breath itself.
"They will notice soon. Be ready."
That night, she didn't sleep again. Instead, she stared out her window, watching the drones trace invisible lines in the sky.
She still didn't know who Cael was, or why he had chosen her.
But something inside her had changed.
She was no longer waiting.
She was listening.