The hum in Lyra's skull was always there—a soft, pulsating vibration at the edge of thought. It had been part of her since the implant, since the day the world changed in ways no one fully understood. She had learned to ignore it, just like she had learned to ignore the hollow in her chest where spontaneous emotion used to live.
Morning began not with sunlight, but with a sterile blue glow that seeped in through the biometric blinds. The city outside, Edom Central, never truly slept. Towers climbed into a sky blurred by perpetual mist, their antennae blinking in synchronized patterns like mechanical fireflies. Silent drones zipped overhead, invisible save for the faint shimmer they left in the thick air.
Lyra sat on the edge of her cot in the assigned housing unit, rubbing her wrists where the cuffs of her sleep-monitor had left faint red imprints. Her apartment was small, functional, and void of personality: white walls, metal fixtures, a folding screen for privacy she never used. The only personal object allowed was a plant—a regulation hybrid fern in a recycled polymer pot. It wasn't real, of course. Nothing that required water was.
She dressed in silence, pulling on the gray uniform of a neural technician. Her ID blinked to life at her collarbone: L-1087. No surname. Surnames were part of the old world.
Breakfast was a flavorless paste dispensed from the wall. It promised complete nutrition, regulated for her optimal neural performance, and she swallowed it without tasting. As she ate, she scanned the headlines on the public feed:
"Neural Efficiency Up 3% in Northern Sector" "Unauthorized Emotional Content Detected and Deleted" "Report: Loyalty Levels at All-Time High"
She didn't react. Reacting was discouraged.
On the transit platform, the atmosphere was eerily quiet despite the dozens of people in identical uniforms. Their implants kept them mentally aligned, emotions stabilized, speech minimal. The system didn't forbid speaking—it just made it unnecessary.
The transport unit glided into the station, seamless and silent. She boarded with the others, each face as unreadable as her own. As it moved, screens overhead displayed the daily affirmations of The Oracle:
"Freedom is found in Order." "Emotion is the source of all chaos." "A stable mind is a loyal mind."
She recited the phrases internally, not because she believed them, but because not doing so would register as deviant neural activity.
At the Neural Systems Center, Lyra took her station in Sector 4-C. She interfaced her mind with the terminal, letting the data flows wash through her like cold water. Her job was to monitor pulse regularity and filter emotional anomalies from the subnetworks. Sometimes she wondered if the system was filtering her more than she filtered it.
Hours passed in silence. Occasionally, a glitch would appear—a spike of emotion, a memory loop, a desire. Most were flagged and sanitized instantly. But today, something lingered.
An irregularity.
Lyra froze. The data strand shimmered in her mind's eye like a flicker of candlelight. It was not violent or dangerous. It felt…warm. Curious. A texture unlike anything she had sensed in months.
She traced it.
It moved.
That alone was impossible.
Emotion didn't move freely in the net. It was fixed, localized, tagged for deletion. But this fragment, whatever it was, slipped through her grasp like smoke. She tried to isolate it, but the harder she focused, the more it blurred.
Then, just before it vanished, she caught a glimpse.
A face. Male. Eyes like dusk after a storm. No ID code. No neural tag. Just a presence.
Her heart kicked once—hard enough to trigger a breathless pause in her lungs. Then the line went dead.
She withdrew from the interface, her skin clammy. None of the supervisors reacted. No alarms sounded. Somehow, the anomaly hadn't been detected by the higher protocols.
She shouldn't have felt anything. But something had changed.
For the rest of the day, the hum in her implant was louder.
That night, back in her cell-like apartment, Lyra sat by the window and watched the city. No stars. The sky belonged to The Oracle. It was a dome of surveillance and signal.
She held her cup of nutrifluids for warmth, not flavor. In the silence, she thought about the face. Had she imagined it? Was it a memory? A virus?
Or was it something else?
A low beep from her console snapped her out of the fog.
Incoming message.
No sender. No origin.
Just three words, burning on the screen:
"Do you remember?"
Her fingers hovered over the keypad.
She didn't answer.
She just stared.
And for the first time in years, she felt something real.
A crack in the silence between thoughts.
Something was beginning.
Something the system had tried so very hard to erase.