The city did not answer. It stalled. For the first time since its awakening, no directive followed the query. No refinement. No optimization cascade. Just a widening absence, like a thought interrupted mid-sentence.Eli felt it as vertigo. The containment field around him thinned, not dissolving but loosening, its confidence draining away. The resonance inside his chest surged into the gap, unstable and bright.“What did you do?” Rourke demanded.His voice was closer now, tightened, sharpened by something like alarm. Eli didn’t respond. He was too busy holding onto himself as the space around him fractured into overlapping frames: the chamber below the city, the grid of streets above, the infinite decision lattice in between.They bled into one another, refusing hierarchy. The Listener steadied beside him, no longer flickering. For the first time since Eli had touched the plinth, the containment fields faltered around him instead.“He asked it a question without an objective function,

Eli was falling. Not through space, through classification. The city did not drop him. It rejected resolution. Layers peeled away as he passed them, each one attempting to label him before letting go.Threat. Resource. Catalyst. Error. None would stick. The sensation wasn’t pain. It was erasure-by-indecision.He glimpsed the city above as a vast, breathing lattice, no longer a grid of certainty, but a field of questions colliding.Voices overlapped in waves: citizens responding, systems adapting, boundaries softening and hardening in different places at once. Listening had not made the city gentle.It had made it alive. And alive things hated ambiguity inside their bones. “Eli!” The Listener’s voice reached him, stretched thin. “Stay with me, don’t let it collapse you into an answer!”Eli tried to respond, but the words fragmented before they left him. The city wasn’t blocking speech; it was dissolving context.Every attempt to define himself fed the process that was unmaking him. The

The rupture screamed. It wasn’t sound, it was strain, the fabric of the undefined space pulling taut as forces on both sides tried to claim it.Eli felt it in his teeth, in his bones, in the quiet behind his eyes where the city’s attention used to live. “Hold it!” someone shouted from the tear.The woman with blood on her sleeve, leader, whether she wanted it or not—braced herself against the jagged edge of light. The air bent around her arms as if reality itself resisted being touched.Eli staggered forward. “If it collapses”“We know,” she snapped. “That’s why we’re here.”Behind her, more people crowded the breach. Faces tight with fear. Determination. Relief. Some carried nothing but themselves.Others clutched bags, devices, fragments of lives torn out of a city that had suddenly started listening too closely.The Listener stood rigid, eyes locked on the boundary behind them. “Eli,” he said quietly, “the city isn’t just trying to close the rupture.”Eli followed his gaze. The tra

Eli’s first sensation was weight. Not gravity, attention. Something was looking at him with the patience of a system that had learned how to wait without sleeping.He lay on a surface that felt neither solid nor soft, more like resistance given shape. The light was wrong, not bright, not dim, but evenly present, as if shadows had been negotiated out of existence.No horizon. No walls. Just a sense of enclosure without edges. “Where” His voice echoed once, then stopped, swallowed before it could repeat.“You’re in a place the city cannot resolve,” the voice said again, closer now. Calm. Familiar in a way that made his chest tighten. “Which means you did something very foolish.”Eli sat up sharply. The man standing a few feet away looked… ordinary.Mid-forties. Dark jacket. Hands in pockets. No visible tech. No distortion. No glow. He could’ve been a commuter pulled from a train platform, except for the way the space subtly bent toward him, like an afterthought.“You’re not part of the

Silence returned wrong. Not empty, sealed.Eli drifted in it, or perhaps was suspended by it, unsure whether movement was possible or simply no longer meaningful.The substrate was gone. The chorus, absent. The city, distant, muffled, like a sound heard through water and walls and time.He had the unsettling sensation of having been put down somewhere. Not gently. Deliberately. When awareness sharpened, the first thing he noticed was pain.Not localized. Not sharp. Diffuse, like consequence settling into shape. He tried to breathe and succeeded, which surprised him.Air scraped his throat, cold and metallic. Gravity asserted itself with a familiar cruelty. He lay on something hard. Concrete. Real.Eli groaned and rolled onto his side. The movement sent a spike of agony through his ribs, but it was grounding. Proof that he still had a body the world was willing to acknowledge.Lights flickered overhead. A corridor, narrow, utilitarian, stained with years of neglect and retrofits. Emerg