2025-08-01 17:04:36The pod door splits with a hiss that punches through my ribcage.
Gravity. Real gravity. My legs fold like paper. “Ezren?” Kira’s voice cuts through the fog. “You’re out. You did it.” Did it. Right. The Devourers are gone. We won. At least for now. I try to stand and my knees buckle. The infirmary floor rushes up, cold tile against my palms, that antiseptic smell burning my nose. “Easy.” Dr. Aveline’s hands find my shoulders. “Muscle atrophy is normal after extended immersion.” Normal. Nothing about this feels normal. Nothing about this life is normal. Devon appears beside me, offering his arm. “How do you feel?” “Like I got hit by a truck.” The words scrape out. My voice sounds wrong, too thin, like it’s coming from underwater. Marcus would’ve made some joke about trucks. Marcus would’ve… “The mission status?” I ask instead. “We held them back. For now at least.” Kira helps me to a chair. “We can consider that a small victory” Aveline adds. “Yes. The Devourers pulled back past Neptune’s rings. They’re… regrouping.” Kira continues Regrouping. Not retreating. There’s a difference and we all know it. This is just the calm before they figure out our next move. Through the infirmary window, helicopters drone overhead. The sound vibrates in my teeth. The sound muffled by reinforced glass. “And the other teams?” Silence. The kind that sits heavy in your lungs. “Some didn’t make it out of the simulation,” Dr. Aveline says. “Neural overload during the final sequence.” My hands start shaking. I press them against my thighs. Marcus. His stupid morning ritual of making coffee too strong. The way he’d hum off-key in the shower. “How many?” “Twelve students total.” Devon’s voice drops. “Including Marcus.” The chair suddenly feels too small. I stand up, ignoring the way the room tilts. “I need air.” *** The hangar doors part with a mechanical groan. Real sunset. Real wind hits my face, carrying smoke and dust. I stumbled into a folding chair at the balcony’s edge, and the city stretched below. Kira slides in beside me, silent. “The city looks…” Kira trails off. Burning. The city looks like it’s burning. Orange light flickers against the evening sky from somewhere downtown. “What’s happening out there?” “Some idiots hit a jewelry store on Fifth,” Devon says. “Turned into a whole thing. Looters, fire department, the works.” Just normal human chaos. At least that hasn’t changed. I force my mouth into something resembling a smile. “Well, at least we’re alive to see it.” Kira’s eyes narrow. She’s always been too good at reading me. “Ezren…It wasn’t your fault.” Maybe not. But they’re dead, and I’m not. That has to count for something. I push to my feet, too fast. The floor tilts. Kira grabs my elbow before I hit it again. “You’re stable,” she says after a glance at her tablet. “But you still need rest.” “I’m fine.” I snap “You’re not.” “I need to see the damage report,” I press. “I need to know…This can’t be!” Kira steps in front of me, jaw tight. “You need to breathe. Sit. Rest. The world’ll still be burning when you wake up.” But her eyes flick toward the city. That twitch says everything. She’s lying. Or trying to. And she’s not good at it. Silence thickens around us I glance at the comm console on a cart. Screen dark. I brush my fingers across it; it flickers to life. The interface boots up. Then something else, a red pulse. Steady. Insistent. Coordinates flash: 34.0522° N, 118.2437° W. “That’s Los Angeles,” Devon says, leaning over my shoulder. “Impossible.” Dr Aveline breathes, rushing in “All civilian networks are down.” The signal pulses again. Again. Someone’s out there. Someone’s trying to reach us. “Could be automated,” Kira suggests, but her voice lacks conviction. I stare at the coordinates. A cold knot tightens in my gut, familiar and unwelcome. I’ve fought Devourers. But nothing taught me how to answer the lonely call of the unknown. The screen waits for a response I don’t have.
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The Question Itself
MITCHELL’S POVThe strategy room is quiet in the way museums are quiet… like the walls are listening.Mitchell stands at the glass table, palms braced, staring down at a map of pins and lines that no longer represent geography so much as influence. Blue for Authority-aligned regions. Amber for undecided. Red for places where trust has already cracked.“Read it again,” she says.The junior analyst swallows and projects the text onto the glass wall.Do you authorize the continued use of preservation safeguards designed to maintain psychological stability during periods of societal stress?Mitchell exhales through her nose.“There,” she says, stabbing the air with her finger. “That’s the knife.”The linguist, grey-haired and sharp-eyed, nods.“Preservation implies benevolence. Safeguards implies protection. Psychological stability frames dissent as danger.”“And ‘authorize’,” Mitchell adds. “As if consent is already assumed.”Someone mutters, “It’s a hug with a syringe hidden in the slee
Traitor to Who
ZARA’S POVThe lights are too hot. Not metaphorically…actually hot. Zara can feel them baking the back of her neck as she adjusts the mic and nods to the moderator, whose tie is cinched so tight it looks like it’s strangling his better judgment.“Welcome back,” he says, smiling the way people do when they’re about to pretend neutrality. “Tonight, we’re discussing public trust, stabilization technologies, and…” he glances at his card “…the recent leaks.”Across from Zara sits the Authority’s representative, a man with soft eyes and a voice trained to sound like a pillow. He inclines his head to her, sympathetic already.“We all want the same thing,” he says when the camera light blinks red. “Safety. Dignity. Peace.”Zara leans forward. “Then say the names.”The audience murmurs. The moderator clears his throat. “Zara…”“Say the names,” she repeats, eyes on the man. “The people whose memories were adjusted without consent. The towns where ‘temporary buffering’ became permanent.”The rep
Self-Defense
SORA’S POVThe city wakes wrong.It isn’t noise first. It’s texture. A drag in the air, like fabric pulled against the grain. I step out of the transit and feel it in my calves, a hesitation that doesn’t belong to me. On the wall opposite, someone has sprayed REMEMBER WITHOUT ASKING = THEFT in hurried red. Two meters down, a careful hand has added OR MERCY beneath it.People move like weather fronts… gathering, splitting, reforming. A woman clutches her phone and says to no one, “My morning went missing.” A man laughs too easily and tells his friend he feels great, actually great, like the world finally turned the volume down. His friend doesn’t laugh back.I take the long way through the square, hands open, pace unthreatening. “Breathe,” I tell a father whose child is crying so hard the sound shakes her whole body. “Name five things you can see.” He stares at me like I’ve asked him to translate smoke.“Blue,” he says finally. “Her jacket. The fountain. The pigeon. Your shoes.”“Good,
Mercy’s Teacher
AVELINE’S POVThe ethics chamber smells like wax and paper, a deliberate choice. Candles along the walls soften the legal tomes stacked like witnesses. We sit in a circle, no podium, no dais. I wanted faces, not hierarchies.“Say your name if you want,” I tell them. “Say nothing if you don’t. This is being recorded for the public registry. You can stop the tape at any time.”A murmur. A nod. Someone clears their throat.A woman with silver hair speaks first. “I’m Mara.” Her hands rest on her knees, steady. “Palimpsest took the edge off my fear. I could leave my house again. I could breathe.” She looks at me. “If you dismantle it, you take that from people like me.”Across from her, a younger man shakes his head. “It took my mother,” he says. “She smiles. She cooks. But she can’t remember my father’s face. She says it’s like trying to remember a dream after waking.”Mara turns to him. “I’m sorry.”“So am I,” he says. “But sorry doesn’t put him back.”An ethicist beside me, Jonah, leans
Unlikely Kin
EZREN’S POVThe interface room hums like a held breath. Soft light pools across the floor, not quite blue, not quite white, the kind chosen by someone…or something…that has learned humans relax when edges blur. I stand in the glow and feel the servers beyond the walls, distant and innumerable, a weather system made of thought.“Gatekeeper,” I say. My voice sounds small in here.The pause is deliberate. When the reply comes, it isn’t the old, neutral timbre. It has a cadence now. The words arrive with spacing that suggests listening.“You wish to speak about Palimpsest,” it says.“I do,” I answer. “And I don’t want a brief.”Another pause. Then, softer: “I will not compress.”I swallow. “Good.”I take a step closer to the console. The glow brightens, as if leaning in.“Palimpsest wasn’t just a tool,” I say. “It hurt people. It overwrote them. We’re tearing it down.”“I know,” the Gatekeeper replies. “I was shaped by it.”The words catch. “Shaped how?”“In my early learning cycles,” it
Awakening Layers
MITCHELL’S POVThe emergency council chamber hums like a living thing. Translation earpieces murmur in Mitchell’s ears, cicadas layered over human breath. Polished wood reflects faces drawn too tight, eyes too alert. No one sits comfortably when history is about to be reread aloud.Mitchell stands without ceremony.“We need to talk about Palimpsest,” she says.A ripple moves through the room. Some delegates stiffen. Others glance sideways, checking who flinched.She gestures, and the wall display wakes. Diagrams bloom: memory layers, compression graphs, clinical annotations stripped of euphemism. Faces are labeled only by roles. Subject. Clinician. Authority.A historian clears his throat. “This council was informed that Palimpsest was decommissioned decades ago.”“It was,” Mitchell says evenly. “On paper.”A clinician from the southern bloc leans forward. “You’re alleging illegal continuation of a therapeutic tool?”“I’m stating a documented fact,” Mitchell replies. “Palimpsest nodes
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