Morning comes with static.
The broken window filter in Daren Vale's apartment hums faintly as the artificial sunrise flickers through the cheap panel glass. Red-white city light pulses across the cracked ceiling in waves. Not the warm glow of a rising sun, but a digitized simulation—a budget luminal loop, set to factory default.
Daren opens his eyes.
There's no alarm. He doesn't need one.
He's twenty-five. Fit. Pale. Average height. Plain. Brown hair cut short. No tattoos. No augmentation scars. Just a clean, charming face.
He lies in bed for exactly eight seconds, breathing steadily, calibrating himself. No thoughts. No plans. Just quiet math.
Then he rises.
---
His apartment is small. Too small.
A rust-colored box in the heart of Sector 43's Red Recess—one of the city's decaying vice districts. The building is old enough to have real metal pipes and thick concrete walls that sometimes scream from within. The air was thick with static from the neighboring sim pods — muffled gasps and echo loops bleeding through the thin ferrocrete walls like phantom sighs.
He sat up slowly.
Paused.
Listened.
A broken audio-sex ad murmured through the vent system: "You deserve better — real skin, real sin…" followed by a synthetic giggle that glitched halfway through.
Daren ignored it.
The unit has a kitchenette (nonfunctional stove, working sink), a cramped hygiene stall, a narrow sleeping cot bolted to the wall, and a single desk covered in puzzles.
A Tesseract lockbox solved open to display its core—a gyroscopic diamond that rotates infinitely, never touching the frame.
A Cubik lattice-puzzle reassembled into a Möbius strip.
A hologram cube mid-phase—constantly shuffling between solved and unsolved states unless observed from a very specific angle.
A glass serpent maze, twenty spirals deep, with a magnetic core moving through it in perfect rhythm, never touching the walls.
Daren took one look and began solving it—his fingers gliding across the surface, tracing invisible vectors as if interfacing with an unseen algorithm. His neural focus narrowed. Sequences unfolded in his mind like nested code.
On the holo-pad beside the maze, his scrawled diagnostic read:
"Cycle offset: 0.0037 sec. Magnetic field gradient stable. Optimize path for minimum entropy."
He was always ranked #01.
"No fun. Too easy," he murmured, discarding the puzzle with disinterest.
These were calibration protocols—morning focus loops he'd engineered himself. Mental subroutines to stabilize cognitive sharpness.
He turned away, not sparing them a second glance.
---
He dropped to the floor in silence.
No voice assistant counted reps. No ambient AI corrected form. The Red Recess didn't support those luxuries—and Daren didn't need them.
His body was already a discipline engine.
Push-ups.
Sets of 100, evenly spaced. No wasted motion.
Knuckles hovered a hair above the frost-chilled floor with each descent. He didn't grunt. He didn't sweat.
Pull-ups.
Thirty-two. Executed with mechanical grace on the exposed ceiling beam above the hygiene stall—silent lifts, each muscle fiber firing in sync.
Each movement aligned to breath.
Each breath aligned to internal rhythm: 0.8 Hz, precisely tuned for morning neuro-oxygenation.
His frame was lean, conditioned. Not bulky. Not soft.
It looked like maintenance, but it was command—measured, mapped, monitored.
He tracked his vitals without tech: breathing rate, heart rate, joint angle alignment.
No mirrors. Just internal diagnostics.
This was his other ritual: a body check.
A calibration of flesh to match the precision of mind. By the end, sweat traced twin lines down his spine—symmetrical, restrained, never dripping. He didn't towel off. He let the heat linger. Let the skin remember it was alive.
Then—a sound.
A woman moaning, soft but unmistakable, leaking through the ceiling from the apartment above.
Daren paused, stared blankly upward.
"Damn sim addict," he muttered. "It's not even 07:00."
He silenced the thought, blocking out the pleasure loops echoing from above.
Without a word, he brushed his teeth—quietly, methodically.
Then he stepped into the hygiene stall.
It hissed open with a mechanical sigh—barely wide enough to turn inside.
Sensors chirped to life as the protocol initiated:
> DETECTED: HUMAN BIOFORM [D.VALE]
> TEMP: 36.4°C
> TOXINS: MINIMAL
> HYGIENE PROTOCOL: URBAN-RATIONED (TIER 3)
> INITIATING DRY-STEAM + IONIC SHOWER...
A fine mist enveloped him—ion-charged vapor designed to bind with micro-residue.
The pressure was clinical. Scentless. Efficient.
A luxury designed for corporate towers, diluted a thousand times before reaching the underlayers.
When it ended, the floor flicked dry beneath his feet with a low-frequency pulse.
He stepped out clean. Reset.
He dressed fast—plain urbanwear, charcoal black.
No logos. No reactive mesh. Just worn synth-cotton sealed at the seams, stitched by hand.
He adjusted the collar once.
Then stood at the door.
Outside Red Recess: Sector 43's Dead Signal Zone. The city didn't talk here. No traffic drones. No skycast projections. No consumer-grade surveillance grids. Just analog shadows and the stink of feedback.
Red Recess was the place where old tech went to rot and lost people came to forget. The buildings leaned like addicts. Rust-bone scaffolds wrapped around concrete husks, stitched with power cables like veins over scar tissue. Walls were layered in peeling ad-skins from a hundred failed campaigns—glitched models frozen mid-smile, their faces stretched wide in pixel decay.
Every few meters, flicker-lights blinked in and out like neurons in a dying brain. Half the residents had cut themselves off the citynet to avoid constant cognitive pings.
The other half were sim-addicts, burned-out code junkies who couldn't tell real skin from rendered pleasure anymore.
Air here tasted of metal and burnt synth-rice. From the ramen stalls to the black-market pharma dens, everything in Red Recess was slightly toxic, slightly illegal, and running on firmware five years out of date. The sky was a dull smear above—a plasma bruise filtered through miles of neon smog.
No one looked up. Everyone looked down.
Children played with broken drones like toys. Vendors sold hacked neural patches from folding crates. Old war vets in feedback loops twitched on corner mats, muttering battlefield slang from a war no one remembered.
Even the trash bins had AI—but here, their logic cores were fried.
They stuttered endlessly: "DISPOSE / DISPOSE / ERROR / ERROR" in soft, pleading tones.
Police didn't patrol Red Recess. They just flew over it. This district had been flagged Containable decades ago.
The world had given up on Red Recess
The addicts were everywhere in Red Recess. Not like a plague. More like furniture the city stopped noticing. You could find them collapsed beside broken vent units, curled inside stolen recharge pods, or just staring at cracked plasglass walls—waiting for an interface that no longer came.
Most were wired-in—visors fused to their foreheads, neurogel masks clinging like second skin. Their pupils fluttered beneath eyelids, tracking worlds no one else could see. Mouths parted in soft moans or static-warped whispers.
"Cycle… feed… reset… give me the full loop..."
"I touched the stars, she kissed me there—reset…"
"More time. More time. Please—reset."
Their bodies thinned, Muscles atrophied. Skin paled under the dim glow of expired overlays still stuck on loop: neon oceans, synthetic lovers, endless meadows stitched from stolen memories. Most of them weren't poor. Not at first. Just tired. People who failed too long, dreamed too hard, and slipped into the safe coffin of simulation.
They didn't sleep. Not really. Not when you could load REM-loop fantasies directly into your cortex. Not when every second in the simscape felt better than a thousand heartbeats in the rust-real world.
---
Daren passed them quietly. He never kicked them, never judged.
He just noted details. The way one woman's fingers twitched in time with a failed feedback loop. The way a young man cradled an old VR drive like a childhood toy. The faint chemical burn around a sim-patch leaking through gauze.
> "He was someone once," Daren thought, glancing at a slumped figure half-covered in a dirty therapy blanket.
"He probably said 'just one try' too."
He'd grown up watching friends vanish into those machines—smiling one day, then gone the next.
No funerals. Just... disconnected.
Some people overdosed on drugs.
Red Recess overdosed on dreams.
______________________________________________
The stairwell stank of rust and burned gel patches.
Daren moved down three flights in silence. The walls were tagged with flickering ink—decay-code from old gang scripts and AI graffiti loops that never rendered right. He passed a collapsed addict still mid-twitch, whispering to a lover who wasn't there. No eye contact. No pause.
Outside, a silver pulse shivered through the smog—the mag-rail skimmer track humming faintly beneath the overpass.
He climbed the station stairs two at a time.
A skimmer hissed into view—its undercarriage rippling with blue magnetic plasma, graffiti-scored and bullet-dented, but fast enough to outrun the zone's dragnet signals. Daren boarded wordlessly and took a standing post near the rear hatch. The cabin lights flickered between working and not.
As the skimmer accelerated, Red Recess fell behind in a blur of shattered neon and analog screams. Tower scaffolds whipped past like the ribs of a broken machine.
The further out they went, the more the buildings stood upright. The more ads started making sense.
The rail cut across a faded checkpoint—Gate 12, where Red Recess bled into the outer city.
A retinal scan flickered against the cabin glass. Daren's eyes met it with casual stillness.
> "IDENTIFIED: VALE, DAREN. PASS: LOW-TIER CIVILIAN. SCAN CLEAN."
A soft tone confirmed entry. The gate allowed the skimmer to pass.
Moments later, the overhead info cast kicked in—cheap but functional:
> "BREAKING NEWS: RENOWNED NEURAL BIOLOGIST DR. ELLION MERIS, AGE 364, FOUND DEAD IN UPPER HAVEN COMPLEX. AUTHORITIES CONFIRM 'NON-NATURAL TERMINATION.' DETAILS CLASSIFIED."
A 3D bust of Meris flickered in the cabin air—half-smile frozen in memory glass, now riddled with static.
Passengers barely looked. One woman scrolled a dream-feed through her wrist implant. A man whispered to his earpiece in a language no longer spoken aloud.
Across the cabin, a teenager with modded eyes whispered to his friend:
> "Bro. You know what that means? No way that's natural. Brains don't just fold like that."
Another voice added, "He pissed someone off. Or... maybe it's a breeder hit. One of those 'life freaks.'"
Daren stared at the image. The face meant something—but he didn't reach for it.
He simply watched the display fade.
Eight seconds later, he blinked once.
Then the skimmer dove downward into the working zones, toward Tower Sector B4—where function lived and dreams were scheduled.
The skimmer hissed to a halt in the B4 Dockwell Transfer Terminal, its plasma rails sighing under decompression. The platform lights here were colder—white-blue, corporate sterile. Every panel was regulation-clean, lined with interactive glass veins and brushed steel. Surveillance orbs floated silently overhead, blinking once every seven seconds like mechanical eyelids.
Daren stepped out into the queue of commuters—gray clothes, blank faces, small neural twitches betraying looped morning affirmations running silently in their heads.
A signage drone skimmed overhead:
> "WELCOME TO SECTOR B4: FUNCTION, EFFICIENCY, STABILITY."
He walked.
______________________________________________
🛠️ Facility: Dataloss Division 3, Civic Archives Sub-Level
Daren's assigned job was simple: Dataloss Mitigation. It sounded technical. It wasn't.
He worked in a forgotten sub-level office tucked beneath Tower 9B—a corridor of dead servers and carbon-dust terminals. His station was a vintage neural relay console where corrupted civic data logs were restructured, cleaned, or deleted entirely. Bureaucracy disguised as preservation.
He liked it.
It was quiet. Predictable. Pattern-based.
As he entered, the flickering retinal sensor beeped:
> "AUTHORIZED: VALE, D. – STATION 9L – CYCLE 41/180."
Inside, half-lit cubicles formed a maze of fogged glass and thin poly-walls. Only a few other workers occupied the row—low-tier citizens like him, mostly quiet, lost in headspace.
But not today.
Voices carried over the hum of the core processor arrays. At Station 9H, two techs were talking, too loudly.
> "...Nah, I'm serious. A Class-C unit raided an off-grid sector up in 18-K. Said they found a family. Actual breeding pair. Kid was six."
> "Bullshit. You don't get six years past the census."
> "That's the point. They were hiding in a shielded bio-cell—some pre-Loop design, probably military scrap. System didn't ping 'em until the kid accessed a public stim-grid for educational vids. Triggered the net."
> "Damn. What happened?"
> "What do you think? Clean team. Sterilizer drones. Nothing left but heat trails. Whole complex marked for re-scan and ash quarantine."
One of them chuckled under his breath.
> "Idiots. What were they even hoping for? Real childhood? That's like teaching a fish to breathe vacuum."
Daren sat at his terminal. Logged in. Said nothing.
He watched the screen light up. Rows of corrupted civic logs flickered into view:
> JUDGEMENT RECORD: CITIZEN 4773-A – DATA CORRUPTED
INFRACTION: UNLICENSED SIM DISTRIBUTION – STRIKE 2
REDACTED – REDACTED – REDACTED
He processed twenty-three entries in six minutes.
But in his mind, something looped.
The image of the newscast: Dr. Ellion Meris. Brain distorted. Unnatural.
The whisper on the mag-rail: "...maybe it's a breeder hit."
The tone in those workers' voices. Laughing about sterilizers like it was cleaning up trash.
---
The city dimmed.
By the time Daren stepped back onto the evening skimmer, the plasma hum was running uneven—interference from the lower power grid bleeding into the rails. The ride back was slower. The cabin more crowded. A dozen bodies stood around him, all projecting false stillness.
No one talked. Everyone twitched in micro-patterns—silent reflexes to stimulation loops still running behind their eyes.
Across from him, a man in his forties leaned against the wall, visor down, smile curled in permanent pleasure. A single tear ran from beneath the mask, perfectly symmetrical.
Daren looked away.
The ride through Gate 12 took longer this time.
Scanner delay. Static across the biometric line.
> "IDENTIFIED: VALE, DAREN. PASS: VALID."
"WARNING: ZONE 43 UNDER SOFT SURGE. MOVEMENT LIMITED TO RESIDENTS."
He felt the thrum in his spine as the skimmer crossed the invisible threshold back into Red Recess. The outer world disappeared like a mask being peeled away. Clean towers replaced by wounded husks. Lights dimmed to wounded embers. Ads blinked into glitch-static.
The familiar stink of static mold and burned gel thickened the air. Somewhere distant, a scream—possibly real, possibly looped—echoed down a stairwell and vanished.
Daren stepped off the skimmer.
______________________________________________
His boots clicked softly on cracked ferroglass as he walked the two blocks back to his building. Vendors were shutting down. Holographic price tags flickered in and out. A nearby addict crouched in an alley, fingers trembling as he tried to calibrate a feedback patch with a shaking hand.
Daren passed them all, expression unchanging.
He entered the building.
The stairwell light was dead again.
He climbed the first flight in shadow.
Then—he stopped.
Somewhere above him, a sound.
It wasn't static. Wasn't a glitch. Wasn't the endless recycled sex-loops bleeding through the walls.
It was laughter.
"A child's" he thought with a shocked look on his face.
Short. Sharp. Bright. Like glass chiming in sunlight. Unrehearsed. Chaotic.
He froze, listening.
It came from the second floor, maybe unit 6B—the one with the sealed lock and scorched wall panel. Condemned since last year's fire. No one was supposed to be living there.
Another giggle.
Then a shushing voice. Female. Gentle. Urgent.
"Shhh, sweetling. Not so loud. Not here."
Daren said nothing.
He waited. Counted five breaths. Then moved up the stairs—silently, precisely, making no noise on the metal grate.
He passed unit 6A. Faint moaning from within, nothing unusual.
Then he reached 6B.
Door sealed. But something had been wedged into the panel.
Not code. Not a bypass tool.
Just… a sheet of metal, pried loose and gently welded back into place with what looked like a handheld burner.
Low-tech.
Manual.
Human.
He stared at it.
Inside, he heard nothing more.
He stood there for nearly a full minute. Listening. Watching.
Then he turned—walked to his own unit without a word.
______________________________________________
Inside, he didn't undress. Didn't shower.
He sat at his desk and stared at the serpent maze puzzle.
But his fingers didn't move.
His gaze flicked to the corner of the desk—where the diagnostic slate still blinked:
> "OPTIMIZE PATH FOR MINIMUM ENTROPY."
He turned it over.
The message disappeared.
______________________________________________
The next day, Daren returned from work earlier than usual. The skimmer had skipped three checkpoints due to a system-wide lag. Sector 43 was unusually quiet—less static in the air, less screaming from broken interfaces. Even the addicts in the stairwell of his building were absent, as if the city had momentarily exhaled.
He climbed the stairs with mechanical rhythm.
First floor. Second floor.
As he passed Apartment 6B, something changed.
A sound.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
He paused.
It wasn't from within the apartment. It was behind him.
Slowly, he turned his head.
A pair of small eyes peered up at him from the shadows beside the stairwell utility box. A child—no more than four or five. Pale skin. Matted hair. A gray patch-shirt too large for her frame. She clutched a tiny toy in her hand—a plastic AI-drone model with one wing snapped off.
Her expression wasn't afraid.
It was curious.
She stepped forward and held the toy up toward him like an offering.
"He's broken," she said. Her voice was soft, like static wrapped in silk. "You fix things, right? Mom says you're smart."
Daren didn't move.
His breath caught. Muscles locked.
The shock didn't come like a jolt—it came like ice cracking beneath him. A child. A real one. Not a sim loop. Not a whisper in the wall. Alive. Breathing. Illegally born.
He took a step back.
His hand grazed the stair railing. He hadn't realized he was trembling until he heard the soft metal creak beneath his fingers.
"Go back inside," he whispered. It wasn't a command. It was barely a sound. "You're not supposed to be here."
The girl tilted her head.
"You're shaking," she said, simply. "Why?"
Before Daren could respond, there was a sudden rush of movement.
A woman appeared in the stairwell—mid-thirties, sharp eyes, sunken cheeks, wrapped in a layered cloak patched together from old thermal fiber. Her face shifted instantly from caution to panic.
She saw Daren. Her eyes widened.
"No—"
She sprinted forward.
In one motion, she scooped the child into her arms and pulled her close, wrapping her in a protective embrace. Her hands trembled as she shielded the girl's face, backing toward the door of 6B.
Daren stood frozen.
"I'm sorry," she said, not to him, but to the child. Then, more sharply, to Daren: "Don't follow. Don't talk. Don't even think about this."
She slipped through the doorway and shut it behind her. A quick seal. No lock clicks—just the quiet sound of cloth shifting against metal as she braced herself against the other side.
Inside, Daren heard nothing. Just silence. Breathing. The rustle of fear.
He stared at the sealed door.
And somewhere inside his chest, where there was supposed to be stillness, something trembled.