The sound that woke him wasn't a sound at all.
It was the absence of it like something essential had been removed from the world while he slept.
Naël opened his eyes to the dull white glow that spread across the ceiling. Dawn Simulation: calibrated to Sector A9's circadian schedule. His breathing, his heart rate, his neural wave pattern , all synced, all optimal. All normal.
''Good morning, Citizen Naël '' the voice said softly, directly into his mind.
He sat up slowly. The bed adjusted its angle. The walls pulsed gently with tranquil blue hues, adapting to his biometrics. Everything about his world was designed to be smooth, consistent, perfect.
He did not speak. No one did, unless necessary. Language had become mostly redundant obsolete in a world where intention and approval were transmitted mentally, with more precision than any spoken tongue could allow.
''Rest cycle complete. Cognitive readiness: stable. Today's designation: Maintenance Level 2 – Subgrid Core. Forecast: efficiency.''
Naël blinked once. Acknowledgement. The AI registered his response and moved on.
He swung his legs off the bed. The temperature adjusted to match his skin's preferences before he'd even touched the floor. He walked to the hygiene station , not a bathroom, not really. No mirrors. No personal items. Just a vertical chamber of polished metal.
The cleansing process was silent and invisible: a combination of sonic decontamination, nano-surface scrubbing, and neural priming. It left no trace. No scent. No water. No memory.
He emerged dressed. His uniform was already on him ,grey, seamless, unwrinkled. Everyone wore the same.
He stepped toward the nutrition wall. A panel slid open to reveal a single bar ,compact, dense, and tasteless. Naël didn't need to chew. He did anyway, slowly. It made him feel… anchored.
''Nutrient absorption confirmed,''came the voice again.''All systems nominal.''
Still, something tugged at him.
It wasn't the food. Or the lack of color. Or the sterile quiet. It was… something underneath. Something faint. A sensation he couldn't quite name.
Like déjà vu, but deeper. Not ''I've seen this before , ''but:
''This shouldn't exist.''
His assigned route took him through the central corridor of Residential Block C. Everything was symmetrical. Identical door panels stretched endlessly on either side. No names. No signs. No noise.
Naël passed others on their way to designated tasks : technicians, analysts, sanitation drones. No one made eye contact. No one paused.
He liked that. Or, at least, he always had.
Until now.
Today, he hesitated at the edge of the transit platform.
A thin silver bridge extended across the city's mid-layer, suspended in a web of invisible gravimetric fields. Beneath it, glowing tubes carried thermal waste and redirected kinetic flow.
He paused, eyes scanning the vast artificial skyline.
Sector A9 was one of the oldest in the Northern Complex. Its towers were utilitarian , tall, grey, and sharp. Newer sectors gleamed with flowing glass and luminescent membranes. But here, everything still looked… functional. Dead.
He turned his gaze toward the rail node as his Transit Pod arrived, gliding silently along the line. Its doors opened without a hiss.
Inside: empty. Always.
He stepped in. The doors closed.
And then
A flicker.
In the window, his reflection shifted.
He didn't move. His face didn't change. But something about the reflection did.
His own eyes.staring back weren't the same.
They were… softer. Wider. Sad.
And then it was gone.
The system chimed softly in his skull:
''Transient visual anomaly detected. Recalibrating neural input stream…''
Naël sat down, but his body felt stiff. Not from fatigue. From doubt.
A word surfaced. Unbidden.
A strange word. A forgotten one.
Beautiful.
He didn't know where it came from. He hadn't used it before. He wasn't sure he even understood it.
He blinked. The thought evaporated.
When he arrived at Grid Level 17 Sub-core maintenance deck , everything was as expected.
Almost.
His interface terminal was functioning. The energy flow stable. Neural lattice responses: 99.8% efficiency. His role, like all roles, was essential. He adjusted memory nodes, filtered echo signals, maintained distribution clarity.
But his hands… trembled.
Just once.
So faintly it didn't register on the scanner.
He continued. Calibrated. Monitored.
Yet… beneath the task, something pulsed.
Not in the machines. Not in the system.
In him.
''Do you remember the sky?"
The words came with no source. No trigger.
He jolted upright, looking around. But the chamber was empty except for other workers, heads down, silent, connected.
His breath caught. The voice hadn't been synthetic.
Not part of the daily feed. Not SOMA.
Real.
Human.
Female.
The implant didn't respond. No correction wave. No purge. No warning.
Which meant the system hadn't detected it.
Or it was letting it happen.
That night, Naël didn't go straight home.
He walked , a fading, unnecessary ritual.
He didn't know what led him to the edge of Sector A9. Maybe he was following something. Or maybe something had been waiting.
He passed under flickering lights. Past service drones. Past towers that hadn't been repaired in decades.
There behind a warped metal gate, half-covered in ivy-shaped polymers , was a courtyard.
Not quite abandoned. Not quite alive.
Plastic trees curved toward an artificial sky. A cracked stone fountain stood at the center, its water long since shut off. A bench waited beneath a blue-lit canopy.
He sat.
The silence here wasn't like the one in his room.
It was natural. Old. Made of wind, static, and memory.
And as he sat
He heard it again.
''You're late.''
He turned.
No one there.
Yet the air held something , an afterglow, like a person had just walked through it.
A shadow lingered at the corner of his sight.
A shape.
A girl?
He stood up quickly, heart racing. Something inside him recognized her.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came.
The silence… stared back.
The cold metal bench was hard against Naël's back, but he barely felt it. His mind churned, caught between the monotony of his world and the inexplicable shadows crawling beneath its surface.
The city hummed with its usual mechanical pulse ; the faint whir of turbines, the distant clatter of transit pods, the soft tap of footsteps on concrete. But beneath that, something else lurked. A vibration he couldn't place, a rhythm out of sync with the sterile order.
His neural implant buzzed faintly ,a whisper only he could hear.
"Remember."
Naël's eyes darted to the empty courtyard around him, scanning for any sign of life. But the place was deserted, save for the flickering neon leaves that barely stirred in the artificial breeze.
"Remember who you are."
The voice was no longer just a hint. It pressed closer, softer and more urgent like a breath against his mind.
He clenched his fists. The implant should have filtered it out. The system was flawless.
Yet it was there.
He stood and paced slowly, muscles tight with tension. The silence wrapped around him like a shroud, but the words echoed, filling the spaces between each calculated, measured sound.
You are not alone.
Naël's vision shifted, a low flicker in the corner of his eye. It wasn't a glitch, not really. It was a shadow a shape that vanished when he blinked.
He swallowed hard. The world that had always been absolute was starting to blur.
Back in his apartment or rather, the compartment he called home ,Naël sat before the blank screen of his neural interface. The screen was empty, designed only to display approved data streams.
He ran a hand over his scalp, feeling the slight hum beneath his skin where the implant rested.
"Analyze neural interference," he commanded silently.
The interface obeyed instantly, graphs and waveforms flickering into view. But all data appeared normal ,no abnormalities. The system registered nothing.
Yet he knew better.
A knot tightened in his stomach. Something was wrong. Something was hiding in the perfect order.
The days passed with mechanical precision. Naël moved through maintenance cycles, calibrated energy flows, and monitored the city's silent systems.
But beneath his routine, the whispers grew louder. Voices not part of the sanctioned feed. Glimpses of faces just beyond sight. Feelings that weren't supposed to exist.
He tried to push them down. Focused on data. On graphs. On numbers. Anything to drown the rising tide of uncertainty.
One evening, while calibrating a relay in the northern sector, Naël paused. A small screen flickered before him — an encrypted message blinking briefly before vanishing.
He froze, heart pounding.
He rewound the data stream.
The message repeated, fragmented but clear enough:
"Find the truth beneath the silence."
The words weren't part of any authorized transmission. Someone had hacked the system. Or maybe it was a ghost in the code.
Naël's breath hitched. Was this the voice he had heard? Or something else?
He risked a glance over his shoulder. The corridor was empty.
He was alone.
Or so he thought.
That night, sleep was a distant memory. His dreams were fractured mosaics of faces, places, and words that dissolved the moment he reached for them.
He saw a girl but never clearly. Her eyes were pools of sorrow and light. She whispered his name, soft and aching.
"Naël…"
He woke, drenched in sweat, the echoes fading but never gone.
The next morning, at the transit platform, the flicker returned.
This time, it wasn't just his reflection.
Across the glass, a figure appeared , a girl in a simple grey uniform, her hair a tangled cascade of dark strands, eyes fixed on him with a quiet intensity.
Naël blinked.
She was gone.
Had he imagined her?
But when he looked down, his hand trembled.
A single drop of crimson impossible in this sterile world stained his palm.
His mind reeled.
He knew the world was perfect. Immaculate.
Yet here was proof of imperfection.
Of life.
Of pain.
As the Transit Pod arrived, Naël hesitated.
The doors opened. The girl stepped inside, silently, her gaze never leaving his.
He was frozen.
She smiled, a brief flicker of warmth in a cold world.
And then she vanished , a ghost in the glass.
Naël boarded alone, but his mind was anything but empty.
Questions burned.
Memories whispered.
Something deep inside him stirred.
The silence wasn't peace.
It was a cage.
And Naël was beginning to hear the bars creak.
The days that followed folded into one another like faded pages in a forgotten book. Yet for Naël, time itself seemed to splinter moments stretching and cracking, memories fraying at the edges.
The city continued its hum, indifferent to the turmoil stirring within him. Yet the familiar cold precision began to feel... brittle.
At work, his fingers moved with practiced ease, maintaining the subgrid's delicate balance, but his mind drifted, snagged by the persistent echoes.
"Remember…"
The voice was quieter now, like a breeze brushing the edge of consciousness. He tried to ignore it. Tried to tell himself it was a fault in the implant, a misfiring of circuits.
But deep inside, he knew.
This was no glitch.
One afternoon, while adjusting the data streams in the Central Archive, he noticed a small anomaly , a fragment of code that shimmered briefly before disappearing.
His curiosity ignited.
He traced the signal through the encrypted layers.
It led him to a hidden file ,access restricted, heavily guarded.
His hands trembled as he decrypted the file.
Inside were fragments of a memory , a woman's voice, soft and haunting.
"They took everything… but not the truth."
Naël's breath caught.
The message was incomplete, but it burned in his mind.
He closed the file hastily, heart pounding.
Someone had left a trace. Someone who wanted him to find it.
Was it a warning? A cry for help?
Or a trap?
That night, sleep refused him again.
His dreams grew darker.
He wandered through endless corridors of light and shadow, searching for something he couldn't name.
Faces flickered ,past strangers and memories intertwined.
Among them, the girl.
Her eyes, deep and sorrowful, locked with his.
"Find me," she whispered.
He reached out, but she dissolved like smoke.
Waking, he felt a new weight pressing on his chest a growing certainty that the life he knew was a lie.
At the transit hub, the flicker returned with a cruel persistence.
This time, the girl was there again, standing at the platform's edge.
She didn't speak. Didn't move.
Just watched.
Naël's heart ached with recognition.
He wanted to call to her, to break the silence.
But his voice was gone.
Only the endless hum of the city answered.
Back in his apartment, Naël sat before the neural interface, fingers hovering.
He hesitated.
Could he risk it?
Could he dive deeper?
The answers were hidden beneath layers of control ,layers designed to keep him compliant.
But the fractures in his mind demanded truth.
He initiated a manual override , a forbidden command.
The interface blinked, warning signals flashing.
For a moment, the system resisted.
Then, the barriers cracked.
Data flooded in raw, unfiltered, dangerous.
Images and sounds overwhelmed him: memories not his own, feelings long suppressed, a world buried beneath the surface.
And at the center of it all , the echo of a name.
Unspoken. Forbidden.
The system alerted: Intrusion detected. Neural integrity compromised.
But Naël no longer cared.
He had glimpsed the edges of his cage.
And now, he was ready to break free.
Here is Chapter 1 – Part 4, completing the first chapter arc with tension, psychological intensity, and growing unease—while still keeping the truth hidden and the atmosphere deeply mysterious.
Naël couldn't hear the world anymore.
It wasn't that the city had fallen silent ; its hum remained, steady and mechanical, woven through with the whisper of drones and distant footsteps but the sound no longer reached him the same way. Everything was muffled, dulled, as if SOMA itself had pulled a layer of glass between him and reality.
Even his own breathing sounded distant.
He sat in the corner of his apartment, lights off, neural interface disengaged. Around him, the faint glow of the monitoring system pulsed like a heartbeat. Blue. Steady. Watching.
But Naël didn't move.
He kept replaying the voice from the fragment he'd uncovered.
"They took everything… but not the truth."
The words echoed, curling through his thoughts like smoke. They felt… familiar. Not in the way a phrase is remembered, but like a scent from a long-forgotten home. It gnawed at him ,this sensation that something important had been taken. Not from the world. From him.
His neural implant pinged softly, a warning.
"Behavioral irregularities detected. Please report for recalibration."
He didn't respond.
Instead, he rose, slowly, and crossed the small room to the interface wall. He hesitated then accessed his private system logs.
There, buried deep under layers of sanctioned input and behavioral tracking, was a single corrupted memory string.
Unauthorized. Unregistered.
Its title was blank. Its size: indeterminate.
It shouldn't have existed.
He opened it.
A rush of sensation hit him , not images, not sound, but feeling. A cold void. Grief. Something breaking. Something burning. And a voice so faint it was more intuition than sound:
"Naël…"
He stumbled back, knees hitting the edge of the sleeping unit. His breath came in sharp, dry gasps.
That voice.
It had said his name. Not the way the system did. Not with clinical detachment. This was something else.
It knew him.
And he… knew it back.
The next morning, the city looked the same. Tall glass towers, pale skies, seamless drones gliding overhead like birds that had forgotten how to sing. No faces in the streets. No laughter. No music.
Only silence.
Naël's transit route had been rerouted. The new line passed through an older sector, half-lit, sparsely monitored. The walls here still bore the remnants of a world long before; bare stone beneath the glass, vines of rust, strange organic textures SOMA hadn't fully wiped away.
There, in the corner of a deserted corridor, he saw her again.
The girl.
She didn't speak. Her eyes were wide, fixed on him. She looked fragile.Not physically , but like a reflection that might vanish if he blinked.
She reached into her coat, pulled something from her pocket.
A piece of paper.
Naël's breath caught.
Paper. A relic from before. Real, tangible. It had no code, no tracker. No trace.
She placed it gently on the ledge beside her.
Then she turned and walked away.
Naël moved forward, uncertain.
The paper fluttered slightly in the artificial breeze.
He picked it up.
One word.
Scrawled in trembling, hurried strokes.
"REMEMBER."
That night, his dreams changed.
They no longer drifted in fragments. They pulled him ,dragged him into a deeper place.
He stood in a room he'd never seen.
There was warmth here. Real warmth. A fire flickered on the far wall, casting shadows that danced.
And beside the fire, a child sat.
A girl. Her back to him.
She was humming.
The tune was familiar. Heartbreaking. Ancient.
Naël took a step forward, but the floor beneath him cracked like glass. The dream shattered into shards of thought and memory :
A name he couldn't say.
A scream cut short.
A face in the dark.
A promise.
A lie.
An end that never truly came.
He awoke gasping, hands clutching at nothing.
His implant flared.
"Memory anomaly detected. Initiating containment."
He shut it down manually before the system could flood his neural net with suppressants.
Not tonight.
Not now.
The next day, the city felt colder. The sky, more sterile. Even the people walking past him ,those who still bothered to look human seemed less there.
As he passed the transit gate, the wall screen glitched.
Just for a second.
A woman's face appeared ,blurred, distant, unsmiling.
Then gone.
No one else reacted.
No one ever did.
Naël's pulse pounded. His hands trembled as he moved.
In his mind, a word pulsed in rhythm with his steps.
"Remember…"
And another followed.
"Run."
That evening, the city went dark for two full seconds.
A blackout. Impossible.
SOMA never blinked.
But in those two seconds, Naël saw.
A skyline in flames.
Children screaming.
An ocean swallowing towers.
A hand reaching toward him ,burning, breaking
A voice, crying out in anguish.....
"Don't let them take me."
Then the lights returned.
Everything resumed.
No alert. No announcement.
Just silence.
But Naël knew: the fracture had deepened.
The cage was weakening.
Something inside was waking up.
And the world was holding its breath.