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February 14th, of a year that existed today and has always existed
It was a morning like any other.
Birdsong stitched the air together, thin and bright. The neighbor’s hammer kept its relentless rhythm—metal against metal, or maybe bone against bone, who could tell anymore? Saturdays had a particular silence beneath the noise, a collective exhale. Some slept off hangovers, others their insomnia, others the exhaustion of pretending their jobs still mattered.
The robots had taken over production long ago. Efficiency, precision, optimization. They manufactured everything—except purpose. So now survival required something far more draining: participation. Endless cognitive shifts, emotional labor, curated authenticity for machine-run economies that fed on attention and compliance.
It was all very human.
I stepped onto the balcony with a mug of instant coffee. It wasn’t real coffee—not like the earthy, sacred brews we once grew for pleasure rather than profit—but it was affordable. Immediate. Convenience had become the last affordable luxury.
From the twentieth floor of the multibuilding, I stared at the grid of anonymous windows across the courtyard. Thousands of framed lives. Some opaque, some glowing faintly blue from neural implants syncing their occupants to curated realities. Windows looked back at me like unblinking eyes.
Who knew if anyone was actually behind them?
I took the first sip.
That’s when it happened.
A dull, blunt impact above me—sharp yet muffled—followed by a metallic tremor that shivered through the structure. It came from the solar panels on the roof garden. A sound too heavy to be debris, too sudden to be weather.
Then silence.
The birds stopped mid-argument. A flock of pigeons burst upward, wings thrashing against the pale sky like scattered paper.
No heads appeared in neighboring windows. No alerts chimed in the building’s internal network. No passive-aggressive thread asking if someone had “dropped something large again.”
Nothing.
Most people had muted their external senses years ago, routing sight and sound through implants that filtered the world into something softer, safer. Reality had become optional. Raw perception—outdated.
But I had kept mine intact.
Call it paranoia. Or appetite.
I glanced, almost automatically, to the window three floors below and across—the one with the gauzy curtains that never fully closed. Right on time, she appeared. She moved with slow deliberation, unaware or unconcerned about visibility. Bare shoulders catching the morning light. A stretch that was either innocent or calculated. The curve of her spine disappearing behind fabric.
She never looked up.
Or maybe she did, through another interface.
My curiosity wasn’t noble. It was feral. A remnant of something unoptimized.
Still, the impact above gnawed at me more than she did.
There were no notifications. No maintenance drones dispatched. No algorithmic reassurance.
Just that sound.
Maybe it was nothing.
Maybe it was someone.
Maybe—impossibly—it was something that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore.
I set the mug down and stepped back inside. The hallway lights flickered as if aware of my decision. Elevators were monitored; stairwells were not. I chose the stairs.
Each step upward felt heavier than it should have. The building hummed faintly—the electrical bloodstream of a structure more machine than architecture. Somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors, my wrist implant vibrated softly.
A private message.
Unknown sender.
Did you hear it too?
I stopped.
The screen hovered in my peripheral vision. No ID. No metadata. No origin point.
A second message appeared.
Don’t let them detect curiosity.
A smile tugged at my mouth despite myself.
Finally.
Something interesting.
I typed back without slowing my climb.
Where are you?
The response came instantly.
Above you.
The rooftop door wasn’t locked.
That alone was wrong.
The air was colder up there, sharper. The solar panels stretched in sleek black rows, gleaming like scales. And in the middle of them—
A body.
Not sprawled. Not broken.
Standing.
She turned as I approached.
Not the girl from the window—but close enough to steal my breath. Same shoulders. Same slow confidence. But her eyes were different: clear, unfiltered, alive in a way that implants dulled in others.
There was a faint crack across one solar panel beside her. A shallow dent in the metal railing. She must have fallen from somewhere higher—or been dropped.
“You heard it,” she said.
Her voice wasn’t transmitted. It wasn’t enhanced. It simply existed in the air between us.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She studied me openly, the way predators assess other predators—or potential allies. “That means you’re not fully connected.”
“Neither are you.”
She stepped closer. Close enough that I could see the fine tremor in her breath, the warmth radiating from her skin despite the cold. There was something electric about proximity to someone unplugged. Dangerous. Intimate.
“I disconnected myself,” she said softly. “Mid-transfer.”
“From what?”
Her lips curved—not innocent.
“From them.”
A drone buzzed faintly somewhere beyond the edge of the building.
She reached for my hand—not urgently, but deliberately. Her fingers were warm. Real. Her pulse steady against my wrist.
“If they trace the interruption,” she murmured, eyes never leaving mine, “they’ll come here first.”
“And what do you suggest?”
She stepped even closer, until the space between us felt charged and narrow and deliberate.
“Run,” she whispered.
Another impact echoed in the distance. Not on our building this time.
Somewhere else.
Someone else waking up.
Her hand tightened around mine.
“Or,” she added, her breath grazing my ear, “we make this morning unforgettable before the world corrects itself.”
The drone’s hum grew louder.
Below us, thousands of windows watched—blank, indifferent, curious.
For the first time in years, I felt entirely present.
And entirely exposed.
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