Silence
Not the kind you find in a temple, or the kind that comes with peace. This silence pressed against my ears, sharp and unnatural—like sound had been ripped from the room, and something vital went missing in the process.
I sat up in bed fast—too fast. The thin mattress beneath me crinkled from the movement, and the neural jack in the back of my skull tugged slightly against its housing. There was no soft chime from my neural assistant. No ambient overlay adjusting the room lighting to my circadian rhythm. No automated prompt from Seren.
"Seren?" I asked aloud.
No reply.
I blinked hard, waiting for my HUD to activate. Still nothing. The retinal display should've been showing today's schedule, my metabolic vitals, and a calm voice greeting me with curated updates. But all I got was the unlit gray of the wall in front of me and the racing pulse pounding at the back of my throat.
I swung my legs over the bed and tapped the back of my neck, where the neural interface port connected to my spinal feed. Cold metal met my fingertips—no damage, no sign of physical disruption.
Still no Seren.
The silence became heavier, and with it came the itch of fear under my skin.
This wasn't a crash. It wasn't a software update. Seren was too deeply integrated into my nervous system to just go offline.
She wasn't missing. She was gone.
I stood up, scanning my living cube. Ten square meters. Minimalist to the point of sterile. Steel desk. Wall-integrated screen. One sink. One sealed door. No windows. Nothing personal—just how the Ministry liked it. Blank environments for blank minds.
Except mine wasn't blank anymore.
Last night's memory core still throbbed behind my eyes. The girl's scream. Her face. That encrypted phrase—
> "Don't forget me, Elian."
But I had purged the data. Manually. Cut the loop, shredded the memory, and deleted the logs. A direct violation of Ministry protocol, but I couldn't take the risk of trace remnants syncing with the central system.
Unless I was already too late.
"System reset," I muttered. "Manual override. Code alpha-nine-seven."
The room's lights blinked once in acknowledgment. Basic automation still worked. Temperature control still responded. Even the biometric door registered my ID.
But Seren—my AI, my handler, my conscience—was still silent.
It was like someone had gone into my mind and pulled the plug on only one function: the one that kept me safe.
I walked to the sink, splashed water on my face, and stared into the mirror. A scan initiated automatically, syncing to my ID.
The mirror lit up and projected a line of green data—normal vitals. But something was off.
My eyes.
They looked... empty. Flat. As if I were watching myself from the outside.
"Seren, diagnostics," I whispered again.
Still nothing.
I touched the mirror. The interface pulsed faintly, then dimmed.
No access to Ministry Net. That clinched it.
This wasn't a glitch. Someone had cut me off from the system. From Seren. From the Dominion.
Which meant only one thing: they were watching.
I reached for the emergency uplink module inside the collar of my coat—fiber-woven with embedded circuitry. Pressed the sync pad.
No network detected.
I backed away, heart pounding. The uplink should never be out of range, not in Sector 3. Even black zones had a fallback mesh. You'd have to be underground—or blocked by a directed scrambler.
Or…
The knock came.
Three sharp raps. A pause. Two more.
Standard Ministry pattern.
I froze.
There was no time to wipe memory fragments. No time to hide the logs. They already knew.
I walked to the door and activated the retinal lens. One man stood outside. Tall. Ministry black coat. No visible insignia.
Not Peace Division.
Not Internal Ops.
Worse—Emotional Integrity Division.
He didn't wait for me to open the door fully. The moment the lock disengaged, he pushed through, eyes scanning the room with precision.
"Elian Rho?" he said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes," I replied, forcing my voice to remain steady.
"You've been flagged for irregular cognitive variance," he said.
I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off with a raised hand. "You'll come with me."
"This is a mistake. My AI interface is malfunctioning—"
"We know," he said. "That's why we're here."
His voice was cold. Not robotic. Worse—it was calm. The kind of calm they engineered in labs, bred into Ministry agents through endless neural conditioning.
I grabbed my coat. My fingers brushed the inside seam—where I'd stitched a backup core, a trace of a trace of the voice I wasn't supposed to hear.
If they found it, I'd be scrubbed. Mind-wiped. Maybe worse.
I followed him out.
---
The streets of Sector 3 were bathed in a sterile blue glow, the kind that looked peaceful from above but made everything feel frozen at ground level. We moved in silence, weaving between patrol drones and clean-faced citizens with perfectly calibrated expressions.
No one made eye contact. No one asked questions.
That was the Dominion's greatest victory—not the technology, not the memory control—but the culture of quiet obedience.
We arrived at a black transport module and stepped inside. No markings. No windows. Just polished metal and two chair rigs designed for neural tethering.
I was strapped in before I could resist.
The agent took the seat opposite me. "You are undergoing a Level 3 Calibration Scan under Directive 17-B. Do you understand?"
"I want representation," I said, voice dry.
He smiled faintly. "Representation implies deviation. We're simply correcting imbalance."
The module hummed. My restraints engaged. A high-frequency tone pulsed through the cabin.
> Initiating Deep Audit Protocol…
I bit the inside of my cheek, grounding myself.
But it had already begun.
The memory core—the real one—was still inside me.
And soon, they were going to dig until they found it.