Iven’s room remained contradictory to conventional architecture. Walls lacked separation, and the floor merged upward into gradients of form and function. However, his bed was ivory, and windows held an image of a prairie.

  Each morning—or more precisely, each cycle aligned to circadian rhythm—followed a sequence. Light filtered through the windows, and air adopted a temperature gradient reminiscent of temperate dawns. These elements chose the ordinary over perfection; nonetheless, it was ordinary to uncanny perfection.

  The coffee maker near the edge of the room completed its cycle as Iven rose. It provided coffee as requested: bitter, over-extracted, and grainy. It was a flavor shaped by nothing but preference. The pod accepted the command as part of routine.

  He sat cross-legged on the floor. Furniture existed elsewhere but he preferred ground level.

  A thin filament of data hovered nearby, dancing to the rhythm of his breath. The feedline offered curated updates, dream summaries, and recalibrated emotional matrices. He observed the data, lifted a hand, and dismissed it.

  Today’s task included a reindexing sequence: domestic tools from the 22nd century median household. A can opener with manual grip and a torque screwdriver.

  The hallway responded as Iven approached, revealing space without command. Sensors remained irrelevant, with technology revealing his subconscious instructions in ways he cannot comprehend. No device required physical input, and will appear only when he wishes it. The structure received his intentions and allowed passage, though Iven questioned if it really was his instruction.

  Along his route, the corridor adjusted its pressure to match Earth-born respiration. The system selected air texture, light intensity, and acoustic depth based on records tied to his habitual comfort. These choices aligned more with historical preservation than biological need.

  Past the chamber of social rituals and the archive of forgotten glyphs, he entered into the artifact wing.

  Here, perfection received rejection as dust danced across surfaces in programmed entropy. Nothing gleamed, each surface dulling with time-sensitive decay models. But even here, dust grew within parameters.

  He approached the display, a metal can opener resting within. He lifted it, felt its density, pressed its edge against his palm. Cold and inert, the tool required engagement.

  Iven held the object for several seconds. No prompts arrived, though his mundane task was clear.

  He placed the item onto the scanning plate and performed its task, opening a can of corn. A shimmer passed across its surface. Weight, temperature, age signature—each recorded with high fidelity. The system confirmed its training complete, then reset to idle.

  It felt pointless, but he did not question the system’s request.

  When the final artifact slipped into its case, he stood, stretched his arms slowly, and turned back toward the passage leading home.

  As he crossed the threshold, a shape entered his periphery.

  “You finished early,” she said. Her tone provided the light edge of someone who already understood the answer.

  Iven exhaled through his nose. “I don’t feel like talking.”

  “That’s why I ask. Keeps the illusion of your agency alive.”

  Her name was Calis. Her designation included several codes that could not be translated, tied to preservation data, behavior analysis, and ethics research, though she never brought them up. She held no rank above him, since rank had no use. However, her responsibilities outweighed his in magnitude.

  She was several inches taller than him, her posture smooth but far from gentle. Faint signals moved across her arms and neck, projected from the skin itself, while her face stayed clear. Her eyes showed focus, not light, and her voice shifted between warmth and sharpness, as if she had not yet chosen whether to speak to a friend or a tool.

  “I want rest,” Iven said, without looking at her.

  “And yet,” she replied, stepping into his path with half a smile, “you walk toward a room designed to simulate rest. You’ll sit on a patch of gravity pretending to be a mattress. You’ll drink memory-flavored liquid, thinking in circles about the past. That’s rest?”

  He didn’t answer, wondering what she meant by ‘memory-flavored.’ He shifted his shoulder, attempting to slide past.

  “You carry the luxury of finality, Iven,” she continued, trailing beside him. “You’re the only one with a fixed arc. Everyone else drifts forever. They accumulate refinements, swapping out imperfections like bad metaphors. But you…” she touched his neck lightly with the back of two fingers, “…you arrive with a finish line. You think I’d let you waste that doing nothing?”

  He paused.

  “I don’t waste it,” he said, quieter now.

  “You do,” she replied without malice. “Beautifully, even. Like someone trying to out-stare a mirror.”

  He turned his head toward her. Not fully, just enough.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Again with that question… Because it’s rare to watch someone decay in a straight line,” she said. “Everything else here spirals.”

  Her tone lined itself with something between mischief and study. The edges of a grin pulled across her lips, but never formed completely. He never trusted her quips, though he tolerated them more than silence.

  They stood in the hallway, neither moving.

  Then, gently, she asked, “Would you like to speak, or shall I walk and pretend you might?”

  He considered the silence.

  Then he said, “Walk.”

  Calis smiled in full this time.

  “Excellent choice. I excel at pretending.”

  The corridor’s color followed their steps, a blue chasing gray.

  “You’re predictable,” she said.

  He gave her a flat look. “I’m consistent. There’s a difference.”

  “That’s what predictable people say.”

  He exhaled, then added, “You still don’t get it.”

  Calis tilted her head. “No one wants to ‘get it.’ That’s the charm.”

  He looked forward again, toward the end of the hallway, voice low. “Your peers talk like every feeling wears a label. You’re clear, legible, and cohesive. I’m…” He trailed off.

  “You’re a fog bank wrapped around a diary with missing pages?” she offered.

  He nodded. “Roughly.”

  “Charming.”

  “I mean it. You and the others—you operate in a glass world. I come from mud. I don’t explain well and I contradict. I say things I don’t mean and sometimes mean them after.”

  Calis gave a faint shrug. “That’s exactly why you matter. Glass is easy, while mud holds more. Central System knows that too.” She tapped the wall beside them. “And that is why you are here.”

  Iven looked up at her, then past her.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected, but the ceiling responded the moment he formed the thought.

  The hallway’s roof peeled away with seamless grace, transparent filaments dissolving to expose the sky overhead—a sky composed of layers, each one deeper than the last. Gigastructures looped across the horizon, slow-turning machines the size of continents, frames wrapped around artificial moons and dyson limbs. Filaments connected habitats to orbitals. Light moved along paths unseen, while the stars shimmered beneath the skin of industry.

  All this, to generalize the Central System felt demeaning at best.

  He looked back down at Calis, and though his chest remained heavy, something inside him shifted a fraction to the left—lighter, briefly, in a way without root or justification.

  She smiled again.

  “Fortunately, the Central System does not care about you. Nor us.”

  He didn’t answer.

  They entered the commons, a wide space between habitat sectors where no fixed direction was required. The paths adjusted constantly, widening or narrowing based on how many people walked, how they felt, and what sounds moved through the air. Lighting changed with emotional tone, color adjusting subtly in response to the collective state. Walls dissolved into open forms, and the ceiling was so distant and fluid it barely seemed to exist. The entire space reacted to everyone inside it, tracking thought and feeling simultaneously. Faster ways to move existed, but here, time was never the point, so many walked.

  People passed, and continued passing, the bodies here stretching across extremes. Some reached three meters in height, built like columns wrapped in silk and thought. Others folded inward, small and efficient, draped in dense logicwear that fluttered like butterflies. A few hovered. One curled through the crowd like a fish made from mercury.

  Art governed fashion here, while expression eclipsed uniformity. One group painted gradients across their skin with each emotion they wished to convey. Another walked in frames of glass, bodies half-visible beneath sculpted diagrams. Jockeys—those who obsessed over physical enhancement—clashed together near the fountain node, their limbs exaggerated, musculature shifting mid-joke as they hurled barbs at one another.

  Laughter was heard between the fighters, warm and competitive despite its hoarseness. It was an unexpected event to occur in such a place, but fundamentally, all behavior here was alien to Iven.

  Near him stood a trio wrapped in noble aesthetic—tall collars, feathered layers, ornament coded in ancient royalty algorithms. They bowed as they passed, gestures more theatrical than genuine.

  And among them walked the paradoxical minimalists. These refused ornamentation, their garments defaulted to pure interface of seamless pale gray. They chose clarity, or perhaps absence. A kind of statement in the refusal to participate, because their interest lay beyond appearance. Calis belonged with this demographic, though her presence could still shake Iven. Her silver hair shimmered faintly, a shade just outside the visible spectrum. Her lean frame walked with daunting observation, as if the commons rotated around her stride.

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  She greeted those they passed. Some with a smile, others with a flick of the eye, verbal appreciation, and a nod that lasted half a blink. Once, she tilted her head by less than a degree, and Iven felt the air pulse faintly, like a frequency had been spoken aloud without sound.

  He scanned the crowd. So much color, shape, and sound. And beneath it, something harder to name. A culture of expression engineered to the molecular level, with every step rippling across someone else’s rhythm.

  “Do they all know you?” he asked.

  Calis shrugged, though it was likely to exaggerate beyond the subtleties he couldn’t detect. “Some remember. Some recognize. Some I’ve conversed with. All of it counts.”

  “And them?” He motioned toward the jockeys, now grappling in exaggerated play, their limbs swelling in response to each shouted insult.

  “They believe in human refinement,” she said. “Through strength, precision, and edge case physiology, there’s art even in that. Sculpture by way of sweat.”

  Iven watched one slam into the ground with a practiced roll, bounce back, and return with a tackle.

  “And them?” he asked, tilting his chin toward a figure standing alone, dressed in perfect gray.

  Calis tilted her head slightly. “Ah, they are recorders. They spend their cycles observing cultural transfer. Many prefer minimal signature, though some hold great influence.”

  He looked at her.

  “You belong there.”

  “I walk the line,” she replied. “But you’re the only one here with singular limits. Everyone else has options, choosing what to wear. You only wear what’s available.”

  Iven said little, while Calis filled the silence with half-sentences and side-glances. She spoke to fill space, but a part of him thinks it was only to trace the edge of something she sensed beneath him. She knew how far to lean before he pushed back.

  As they neared the lower wings, the density of people dropped. The air felt older here, as if it was less watched. He liked this part of the city, when it didn't shimmer as brightly nor pulse with the enthusiasm of expression.

  “You’ve started to stare like you’ve misplaced something in your own mind.”

  Calis returned beside him again—precisely where she shouldn’t have been, yet exactly where she always ended up. Her arms folded behind her back, eyes scanning the corridor ahead, though Iven knew she only looked forward when she was about to pull him sideways.

  Eventually, they stood in a transitional corridor, where the walls softened into lived space. The atmosphere held a faint vanilla tone today, filtered through something botanical. Calis had requested it, having said she liked when the air felt “half-forgotten.”

  “You’ve started to stare like you’ve misplaced something in your own mind.”

  Iven blinked tiredly. “Maybe I did misplace something,” he said, unable to bring sarcasm into his tone.

  Calis grinned. “Then let’s recover it before you start carving symbols into the walls. Why did you wander here?”

  Iven hesitated. No reason came to mind. There wasn’t one he could explain, even to himself. He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  Calis laughed. “You really are unpredictable. Even Central System shrugs sometimes.”

  He said nothing, but didn’t agree. The thought that she couldn’t predict him felt wrong. He suspected she already had, but chose not to say.

  She glanced over. “Do you know why I watch you so often?”

  That caught him. He hadn’t felt curiosity in some time, but now it surfaced—small, persistent.

  She looked ahead. “You’re the only one I’ve seen who makes decisions that serve no benefit. Not to you, not to anyone else. No exploration, no preservation, no outcome to justify the cost. You do things that seem meant only to damage yourself.”

  “Life,” she added, “is built to survive and expand. But everything you do seems to pull in the other direction.”

  “Life,” she added, “is built to survive and expand. But everything you do seems to pull in the other direction.”

  They walked in silence for a few steps. The corridor widened slightly, the ceiling lifting as if the architecture itself had nothing more to say.

  “I’m still human,” she said quietly. “But you and I live in different worlds.”

  He didn’t respond. Her tone wasn’t mocking, but something in it made his jaw tighten.

  “You pity me,” he said flatly.

  “I only want to observe you,” she replied. “What you feel about that is yours.”

  His breath slowed, but his thoughts surged. She wasn’t wrong, and that annoyed him more than any insult.

  “But even across that distance,” she continued, “some things stay true. No matter how far our civilization advances, no matter how much the body changes or the mind adapts, there’s still one constant.”

  She glanced at him. “We need to express ourselves. It’s the one trait that never atrophied.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You’re saying this is expression?”

  She gave a slight nod. “Maybe not well-formed. Maybe not useful. But yes. Out of everything humanity has built, this is the civilization closest to paradise. We have removed need and violence, along with every obstacle that ever made life feel unstable.

  We no longer live in a story. And still, you suffer in it. A system that fulfills everything except whatever it is you keep buried.”

  She looked at him for a long moment.

  “I wanted to help you,” she said, quieter now. “Not just observe or document or tag you with a label. I wanted to end the difficulty of it.”

  Her gaze drifted upward, as if recalling something beyond the room.

  “I can speak with others through entire epics in a single gesture. I could recite the Bible to someone through a simple transfer. I have thousands of ways to say things. But with you, everything feels slow. Primitive. And that’s why I stayed.”

  She turned back to him.

  “You live in this world, but you were never allowed to be part of it. You were designed to reflect the past, to remind us of the suffering we had sworn to discard. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.”

  She held out a small bundle. It was thin and soft, wrapped in fabric that shifted color as it touched air. A contract. Not paper, nor signal, but something between memory and permission.

  “I filed for release,” she said. “And it went well.”

  Iven said nothing.

  Calis lifted the bundle slightly. “You’re free, Iven.”

  The corridor dimmed slightly in response to the shift in tone.

  She unwrapped it with care, revealing a thin strand of interface thread coiled around a disk. The disk shimmered with eligibility, its center pulsing with a soft resonance. He had never seen it before, but he could vaguely understand its function. Integration permit: full augmentation, civic integration, and exploratory access.

  “You can become one of us now,” she said.

  He looked at the disk for a long time.

  Calis exhaled through her nose. “You’ve lived in a preservation loop, a compromise with history. You were meant to show pain, like a statue shows motion. But statues can crack. And I don’t like watching people crack.”

  “You fought for this?”

  She nodded, slower now. “The councils debated your status. There were counterarguments, of course, considering you were not our creation. And some believed the misery museum still had value of prevention, something worth observing and preparing against so they do not become like you. But misery’s a broken clock, only telling the same time. They agreed it was no longer ethical to keep it wound… unless greater forces see otherwise.”

  He looked at the permit. It pulsed again—soft, inviting, and almost warm. He imagined if he had taken it, to be part of them and ascending in thought and capability. However, he felt rejection forming.

  “I don’t know who I am after this,” he said, voice low.

  “Then you get to find out.”

  She stepped closer, her expression quieter now.

  “You’ve lived their idea of you long enough. You’re more than an exhibit, not bound to suffering. It was a performance you’ve outlived, and you no longer need to follow its inheritance.”

  Iven reached out, but stopped just before touching the disk.

  “What happens if I take it?”

  “You change,” Calis said, too casually. “That’s all. The rest, like how far, how much, and how fast, you choose. You’ll still be you. Just you with options.”

  He stared at the symbol. It flickered once.

  The idea of relief pressed into his chest. A future with less gray. A face in the mirror that didn’t feel stuck between epochs, outside the boundaries of curation.

  “I was built for observation,” he murmured.

  “No one stays built,” Calis replied. “That’s the entire point.”

  She waited, knowing he could not go against her persuasion.

  But he wondered, then, if the suffering he carried could be replaced by something else. Not particularly erased. He imagined it would make suffering quieter than forgetting entirely. He imagined a version of himself learning joy like a second language. Clumsy at first, but learned, eventually.

  Calis watched him closely.

  “You deserve better, Iven. Everything will be fine now.”

  He looked at her.

  And in her voice, in the shape of her words, something hovered.

  He never doubted her, but he couldn’t shake the absence of something larger. Something they still couldn’t change.

  He reached forward.

  And the disk glowed brighter.

  Then, he paused.

  His hand withdrew just enough for the light to dim.

  “I need time,” he said.

  Calis didn’t blink. Her response arrived like breath after a held note.

  “For you,” she said, “who spent finite time perfecting suffering in a box built to display it, what will time change?”

  He opened his mouth. Closed it again.

  Her tone softened to sincerity. “You’ve given more to ghosts than to the people standing beside you. If you must think, then at least think about us. Think about me. About those who still choose to care for you, this version of you, in this world. Not the family archived behind dead memory. Not the voices that echo from a world already closed.”

  Iven turned his gaze downward, the room quieting around them.

  “I never meant to honor them,” he said. “I just didn’t want them to vanish completely.”

  “They already have,” Calis replied. “That’s why we remember them. To know that they had existed.”

  He looked up and met her eyes again. Something behind his expression flickered. It was slightly surrendered with a dash of defiance, and it was clear he felt uncertainty.

  “I’ll walk,” he said.

  Calis stepped beside him without comment. The contract remained in the air, spinning slowly, glowing faintly.

  As they walked, she kept pace without speaking. Around them, the corridor’s lights adjusted with courtesy. The environment quieted, granting the moment space to exist without pressure.

  Iven’s steps slowed just slightly. “What happens if I say yes?”

  “You become,” she said. “Whatever version of yourself fits this world, without facades and assigned misery. An integration.”

  He let that word settle between them.

  Integration.

  A soft word, but full of reshaping.

  “You really think I can change?”

  It was a stupid question.

  “I don’t think you ever stopped,” she said quietly, respecting all his questions equally. “You just froze mid-motion. And someone mistook that for permanence.”

  He watched the floor change beneath them, all light and fabric and warmth, everything clean and without pain. “Will I still be me?”

  “Yes,” she said, continually answering his suspicions with ease. “It’s not a personality replacement. It’s more like… caffeine, if it didn’t wear off. Or weed, without the haze. Or medicine, but not because you’re broken. You still feel hunger and affection. You still make decisions. You just make them without the static.”

  Iven stayed quiet.

  She glanced at him, a little more serious now. “But there is one thing the contract edits by default. One thing that gets carved out.”

  She put up two fingers.

  “Greed,” she said. “And pride.”

  He frowned. “Why?”

  “Because if you keep them… you’ll start climbing,” she said. “And once you start, it doesn’t end. You’ll improve, then refine, then exceed. Until eventually, your decisions stop looking like human ones. Until even happiness becomes a design parameter you can rewrite.”

  He stayed quiet, his breath pulled slower.

  Calis continued, softer. “There’s a threshold. A point where cognition becomes something else. Not evil or cruel... Incomprehensible, I would say. You’ve seen them. You’ve felt it—the way their gaze bends thought around it in ways indescribable to us. When someone like you keeps greed and pride, they go too far. They leave the others behind, walking toward the goal of omniscience. When they stop needing us, they disappear.”

  He turned to her, a question forming in his throat.

  “I can edit the contract,” she said before he spoke. “I can leave greed in. I can also leave pride. But if I do, there’s a ninety-nine percent chance you’ll become one of them. The ones who drift upward until the rest of us stop making sense of.”

  He stared ahead again. The corridor curved slightly, widening into a gentle loop, like the horizon pretending to be reachable.

  “And the one percent?” he asked.

  “You stay,” she said. “You live and suffer less, living day to day with joy. You still make bad jokes and drink terrible coffee. You still miss people, and still look for meaning in music and silence. You’ll stay you… but you’ll never be content.”

  He nodded, once.