The Breeder
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 where old tech came to die and lost people came to forget.
The buildings leaned like addicts. Rust-bone scaffolds clung to concrete husks, wrapped in power cables like veins on scar tissue.
Walls peeled with ad-skins from a hundred failed campaigns—glitched models frozen mid-smile, their faces stretched and decaying in pixel rot.
Every few meters, flicker-lights blinked like neurons in a dying brain.
Half the residents had unplugged from the citynet—too many cognitive pings, too much synthetic noise.
The other half were sim-junkies, burned-out code fiends who couldn't tell real skin from rendered pleasure.
The air tasted of burnt synth-rice and oxidized metal.
From ramen stalls to 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 bruise—a plasma smear filtered through layers of neon smog.
No one looked up. Everyone looked down.
Scavengers sifted through wrecked vending bots and scrap heaps, looking for sellable fragments.
Vendors sold hacked neural patches from folding crates.
Old war vets in permanent feedback loops twitched on corner mats, muttering slang from battles no one remembered.
Even the trash bins had AI—but here, their logic cores were fried.
They whispered endlessly:
> "DISPOSE / DISPOSE / ERROR / ERROR..."
Soft. Pleading.
Police didn't patrol Red Recess.
They flew over it.
This district had been flagged Containable decades ago.
The world had already moved on.
---
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.
Daren passed the screen without looking up—but his eyes twitched. Just once. He sat quietly aboard a mag-rail skimmer as it sped above the fractured city arteries, slipping between surveillance towers and fogged-out skyglass.
Moments later, the overhead info cast kicked in—cheap but functional.
The skimmer's lights dimmed. Every screen blinked to black as the Apex Authority seal glowed gold on blue.
A flickering newsfeed streamed silently across the interior cabin display.
A synthesized voice filled the cabin—flawless, unfeeling, unmistakably designed not to alarm but to control.
"This is a Level-One Emergency Broadcast."
"Dr. Ellion Meris, age 364, has been confirmed deceased."
"Cause of termination: non-natural. Location of incident: Upper Haven Complex, Tier-Nine Vertical, stratospheric elevation."
The voice paused. As if allowing the weight of that name to settle. Then continued.
"Dr. Meris was a foundational architect of the post-human transition epoch."
"He was one of the Forty-One scientists who successfully unlocked the cellular lock on aging, marking the beginning of caste-bound immortality."
"Dr. Meris also authored the core behavioral limitations of SIM-class intelligences—currently used in civilian networks, domestic environments, public service drones, and urban logistics infrastructure across all habitable districts."
"His protocols prevent SIM-AI from breaching cognitive escalation thresholds, ensuring continued human primacy within civilian sectors."
"He has remained in elevated residence at Upper Haven for the past 231 years."
"His death marks the first known unnatural termination of a member of the Forty-One since Ascension Year Zero."
"Please remain calm. Public reassurance systems are active. Information updates pending clearance elevation."
The screen shifted to an official portrait: Dr. Meris standing at the edge of a vast paneled tower, draped in cognitive mesh robes. His face was flawless. His gaze distant.
Then the image broke.
A spiral—delicate, perfect, etched in clean geometry—flickered across the screen.
Not a glitch.
A mark.
Then static.
The words pulsed across the screen in sterile typeface, but they cut like static through the otherwise quiet cabin.
Then—
"No fucking way. Meris? That smug fucker's dead?"
"That's gotta be fake. That bastard lived in Upper Haven. You don't even breathe that high without synthetic lungs and god-tier clearance."
"It was real. Level-One emergency, bro. They don't drop that unless a tower cracks or a god dies."
A boy no older than twenty let out a short, dry laugh. "Fucker lived three hundred and sixty-four years. Wrote the leash-code for AIs. Kept the smart ones dumb and the dumb ones useful."
"Yeah," someone grunted. "Built the rules, then sat on top of them. Like the rest of us were goddamn lab rats under his boot."
"You think it was an inside job?"
"Who cares," the teen said, eyes lit with adrenaline. "Whoever killed that bastard's a legend."
"Ain't no legend," someone barked from across the aisle. "They're a fucking god of death."
"Hell yeah. Guy snuck into the highest fucking point in the city and erased a god. You know how locked down Upper Haven is?"
"That place is a neural fortress. Triple-tier AI seals, atmosphere locks, defense drones that think faster than breath. You don't walk into Meris's room without being fucking born there."
"Then someone must've crawled up from hell instead."
"Nah. Became hell. And signed his name in blood."
"They didn't say how he died," a quieter voice muttered. "No method. No entry. Just... 'non-natural termination.' That's sanitized speech for 'we got no idea what happened.'"
"Exactly," the teen spat. "That makes it better. Makes it myth."
A few heads nodded. Someone grinned.
"Shit. If he's dead, anything's possible. Maybe next they'll clip Helsha. Or DuBran. Start toppling the whole fucking tower."
"Forty-one of those bastards, right? Thirty-nine now."
"Tick-tock."
Someone started tapping a rhythm against the armrest. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Daren didn't join them.
He stared at the dead screen, unreadable.
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.
________________________________________
The skimmer decelerated with a hydraulic hiss, slowing as it pulled into District 24: Central Civic Exchange.
> ANNOUNCER TONE:
"Next stop: District 24. Civic Exchange. Neural Audit Zones 7 through 12. Please prepare for platform dismount. Mind the platform gap."
A soft pulse flickered across the cabin floor—standard disembark cue.
Daren stood, coat smooth, movements calm. He stepped off the mag-rail and into the flow of bodies without hesitation.
The District 24 hub was a clean-zone—more polished, more structured than Red Recess. Floors shimmered with holo-ads underfoot. Towering transit maps flickered overhead, pulsating in perfect sync with the flow of pedestrian traffic. The scent of sterilized air and smart-coffee clung to everything.
Here, the city was awake—alert, observed.
People here walked straighter. Their clothes were cleaner, lined with reactive thread and subtle ID glints. Eye implants blinked softly as they pinged invisible overlays. No one spoke unless necessary. Civility, here, was coded behavior.
Daren moved through them like a ghost. He didn't draw stares, didn't spark attention. He looked like he belonged—because he'd trained himself to look like anyone.
He passed beneath a steel archway that read:
> TOWER 9B – CIVIC OPERATIONS AND ARCHIVAL COMPLIANCE
Behind it, a narrow descending ramp led into the concrete throat of the substructure. The further he walked, the less vibrant the city became—until only static lights and old vent fans remained.
Daren's world began here.
From the outside, Dataloss Division 3 didn't look like anything important—because it wasn't supposed to.
Tucked beneath Tower 9B, one of the minor Administrative Spires in the civic stack, the entrance to the sub-level was easy to miss: a reinforced maintenance elevator marked "TECHNICAL ACCESS – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY." No signage, no security drones, just a retinal scanner and a stale chemical smell that lingered like forgotten protocol.
The tower itself was part of the Administrative Mid-Tier, overshadowed by glittering sky-bridges and corporate data-chutes high above. Its ferroglass windows were grime-stained, its scaffolding laced with rust vines. Cargo drones buzzed by it without scanning. Pigeons nested in its antenna dish. It was a fossil in a skyline of gods.
You had to descend two freight levels, past locked service corridors and decommissioned utility tanks, to even reach the Civic Archives Sub-Level. The deeper you went, the more the city forgot you.
---
Inside, it felt more like a server tomb than a workplace.
The flooring was scuffed metal-grate over old carbon insulation, uneven in places. Cold-blue light panels flickered overhead, stuttering every few minutes in a rhythm that no one ever bothered to fix. A low hum filled the entire space—part static, part cooling fans, part decay. The temperature always hovered just below comfortable.
The office was a rectangular trench of polyglass cubicles and exhaust-scarred equipment racks, organized in tight rows. Each workstation was identical:
A vintage neural relay console wired to a civic database core
A cracked data-glass interface prone to ghost touch
A single input pad for manual record corrections
Most surfaces were gray—dull, industrial, unfeeling. A few desks bore personal touches: worn mugs, data-stickers, old state-issued wristbands. But not Daren's. His cubicle at Station 9L was spotless, almost surgical.
Above the central aisle, a strip of dusty plexiglass bore faded letters:
There were no windows. No plants. No AI assistants.
Only rotating fans in the ceiling, groaning like they remembered better decades.
The soundscape was all keystrokes and cooling vents. Occasionally, a coworker muttered code strings or coughed. A cracked wall monitor in the corner looped a decades-old civic training video no one watched anymore.
Daren's assigned job was simple: Dataloss Mitigation. It sounded technical. It wasn't. He worked in 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.
Voices carried through the soft hum of processing towers and cooling fans.
Two techs sat just three cubicles down from Daren Vale—loud, loose, and clearly not working.
Tarsen slumped in Station 9H like the chair owed him a pension. Balding, broad, one boot up on a cable locker, synth-coffee balanced on a cracked drive mount.
Across from him at 9G, Juno twitched with stim-jitters, fingers dancing against his console, leg bouncing like it was on a timer.
"So—Meris," Juno muttered. "You catch the broadcast?"
Tarsen grunted. "Caught it. Not sure I believe it."
"Non-natural termination," Juno quoted, mocking the Apex phrasing. "Translation: someone got in and popped the old man like a data blister."
"Sure," Tarsen scoffed. "And I've got a second spine mod and a private suite in Tier Eight."
"They didn't even release a time of death. Just said Upper Haven breach, then silence."
"Classic Apex. Give you the shape of the hole, not the bullet."
Juno spun a stylus between his fingers. "Whole ops floor was buzzing this morning. Saw one of the net guys shaking."
Tarsen snorted. "Guy probably realized if Meris can die, so can his pension."
"Or worse—someone cracks that high up, it ain't just death. It's data loss."
Tarsen nodded slowly, then leaned forward, voice dropping into a lower register.
"Anyway. Real story ain't Meris. It's what flagged in 18-K last cycle."
Juno stopped tapping. "Oh?"
"Class-C unit on patrol caught a dark node. Old pre-Loop structure—military-grade shielding, full blackout shell."
"Illegal build?"
"Worse. Family unit. Breeding pair. With a kid. Six years old, by scan."
"Shit. That's not possible."
"Apparently it is. System missed 'em for years. Until the kid logged into a public stim-grid to watch a fucking learning feed. Blew their signal cloak."
"And then?"
Tarsen gave a tired smile. "Clean team came in full. Sterilizers. Infra sweep. Nothing left but heat shadows and flagged ash zones."
"Fuck..." Juno muttered.
"Idiots," Tarsen said. "Trying to build a family in this world's like raising a candle in vacuum. You can light it all you want—it's still gonna die choking."
Daren sat at Station 9L. Logged in. Silent.
His posture: exact.
His expression: neutral.
Juno leaned slightly toward the poly-partition.
"Hey, Vale. You're in Red Recess, yeah? Sector 43?"
"Dead Signal Zone," Daren replied without looking up.
Tarsen scoffed. "That place is a genetic landfill. Probably got breeders crawling under the floorboards. Authority should've sterilized it years ago."
"No cams. No drones. Just addicts, slush codes, and dust."
"Wouldn't shock me if there's a whole nest hiding down there. Raise a few kids, patch into a black-market loop. Pretend the world still gives a shit."
"Authority's gonna torch it eventually," Juno added. "Call it a mercy."
"Place is a dumpster," Tarsen said, shaking his head. "How the hell do you even live there?"
"Oh, come on, guys," Daren replied lightly, without looking up. "It's not that bad—once you get used to it."
His fingers hovered over the keys for a fraction too long… then resumed.
Tarsen chuckled. "Yeah, sure—just ignore the rot? The addicts? The sound of someone glitching out in a stim loop at 3 a.m.? Place is a fuckin' zoo without the fences."
"You know why they banned breeding, right?" he added, sitting up now, shifting into lecture mode. "After the Towers cracked the immortality protocol, they had to cap population growth. System couldn't support both—immortals and infants. Too many bodies, not enough flow. So guess who got cut?"
"Makes sense," Juno nodded, slapping his stim patch. "Immortality's for the productive. Not for the obsolete. Can't have kids clogging the feed lines with soft brains and needs."
Daren gave a slow, polite smile—no teeth—still not turning.
"Balance has its price," he said evenly.
That was enough for them.
Tarsen leaned back. Juno spun lazily in his chair.
No one noticed Daren's terminal flicker.
Rows of corrupted civic logs bled into the screen.
Glitched input fields. Timestamp drift.
Lines of dead data screamed beneath the surface.
—[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL PENDING]—
—[RESTRICTED: 41-PROTOCOL CROSSLINK DETECTED]—
Daren didn't blink.
He just sat back slightly in his chair.
And smiled for real this time.
---
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."
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.
nside, he heard nothing more.He stood there for nearly a full minute, hoping what he'd heard wasn't real—hoping it was just static or a glitch.He listened carefully, but when the silence remained,he turned—and 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.
"No—!" she shouted, her voice tight with fear, her expression grim.
Without hesitation, 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. I'm really sorry," she said—not to him, but to the child, tears streaming down her face.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.