Below the Direct Current
When the world abandoned alternating current for the clean precision of DC, it rewired more than grids; it rewired power, mercy, and truth. High above the clouds, Skyterra hums on forty‑eight volts of order, while the ground below coughs dust, rust, and memory. Kael, a systems engineer the tower should have erased, and Naeva, the lab‑grown companion designed to love him and no one else, are forced out of their regulated heaven the moment the grid blinks and the alarms stay silent. Something has breached the vaults beneath the Aeon Spire, something with chitin and acid for answers, and an orbital “cleanse” is counting down in hours.
Their descent is not a metaphor, it is metal screaming on ruined rails, plasma fire in steam‑choked corridors, bodies packed into ore sleds that shear and fall. It is blood misting in red light, children shoved through maintenance vents, nobles clawing for seats beside grounders who have learned to measure shade like currency. Every level down strips another illusion: water was never free, efficiency was never neutral, love was never unprogrammed.
On the surface, the air tastes like salt and old heat. Shards of the sky city still burn as they fall. Survival is depth, clay, and luck. Kael, Naeva, and a mismatched handful of soldiers, medics, technicians, scavengers, and Companions crawl into basalt throats and culverts roofed by twenty meters of mud, praying the missiles overshoot and the clay holds. They argue about who gets lifted first, who gets left, and whether anyone deserves saving when everyone is already guilty.
Below the direct current, secrets pulse in the dark. Project Solstice whispering through sealed sectors, memory edits that never quite took, a second grid no one was meant to see. Kael promised one person, not the world, yet he keeps pulling strangers through blood and acid because the alternative is becoming the machine he built. Naeva shakes in filth she cannot clean, then reaches out anyway, because perfection without choice is just another cage.
This is a story of voltage and flesh, of water turned into service and love turned into software, of cities that rise to escape gravity only to be dragged down by what they refused to carry. Sparks will fade, clay will crack, and the sky will rain steel, but a hand can still find another in the dark.
What is done is done. There is no turning back now. Begin here, and fall.