The city roared back to life the moment he crossed the threshold.
Nova Helix was a marvel carved from ambition—glass and steel stitched together by neon veins and corporate algorithms. Its towers clawed upward like sharpened teeth, constantly devouring the sky. Below, transit veins pulsed with crowds, fast and fluid, scrubbed of history and smell. Everything gleamed. Everything lied.
Eliyas moved like static through the current, shoulders hunched in a Helion-issued jacket that hadn't dried properly, its synthetic fibers still damp with city rain. He didn't bother adjusting the collar. No one here noticed details like that. No one looked up unless their HUDs told them to.
Helion Core was nestled in the upper arc of Sector 7, floor ninety-four—a glass capsule suspended above the city's smogline. From there, the world looked antiseptic. Controlled. Like a model of reality, not the thing itself.
He tapped his ID against the entry panel, the doors whispering open.
"Late," came the voice, flat and digitized, before he'd even cleared the threshold.
Rae, his team supervisor. She didn't glance away from her desk interface. Her tone didn't rise. No inflection. Just another notification in human form.
"I know," Eliyas murmured, dropping his bag at his station. "System sync error this morning. Had to reboot from my terminal."
She nodded—barely a twitch of muscle. "You've been syncing from a private device lately."
He didn't answer. Her words weren't an accusation, not yet. Just data.
The others were already at their stations, heads bowed to glass panels, typing without touching, frowns smudged into their reflections. The room smelled of filtered air and mild antiseptics, a corporate ghost of cleanliness. There was no hum from the servers. Too efficient. Too quiet. Like a cathedral designed by machines.
Hours passed in a blur of blinking graphs, predictive models, redacted code lines. Monitoring kinetic traffic in the city's lower districts. Cross-referencing atmospheric shifts against citizen emotional data. Eliyas stared at a pulsing line graph long after he'd finished the script that generated it. He couldn't remember what it was measuring anymore.
"Lunch?" Theo asked, hovering near his station.
Eliyas blinked up, surprised to find himself alone. The others had already gone. Rae too.
He followed Theo to the break sector—a quiet alcove with floor-to-ceiling panels showing a projected ocean. The tide never changed. The seagulls looped in the same arc every five minutes.
"God, I hate this place," Theo muttered, tearing open a protein wrap. "My niece draws better than this."
Eliyas smiled faintly, the expression more memory than feeling. He tapped the table, bringing up a beverage prompt. "Caffeine. Standard issue."
"You been off lately," Theo said. "Not just tired. I mean... you look like a mirror that forgot what it's reflecting."
Eliyas took a sip. "That's poetic for someone with mustard on his tie."
Theo looked down, wiped it with his thumb. "I'm serious, man. You haven't been here all week. And I don't mean physically. Even Rae noticed. She was talking about redirecting your queue."
"Let her." Eliyas leaned back. "Nothing I do here changes anything anyway."
"Don't go nihilist on me."
"It's not nihilism if the system really doesn't care." His voice was calm, almost gentle. "I ran a thread prediction model this morning. Feed variances in Sector 12. You know what the suggested output was?"
Theo raised a brow.
"Deploy psychological noise. 'Localized optimism stimuli.' Basically flood the area with good news ads and tailored microrewards."
"And?"
"I traced the loop. None of the actual data changed. No aid sent. No policy adjustments. Just a dopamine patch. Wrap the wound in pretty light."
They were silent for a while. The synthetic ocean breathed in pixels around them.
"You ever think about leaving?" Theo asked.
"Every day," Eliyas said. "But then I remember—I wouldn't know where to go."
Theo nodded slowly, gaze distant. "I thought you went out into the grey zones last weekend. Off-grid stuff?"
"Yeah." Eliyas hesitated. "It's quiet out there. Like the air remembers what it meant to be air."
"That where you scratched up your hands?"
Eliyas looked at the gauze peeking from his sleeves. "Brambles. Maybe something sharper. I didn't look too hard."
"You're starting to sound like those Heloine-folk. Whispering about old echoes and anomalies."
"Maybe they're not wrong," Eliyas muttered. "Maybe something is trying to speak."
Theo studied him. "You sure you're okay?"
"No," Eliyas said plainly. "But I think that's the point."
He left after hours, long after the last terminal had dimmed and the synthetic ocean had restarted its loop for the fifteenth time. He walked past the reception AI, its empty smile twitching in programmed politeness, then down the mag-lev corridor.
His reflection stared back at him in the tunnel glass—hollow-eyed, shoulders stooped. He didn't recognize the man.
The tram arrived. He didn't board.
Instead, he turned away from the city lights.
Away from the sterile glow.
Toward the edge.
Where silence still had a voice.