The first death did not happen in a public square.
It happened in a corridor.
In Laboris, a man slipped on hot oil from an old machine when he was pushed to form a line. He hit his head against the metal and lay still. No one bent down to help him. Not out of cruelty. Out of fear that helping might also count as unauthorized behavior.
A soldier looked at him for two seconds, the way one evaluates a broken object. Then he moved the line with his hand.
"Next."
And that was how it began.
Not with speeches.
Not with bombs.
With procedures.
Trasporium: One-Way Trips
At the main station, the air smelled of sweat and cold iron.
The monorails arrived every ten minutes, too punctual, too clean for what was happening. The doors opened and spat out orders over loudspeakers:
"Boarding by groups. Documentation visible. No extra luggage. Remain calm."
People obeyed because obedience was the only thing left.
A mother clutched her child, fingers digging into his jacket as if squeezing hard enough could stop the world from taking him away. An old man trembled with a cloth bag in his hand. A teenager looked around for cameras, as if understanding the system could protect him.
When they tried to ask where they were going, no one answered. Not the operators. Not the soldiers. Not the automated voice.
The wagon windows were darkened. Inside, the heat built too fast. The space smelled of fear.
Someone, by instinct, pounded on the door from the inside.
"They're locking us in!"
A guard did not get agitated. He did not shout. He simply struck the edge of the wagon with the butt of his rifle and said, with a calm that made your skin crawl:
"Silence."
A child cried until he ran out of air. His mother covered his mouth with her hand, not out of cruelty, but out of survival.
At the dimensional teleportation points, cruelty was even faster: the portal light turned on, swallowed entire groups… and the panel shut off as if nothing had happened.
There was no "destination."
There was disappearance.
Comunicaré: The Perfect Script
While the trains filled, public screens repeated the same thing.
Preventive operation.
Temporary relocation.
No incidents reported.
Citizen cooperation.
In Comunicaré, the presenters stayed on camera, with makeup and soft voices, talking about security while the country split open from the inside.
"The Republic is protecting stability," said a woman with a controlled smile. "Any rumor to the contrary is part of disinformation campaigns."
Behind the set, someone cried silently with a dead phone in their hand.
The broadcast did not cut even when videos began to circulate. The videos vanished within minutes, as if they had never existed. Links died. Accounts were frozen.
Dinaria "supported" it with its own clean strike:
Temporary financial adjustment for national security.
People opened their apps and saw zeros. Saw blocks. Saw messages marked "under review."
You could not flee if you could not pay.
You could not resist if you could not buy.
You could not exist if you could not move.
Fortis: Presence Becomes Action
Fortis did not get its hands dirty at first.
Fortis organized.
Units deployed at intersections, neighborhood entrances, rooftops, bridges. At first they only watched. Then, when the line broke, when someone tried to run, when someone raised their voice… the "presence" became something simpler and more final.
A man shoved another to break through the cordon.
A soldier placed a hand on his chest.
"Return to your zone."
"No! My wife is—!"
The soldier did not argue. He did not seem to enjoy anything. He raised the weapon like a tool and fired once.
The body fell to the side.
The sound was short. The blood was real. The crowd recoiled like a single frightened animal. No one screamed at first. Shock shuts down the throat.
Then the screaming began.
And Fortis responded the way it always did, without emotion:
"Next."
It was not sadism.
It was efficiency.
Laboris and Cintekis: Real-Time Selection
In Laboris, the filters changed on the fly.
The scanner recognized faces and marked colors:
Green: useful.
Yellow: relocatable.
Red: disruptive.
No one explained what "disruptive" meant. Everyone understood when they saw the reds pulled aside, pushed toward a side door, far from the "normal" trains.
Someone tried to step between a red and the door.
"He's my brother."
The soldier shoved him with a hard blow to the stomach, not to kill him, but to teach the correct lesson.
"Do not interrupt the process."
In Cintekis, the algorithm did its work, and it did it fast. It did not choose the guilty. It chose the disposable.
An engineer stared at a list updating live. Names appeared and vanished at an impossible speed.
"How…?" she murmured.
A colleague looked at her with red, sleepless eyes.
"Don't ask. Or you become one."
She swallowed. Closed the monitor.
And in the silence of that laboratory, for one second, an old melody leaked through a faulty speaker, as if the electricity itself were humming.
The engineer froze.
Not because of the song.
But because of the exact moment it played.
Mediavare: Death as Logistics
In Mediavare, there was no panic. There was work.
The furnaces had been lit before dawn. The air smelled of chemicals, hot metal, smoke that seeped into your clothes and never left. Trucks came in through sealed routes, tarps closed, and the people working there no longer asked questions.
Not because they were monsters.
Because if you asked questions, you ended up on the other side of the tarp.
A young worker, pale-faced, saw a hand protruding from beneath a poorly placed sheet of plastic. Not whole. Just a piece of skin, stiff fingers. He stared too long.
The supervisor approached him.
"Don't look."
"What… what is that?"
The supervisor did not bother to lie nicely.
"What's left."
The kid swallowed, covered his mouth to keep from vomiting. The supervisor grabbed his arm firmly, not kindly.
"If you break here, you enter the process."
The kid nodded, shaking.
He worked.
And every time a hatch closed, Mediavare consumed another piece of Norgalia, with no applause from anyone.
Hospedaré: Numbered Rooms
Hospedaré filled up first.
Not with tourists. With "relocated" families.
The facilities looked clean, almost kind. Aligned beds, light-colored walls, numbers on the doors, guards in the hallways.
But the food was scarce. Water had schedules. Exits were blocked. And the staff's favorite phrase was always the same:
"It's temporary."
On the second day, a woman fainted from fever. On the third, an old man stopped waking up. On the fourth, a teenager hanged himself with a bedsheet in the bathroom.
There were no screams in the hallway.
Just a guard typing something into a tablet.
"Medical incident," he said without looking up.
The word "suicide" did not exist in the protocol.
Death, in the Republic, was a data point.
Agrobia: Stained Land
Agrobia did not comply.
Not because they were heroes.
Because when your food is taken from you, there is nothing left to negotiate.
Farmers built barricades with old machinery. Burned part of their own harvest rather than surrender it. Hid in barns. Used tools as weapons.
Fortis responded with controlled fire.
They did not burn the entire field. Only what was necessary.
A barn burned with people inside because someone closed the door in panic and no one had the courage to open it. The screams lasted less than one expects. Smoke works fast.
Mariel ran with her face covered in ash, eyes wide, unable to contain what she was seeing. She saw her father fall to the ground from a shot that did not sound "heroic." It sounded dry. Real. Final.
Her voice left her. What came out was not crying. It was something broken.
The land was stained, and for the first time, Agrobia understood a simple truth:
The Republic did not want obedience.
It wanted total control.
Gray City Hears the Song
That night, Gray City was strangely silent.
Not because it was safe.
Because there were hardly any people left to make noise.
An old radio, forgotten in a window, turned itself on again. Static. Cracks. Then, as if someone on the other side were breathing inside the device, it sounded clear. Too clear to be coincidence.
A child, the same one from the station, stared at the radio as if it were an animal.
"Why is it still playing?" he whispered.
His father held him tightly. Too tightly.
He did not answer.
Because some questions are not answered.
They are ignored.
And somewhere in the country, behind screens and seals, the execution continued advancing in phases, with the coldness of a clock that does not know the word "mercy."