The lights of Neo-Energia knew no mercy. They were not merely for illuminating streets; they were a chemical weapon aimed directly at the pupils. On the ninetieth floor of the Continuity Tower, Sino sat before his control panel, a cold technological shrine. The air in the room was saturated with the scent of ozone and disinfectants—air recycled hundreds of times to maintain an optimal oxygen ratio that kept the brain in a state of maximum alertness.
Sino placed his trembling hand against the glass of the window. The cold soothed, if only slightly, the burning sensation lurking behind his eyelids. Below him, the city resembled a vast electronic circuit board: cargo vehicles moved in perfectly straight lines, never deviating; pedestrians on magnetic sidewalks advanced at a constant pace, their heads slightly bowed toward their tablets—closing deals, writing reports, or analyzing data at three o'clock after a midnight that never came.
"Shift number 402… status: full wakefulness," Sino muttered hoarsely as the voice system recorded his words.
Sino's job was to monitor the Neural Oscillation Index of thousands of employees in Sector (B). The screen before him was a forest of dancing green lines. Each line represented a human life—the pulse of its thoughts, its resistance to the instinctive call of rest. In Neo-Energia, sleep was classified as a failure of human evolution, a remnant of the age of "weak humans" who wasted a third of their lives in an unproductive coma.
Suddenly, amid the visual noise, Sino's gaze froze on trajectory number 882. The green line, which had been pulsing vigorously, suddenly bent downward in a free fall. It was not a heart attack, nor a stroke. It was the Gap—that moment when the chemical barrier of the serum collapses, and consciousness slips into a black hole.
A tight pressure gripped Sino's chest. He was supposed to press the large red button—the one that would dispatch a Neural Intervention Unit to employee 882's office, to implant a "rapid correction" needle into his spinal cord.But he didn't.
Through the surveillance camera attached to the employee's personal file, Sino watched the man—his name was Igar. Igar had rested his head in his palm; his eyes had rolled inward. His face, which moments ago had been rigid with concentration, suddenly relaxed. In that instant, Igar did not look like someone committing a crime. He looked like someone who had become a child again. He looked… free.
"What are you doing, Sino?" he whispered to himself, his fingers hovering over the keyboard.
In Neo-Energia, lying was not merely a moral sin—it was a data malfunction that threatened the city's stability. And yet, driven by an instinct he did not understand, Sino's fingers moved with swift professionalism. He cut one second from the live data stream and replaced it with a second from the employee's previous record. In the language of the system, nothing had happened. Igar had not fallen asleep, and Sino had seen nothing.
But the silence that followed was heavier than any noise. Sino felt the lights in the room grow brighter, as if the walls themselves were accusing him.
When his shift ended, he felt no desire to visit the Energy Cafés, where workers gathered to exchange technical information and drink concentrated vitamin fluids. There was a strange heaviness in his limbs—a sensation described in old books as fatigue, a term deleted from official dictionaries and replaced with temporary efficiency deficiency.
He stepped out into the street. The outside air was dry, laden with factory dust from chimneys that never stopped exhaling. He walked in the opposite direction of his home, slipping through the crowds like cosmic ants. He was looking for Igar. He didn't know why, but he felt that his own continued existence depended on understanding what had happened in that single second.
He reached Sector (C), a residential zone where human capsules were stacked atop one another. He found Igar sitting on the edge of a metal curb, staring at his empty hands. His features bore the mark of profound shock—like someone who had awakened from a temporary death only to find the world uglier than the one he left behind.
Sino sat beside him. Neither looked at the other; this kind of eye contact was considered a waste of time.
"Why didn't you report me?" Igar suddenly said, his voice like the rustle of dry paper.
Sino stiffened. "How did you know it was me watching you?"
"I saw your light signature flicker on the side screen of my desk before everything went dark… then it happened. I fell into somewhere. It wasn't a place on the map."
Sino turned toward him, breaking a communication rule for the first time. "Where did you go? The serum prevents dreams—it stops the brain from imagining anything beyond material reality. That's what the Continuity Manual says."
Igar laughed bitterly, a laugh closer to a cough. "The manual lies. When the circuit breaks, everything floods in at once. I saw… I saw a color that doesn't exist here. It was like fire, but calm, sinking into a sea of gray cotton. And people… they were smiling with their eyes closed. Can you imagine that, Sino? Smiling without a productive reason?"
Before Sino could reply, the sky above them flashed crimson. It wasn't the color of sunset—it was Purge Light. The system had detected the data gap. Silent surveillance drones descended from the tops of the towers like birds of prey, their massive spotlights sweeping the alleys in search of "idle cells."
"They've found us," Igar said calmly, as if he no longer cared.
But Sino—who had spent his life watching green lines—felt a surge of unfamiliar anger. He grabbed Igar's hand and pulled him up. "Not yet. If what you saw was real, they can't burn us before we see it too."
In that moment, Sino transformed from a monitor protecting the system into a virus threatening its existence. They ran—not toward work, but toward the shadows forming at the edges of the city, where rebels whispered of a place called Night: a place electricity could not reach, where dreams lived like hunted thieves.