The sun rose exactly at 6:00 AM.
The golden light filtered through the frosted windows of apartment block E-17, Sector 4, casting long, rectangular shadows across the sterile floor tiles. In unit 342-B, Kazuki Maehara stirred beneath a blanket regulated for optimal sleep temperature. His smart alarm chirped once and went silent.
Kazuki blinked twice. That was all it took. No grogginess, no dragging limbs—those were things of the past. In this world, sleep was just another function to optimize. He sat up, ran a hand through his disheveled black hair, and stared at the blinking blue light on the wall console.
"Optimal safety requires predictable cooperation.
– Governmental Command Protocol, 8th Revision.
He smiled politely at the screen. It always displayed a new quote. Most people ignored them. He did not.
Kazuki brushed his teeth with his auto-scrubber, dressed in his slate-gray uniform, and stepped outside. The hallway smelled faintly of citrus—artificial, of course. Every third door opened in sync with his, as if rehearsed. It always happened like this. The neighbors emerged, all smiling, all equally rested, all equally dressed.
"Good morning, Kazuki-san," chimed Mr. Tanaka from 342-C.
"Morning," Kazuki replied with a light bow. "Lovely weather today."
"Perfect, as always."
It was. Of course it was.
He descended into the subway. The walls pulsed softly with holographic adverts—nutrient packs, vacation simulations, loyalty programs. None of them featured real places. The trains arrived soundlessly, almost apologetically, and passengers moved like clockwork. Everyone looked ahead. No one looked up.
Kazuki stared out the window as the train glided through its usual route. he'd caught a glimpse of the previous district through a the shutters in the window —a blackened steel tower swallowed by creeping green,like moss or maybe vines , a glimpse of a world before the System. No one ever spoke of it. That, too, was forgotten in the records : the art of history
His destination blinked on the hologram :
RESEARCH DISTRICT 12-A: ADVANCED BIOENGINEERING FACILITY.
Kazuki stepped off. Security scanned him in under two seconds. He walked through reinforced corridors past glistening white rooms and glass chambers. Behind one, nanomachines writhed under a microscope—microscopic, modular, and impossibly complex. He greeted them like old friends.
His lab was neatly arranged, almost obsessively so. On the left: diagnostics equipment. On the right: component synthesizers. On the screen: the current iteration of his work—adaptive regenerative nanomachines, designed to accelerate cell recovery by a factor of ten.
"Kazuki-senpai," a younger researcher's voice was heard from down the hall. "Your synthesis batch from last night—it succeeded."
She wore a slightly oversized white lab coat over a simple shirt and comfortable pants, with a few pens tucked into the coat's pockets. Her sneakers were scuffed from constant movement, and a pair of round glasses often slid down her nose.
She had messy purple hair and often seemed a little clumsy, dropping things or bumping into objects. But her eyes always shone brightly, like stars filled with excitement and curiosity.
He nodded. "Thank you, Ai. Upload the data to my station."
He sat, fingers poised over the console, mind already spiraling through equations. This was his world. Numbers. Possibilities. Precision. Here, in this perfectly ordered domain, he could almost believe the rest of the world was just as logical.
But even as he worked, a flicker of doubt remained. A shadow at the edge of perfection.
At exactly 12:30 PM, he closed his terminal and left for lunch.
The routine never changed. He met Hayato at Table 9 of Café Vernal—a quiet place tucked between Sector 4's transit loops.
Hayato was always already there, nursing a cup of bitter black tea and flicking through some arcane document on his slate. A historian through and through—one of the last allowed access to pre-System data. He spoke in half-whispers and veiled references.
Later that evening, after another flawless shift, Kazuki received an note from his friend.
"I NEED to see you Urgently HerE. same LPace."
— Hayato Sakamoto.
Kazuki's fingers hesitated over the keyboard.
Hayato was a historian. One of the few granted full access to the Network. A friend. An anomaly. Someone who read the past instead of forgetting it.
I Was worried