Pulse promises a healthier, longer life for all — if you can afford it. Monitored by an invisible network of devices, citizens live and die by their LifeScore: a brutal calculation of fitness, diet, emotions, risk appetite, and compliance. Healthy living is expensive. Happiness is suspicious. Poverty is fatal. In a future ruled by algorithms, your every breath has a price.
Chapter 1: The Pulse
Leah Winters sat hunched on the narrow bed in the corner of her flat — if one could call it that — watching the pale green glow of her Pulse terminal flicker on the cracked wall. It was three in the morning. She hadn’t slept. She hadn’t eaten. She hadn’t wept, though God knew she wanted to. The device clicked and stuttered, then spoke in its unbearable syrupy voice:
“Notification: Your LifeScore has decreased. Premium adjustment: +17.4%. Health risk detected: elevated cortisol levels, insufficient rest, unstable metabolic patterns. Thank you for taking responsibility for your wellbeing.”
She buried her face in her hands. The room smelled faintly of rotting fabric and ancient damp. Outside, sirens wept in the night like wounded animals, and somewhere in the building — three floors down, maybe — a man was playing an old song from a tinny speaker. The melody floated up through the broken windows: a lamentation, slow and heavy. Leah recognised it distantly from a forgotten past: “Tchornaya Noch” — Black Night.
The words, though barely audible, clung to her mind:
“Black night, only bullets whistle across the steppe…”
“Black night, you are so dear to me…”
Somewhere, someone still remembered sorrow properly — not the clean, curated sadness that Pulse encouraged, with its mindful breathing exercises and pre-approved meditation playlists, but the raw, torn sadness of men who sang because nothing else remained.
Leah lifted her head. The terminal still glowed. It never slept. It never loved. It never forgave.
She thought bitterly of the day she had first installed Pulse — how bright and shiny the promises had seemed: “Lower premiums! Optimise your health! Live your best life!” She had signed the consent forms with a trembling hand, dreaming of a cheaper future, a future where she might save enough to rent a better flat, or open the café she had once scribbled about in her battered notebook.
Now she knew better. Pulse was no guardian. It was a jailer.
The whir of her ancient wristband reminded her to move. She was behind on her daily steps.
“Get up,” she whispered to herself, like a drunkard urging himself to take just one more drink. “Get up, Leah. Walk.”
She stumbled to her feet. The floorboards groaned.
In the gloom, her reflection caught in the cracked mirror by the door: a pale face, hollow eyes, mouth twisted in grim determination. Was this still her? Or had she already become a creature bred by the Algorithm, existing not to live but to score?
She marched mechanically around the flat, fifteen steps across, fifteen steps back, like a prisoner pacing a cell.
The speaker downstairs warbled on — a different song now, equally broken and beautiful. The voice of a man who had loved and lost everything, who still sang because what else could he do?
“A weary heart, a soul torn asunder…”
Leah thought: He sings because he cannot stop. I walk because I cannot stop.
When she finally collapsed onto the bed again, her terminal beeped:
“Achievement unlocked: Movement Goals – Minor Tier. Adjusting LifeScore: +0.01%.”
She laughed. A raw, hoarse laugh that echoed against the stained walls. What did 0.01% buy her? A few pennies off a premium that still devoured half her salary? A few extra weeks before the algorithm deemed her a liability to be priced out of existence?
The laughter turned to sobbing before she could stop it.
But even through the tears, she heard the music, still rising from below — as if to say, Suffer. Endure. Sing anyway.
The night wore on. The city, wrapped in its electric shroud, turned over in uneasy sleep. And Leah, lying awake in the half-dark, vowed with a fierce, trembling hatred:
I will find a way to live. Even if I must break the whole damned system to do it.
Chapter 2: Hacking Life
The next morning, or rather some grey, indistinct hour that could be called morning by those who kept faith in the old ways of time, Leah stood before the cracked mirror once again. The reflection was no kinder in the daylight: greasy hair scraped back into a knot, bruised hollows beneath the eyes, shoulders hunched forward as though permanently shielding herself from an unseen blow.
Above her head, stuck crookedly with peeling tape, was the Pulse icon — a corporate sticker mailed free of charge to all citizens, alongside instructions to “Create a Wellness Space in Your Home.” A heart beating inside a fingerprint. An image of control masquerading as compassion.
Leah muttered under her breath, a stream of curses stitched together with fragments of old songs. Somewhere deep inside her, a thought gnawed: Was this life? This numbered, scored, hollow existence?
The terminal whirred at her side, insistent.
“Reminder: Caloric intake incomplete. Nutritional risk detected. Suggested action: consume approved foods within the next 15 minutes.”
“Approved foods,” she scoffed.
The only thing left in the flat was a bruised, half-rotten apple and a packet of nutrient wafers that tasted like cardboard dipped in regret.
She bit into the apple. It bled sourness down her chin. Somewhere far above her station, the rich were sipping organic açai smoothies grown in vertical gardens, their premiums lowering with every immaculate mouthful.
There was a rapping at the door — three quick knocks, then a pause, then two slower. Leah’s heart stumbled. It was the signal.
She wiped her mouth, checked the mirror (a stupid reflex: as if she could still appear dignified), and opened the door a crack.
Omar Patel slipped inside like a shadow. He wore an old grey hoodie pulled low over his face, but even so, Leah could see the glint of mischief in his eyes.
“You’re late,” she whispered.
“You’re always dying,” he countered with a grin, pulling a battered old music player from his pocket. It had actual buttons, not a touchscreen. Relic of a freer time.
From its tinny speaker, Leah caught a snatch of another old Russian tune — another black night, another broken heart. Omar winked at her.
“You need to stop listening to that stuff,” she said, trying to suppress a smile.
He shrugged. “It keeps the Pulse readers confused. Background noise score goes up unpredictably. System hates chaos.”
Leah laughed despite herself. Real, breathing laughter. It felt alien in her throat.
“Come on,” Omar said, tossing her a battered rucksack. “I’ve got a hack for you. Better than fake footsteps.”
She hesitated. The last hack had cost her dearly — a sudden spike in her “Behaviour Authenticity Index” that nearly doubled her premium overnight.
“What’s the risk?” she asked.
He grinned wider. “That,” he said, “is the wrong question. You should be asking: what’s the reward?”
They slipped down the back stairwell, past peeling posters of smiling families hugging their terminals, promising eternal health for the obedient. Leah caught her reflection again in a rusted lift door: two ghostly figures, barely distinguishable from the urban decay around them.
Outside, the city breathed heavy under a sky the colour of old bandages.
Everywhere, screens flashed Pulse advertisements: “Live Smart, Pay Less!” “Optimise Your Future Today!”
Omar led her to an abandoned laundrette, one of many casualties of Pulse‘s reign — after all, why bother washing your clothes when your sweat output, chemical balance, and smell particles were already being measured against your insurance score?
Inside, a small group had gathered, faces drawn, bodies twitching nervously like hunted animals. Leah recognised some: a nurse who had lost her licence for “unauthorised stress spikes,” a busker fined for “non-sanctioned public noise,” a once-promising athlete who had collapsed under the weight of perfect health expectations.
Omar spoke quickly, urgently.
“New trick: biofeedback loops. We trick the wristbands, the terminals, the cameras. Short-term bursts of false wellness indicators — high dopamine, low cortisol, perfect blood pressure. Fake as hell, but Pulse can’t tell yet.”
Murmurs rippled through the group. Some hopeful, some sceptical.
Leah’s chest tightened. Another risk. Another chance.
One woman, old enough to remember the world before Pulse, raised a trembling hand.
“But they’ll catch us. They always catch us.”
Omar’s smile faded. “Maybe,” he said simply. “But you pay either way. You pay living like this, or you pay trying.”
Leah felt the bruised apple churning acid in her stomach. She thought of the mirror, the broken food, the numbers ticking up and up no matter how many steps she walked, no matter how many fake smiles she wore for the cameras.
Risk and reward. Risk and reward.
“Count me in,” she said, her voice raw.
Somewhere, distant but insistent, a siren began to wail.
The group fell silent. Leah heard her own heartbeat pounding louder than the city’s noise — a flawed, human rhythm that no algorithm could ever truly own.
Not yet.
Chapter 3: Speculation Fever
The laundrette had no clocks. Time, inside those walls, became slippery — a thing half-remembered, like the faces of dead relatives. Leah sat on an overturned basket, knees drawn to her chest, listening to Omar sketch out the Plan.
Around her, the others muttered, speculating. Always speculating.
They clutched at theories the way drowning men clutch at wreckage.
“Sex twice a week gives you +5 points, guaranteed,” whispered a woman with a surgical mask stretched tight over her thin face.
“No, no,” croaked another, shaking his head like a priest at a heretic. “It’s not the frequency — it’s the satisfaction rating! The sensors pick up endorphin levels!”
Someone else, younger, burning with desperate hope: “I heard if you eat broccoli three times a day, no matter how bad your other scores, you can lower your premium by 20%.”
The conversations whirled around Leah like smoke — the same smoke that clogged the cracked mirrors behind the broken washing machines. She caught glimpses of herself again and again: a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, fractured and endless.
Was there even a real Leah left beneath all the scoring and the gaming?
Omar tapped the terminal he had smuggled in, its screen shielded with tinfoil to block unwanted transmissions. Lines of data scrolled across it like a priest’s endless litany of sins.
“The new update’s coming soon,” he said grimly. “They’re adding ‘natural authenticity’ measures. Punishing people who look like they’re trying too hard.”
A collective groan rolled through the room.
Trying too hard. Trying not hard enough.
Every act was judged. Every breath weighed.
It was then that old Boris, the retired busker, started singing again. No one stopped him. No one had the heart.
“Oh, my weary heart, how heavy your burden…”
The words curled through the stale air like incense, clashing against the cold data flashing across Omar’s screen. For a moment, Leah closed her eyes and let the ancient melody wash over her, sweet and painful at once.
There was power in that sadness.
There was truth in it.
And truth, in this world, was the only real rebellion left.
The meeting broke up into smaller knots of whispered plans and arguments. Leah wandered toward the back of the laundrette, past a vending machine long dead but still filled with dusty packages of synthetic “healthy snacks” — high-protein bars designed by Pulse Nutrition Labs.
One of them had rotted through its wrapper, leaking a sickly yellow paste.
Broken food, Leah thought grimly. Even the machines can’t keep it pure.
She lingered near a wall covered in hand-scrawled graffiti: formulae, theories, mad poems about life before Pulse. In one corner, someone had etched:
“NO SYSTEM CAN MEASURE A SOUL.“
Leah smiled. Not because she believed it — she didn’t, not entirely — but because the act of writing it was itself a kind of victory. A risk worth taking.
Behind her, Omar appeared, slinging the rucksack over his shoulder.
“You think it’ll work?” Leah asked, nodding toward the biofeedback devices hidden inside.
He hesitated. That pause was more honest than any speech.
“I think,” he said finally, “we either hack the game or the game hacks us.”
Outside, the city rumbled. A Pulse Drone buzzed low overhead, scanning faces in the streets. Leah watched the pedestrians stiffen instinctively, adjusting their posture, smiling that ghastly, hollow smile — the Smile of Wellness, the smile every citizen had learned to wear like a second skin.
Another risk. Another point lost or gained. Life itself had become a gambler’s ruin.
As they slipped back into the alleyways, Leah felt the hunger gnawing at her again — not just in her stomach, but in her bones, in her blood. A hunger not merely for food or money, but for something harder to name: dignity, freedom, the right to exist without being measured.
The street was alive with the manufactured noise of calm: Pulse stations pumping out artificial birdsong, the low hum of “soothing” brainwave frequencies designed to nudge cortisol levels down.
Yet above it all, faint but stubborn, Boris’s song still drifted from the laundrette’s cracked windows.
“The night is dark, the path is long, but I will walk it still…”
Leah whispered the next line to herself without even meaning to:
“For even broken souls can burn.”
And somewhere deep inside her, beyond the reach of any algorithm, a small, defiant flame flickered to life.
Chapter 4: Promises in the Air
In the square outside the Ministry of Health and Wellbeing, a stage had been erected overnight, swaddled in banners blindingly white and clean. Leah stood at the back of the crowd, pressed shoulder to shoulder with others, breathing in the sour reek of hope.
Above them, giant screens flickered with the Pulse logo — that endless beating heart inside a fingerprint — and below it, Minister Eleanor Bright’s face, all teeth and sparkle.
She looked like an angel of salvation, if salvation could be bought wholesale and delivered by drone.
Leah tugged her hood tighter around her head, wary of the roaming cameras sweeping the crowd, measuring excitement levels, emotional fluctuations, “civic enthusiasm.”
A brass band played a grotesque, upbeat rendition of a folk song Leah dimly remembered from childhood — its once-haunting melody drowned beneath the crushing cheer of trumpets and drums.
“Everything’s fake,” she thought, even the music. Especially the music.
The speech began. Minister Bright’s voice, warm as honey, poured over the square:
“Friends! Citizens! It is time to reclaim our right to live healthy, joyful lives! No longer shall fresh food be a privilege of the few. No longer shall wellbeing be chained to wealth! We will subsidise organic produce, construct community gyms, offer wellness retreats at no cost!”
The crowd roared approval. Leah felt herself momentarily swept up in it, the way a man might be carried along by a flood even as he drowns.
Numbers flashed on the screens behind the Minister:
- “Goal: 50% Reduction in Urban Premiums by 2028!”
- “Healthy Living Access for All!”
- “Pulse Reform Act – Draft Complete!”
The numbers danced. Leah knew numbers lied better than any politician.
She shifted uncomfortably. Her wristband buzzed — a warning. Her stress levels were rising, her PulseScore at risk of falling. She clenched her teeth and forced herself to relax. Smile. Breathe evenly. Show enthusiasm. The system was watching. It always was.
From a nearby food stall, the scent of roasting vegetables drifted over — sweet and rich. Leah’s stomach growled. She turned and saw the sign:
“New! Subsidised Wellness Meals! Only £11.99!”
£11.99. For a handful of lentils and half a beetroot.
Leah laughed aloud — a sharp, desperate sound — and earned herself a sharp glance from a nearby drone operator.
The illusion cracked for a moment then: she saw it all.
The banners, the music, the promises — all stitched together like a dying man’s shroud, stitched to hold back the stench of rot.
Omar appeared beside her, hands shoved deep into his pockets, chin tipped down against the scanning drones.
“You look like you believe,” he muttered.
“I want to,” Leah admitted.
Omar snorted softly. “Wanting is dangerous.”
On the stage, Minister Bright raised her arms high, a simulacrum of grace.
“Together, we will build a future where no one must pay for their health with their soul!”
The crowd erupted again. Flags waved. Drones captured smiling faces to beam across the city. Already, Leah knew, her face would be analysed for loyalty, her expression graded for sincerity.
Omar nudged her. “Come on. Before they start handing out Thought Loyalty Certificates.”
They slipped away through the fringes of the crowd, down an alley where the real city still festered: rats scuttling through gutters, windows boarded with rusted sheet metal, the air thick with a stench no official ever admitted existed.
At the mouth of the alley, a cracked mirror leaned drunkenly against a wall. Leah caught a glimpse of herself again — the thousandth fragmented Leah, stitched together by fear, by hunger, by the brutal mathematics of survival.
Smile for the cameras. Starve in the dark.
They ducked into a shadowed doorway as a patrol passed. In the distance, the Minister’s voice still soared, promising salvation.
Omar lit a cigarette — a stupid, reckless act. The scent of burning tobacco curled upward like a prayer.
“You think she means it?” Leah asked quietly.
Omar exhaled slowly, watching the smoke dissipate into the poisoned sky.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she believes her own words.”
A pause. Then:
“But belief doesn’t stop the machine.”
Leah thought of the broken food, the hollow numbers, the smiling masks. She thought of the bruised apple in her kitchen, the endless steps walked for no reward.
Above them, high on the Ministry screens, the Pulse icon pulsed, steady as a beating heart.
A heart that never missed a beat.
A heart that never forgave weakness.
Leah straightened her back, feeling the old stubbornness, the old hunger, rise again.
“Then we break the machine,” she said.
The words tasted bitter, and good, in her mouth.
Chapter 5: The Great Clampdown
It began with the laughter.
One evening — a Tuesday, perhaps, but Leah had long since ceased to keep track of such irrelevant markers — two children on Willow Lane burst out laughing as they chased a battered football between the bins.
Within five minutes, a Pulse drone descended, humming like an angry wasp.
By the end of the hour, both families had received official notices: “Excessive Unregulated Emotional Outbursts. LifeScore Adjustment: -5%. Behaviour Audit Pending.”
The message spread like a stain across the city: there was no room left even for joy, unless authorised, unless quantifiable, unless correct.
Leah heard it all from Boris — the old busker who still sang his forbidden Russian songs to an audience of rats and broken machines.
He told it with the grim, resigned air of a man describing the fall of a city already burning.
“They want laughter now,” he muttered, plucking tunelessly at a guitar with only four strings. “But only the right kind. The kind that fits neatly between two metrics.”
Outside, the Pulse billboards changed.
No longer the hopeful banners of Minister Bright’s promises; now, grim warnings in sterile fonts:
- “AUTHENTICITY IS SAFETY.”
- “GAMING THE SYSTEM HARMS EVERYONE.”
- “UNNATURAL BEHAVIOUR = HEALTH RISK.”
Everywhere, Leah saw mirrors.
Real mirrors, shattered and graffiti-smeared.
Metaphorical mirrors: advertisements, cameras, friends turning on friends, neighbours reporting neighbours.
Everyone watched themselves. Everyone wondered: Am I smiling naturally? Am I walking naturally? Am I afraid in a sanctioned manner?
The city reeked of fear.
The crackdown struck Leah personally two days later, at a Pulse Health Station on Denton Street.
She had gone, reluctantly, to tick the mandatory “Mental Wellness Check” — a kiosk where citizens were required to answer a series of questions designed to gauge emotional authenticity.
The machine was a grotesque hybrid of priest and bureaucrat: sleek white panels, soft feminine voice, flashing reminders to “Relax and Breathe Deeply” while cameras measured eye dilation, blood pressure, microexpressions.
Leah sat stiffly as it began.
“On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy do you feel today?”
A simple enough lie. She selected “4.”
“Please smile naturally.”
She bared her teeth.
The machine clicked ominously.
“Warning: Detected anomalies in muscular tension. Smile appears inauthentic. Recalibrating.”
Another click. Another screen flashed up:
“Emotional Authenticity Deviation Detected. LifeScore Adjustment Pending. Please await notification.”
A whir. A hiss.
And then, from a hidden nozzle, a faint puff of mist sprayed her face — a “wellness enhancement mist,” Pulse had promised — but Leah knew better.
Nothing sprayed from a government machine was benign.
The effect was immediate: her head spun, her mouth went dry, her heart hammered against her ribs like a caged thing.
She stumbled into the street, retching into a broken gutter.
Across the road, a bakery display window reflected her image: blurred, monstrous, drooling.
The mirror again — the thousandth, the ten-thousandth reflection of her soul being stripped away, layer by careful layer.
Behind her, the Pulse terminal at the Health Station beeped cheerily:
“Thank you for taking responsibility for your wellbeing! Your commitment to authenticity has been noted.“
That evening, Leah met Omar by the river, where the city’s forgotten remnants clung to the muddy banks like barnacles.
He looked worse than she had ever seen him — sunken cheeks, bloodshot eyes, a slight tremor in his hands.
“They hit the workshop,” he said without preamble.
“Two drones, three armed Pulse Officers. Raided it at dawn. Took Janey, took Mikhail, took half the kids.”
Leah swore viciously under her breath.
“They charged them?” she asked.
Omar laughed, a harsh, broken sound.
“Who needs charges anymore? Non-compliance. Behavioural fraud. Risk culture. Pick a name. It’s all the same.”
The broken food, the broken numbers, the broken laws.
All stitched together into one seamless machine, pulsing endlessly in time to a song of compliance.
Across the river, the Ministry towers glittered coldly. The giant screens still flashed Minister Bright’s smiling face.
Leah shivered.
“What do we do now?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.
Omar stubbed out his cigarette on the concrete and stared into the black, oil-streaked water.
“We move faster,” he said. “We move smarter. We don’t trust anyone.”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a small black device — no bigger than a cigarette lighter — and pressed it into her hand.
“A scrambler,” he said. “Blocks heartbeat readings for three minutes at a time. Enough to slip through some scans.”
Leah turned the device over in her fingers. It felt heavier than it should have, like it carried the weight of a hundred impossible risks.
She caught her reflection again in a puddle at her feet: blurred, dark, unrecognisable.
And for a moment, she thought she heard the strains of another old song drifting up from the city’s bowels — faint, broken, beautiful:
“I walk through black nights, my heart full of fire…”
Leah smiled, grim and real, for no algorithm to see.
“Let it burn then,” she thought. “Let it burn.”
Chapter 6: Secrets of the Algorithm
The file came wrapped in fear.
Omar brought it to her one night, tucked into the lining of his coat like a priest smuggling forbidden scripture. They met in the ruins of an old car park — a place where Pulse drones seldom ventured, too chaotic, too broken, too full of unpredictable data points.
Leah waited beneath the rusted beams, the wind howling like a wounded beast through the skeletal ruins.
Above her, fragments of adverts fluttered on crumbling walls: faded slogans — “Optimise Your Soul!” — with the Pulse icon beating feebly behind them, a heart that had forgotten how to feel.
Omar’s face, when he arrived, was pale and furious.
“No copies,” he said. “No backups. It’s on this.”
He handed her a data stick, tiny and black. It seemed absurdly small, absurdly innocent. As if all the truths they had suffered under could be contained in a thing no larger than a thumb.
Leah held it without moving.
“What’s in it?”
Omar’s voice was low, brittle with rage.
“The real metrics. The real purpose. They never cared about health. It was never about making people better. It’s about sorting. Sorting and breaking.”
He kicked at a pile of rubble, sending up a cloud of dust that caught the dying light like ghosts.
“Pulse was designed to stratify. To price the poor out of life itself. Health indicators are just camouflage. They weight the scores against income, postcode, biometric lineage… they even track genetic risk factors you can’t control.”
Leah stared at the stick, as if it might bite her.
“Even if you lived perfectly,” Omar said, “ate nothing but organic lettuce, ran marathons, slept like a saint… you’d still pay more. Because you were born on the wrong side of the river.”
A long silence. Only the wind answering back.
She thought of her endless steps, her bruised apple, her forced smiles. The mirror reflections, the broken numbers, the fake birdsong engineered to soothe a soul while draining it of hope.
All of it — a game rigged from the start.
Leah closed her hand around the data stick, so tightly it cut into her palm.
“How do we get it out?” she whispered.
Omar gave a short, bitter laugh.
“We don’t. Not through normal channels. Media’s bought. Politicians are bought. Even Bright — she means well, maybe, but she’s tied to the same leash.”
He pulled out a battered notebook — real paper, real ink — and scribbled a crude diagram.
“One chance,” he muttered. “We hijack the Minister’s next public wellness address. Their biggest broadcast of the year. If we can override the feed, show the real data…”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to.
Leah understood.
They would be hunted.
They would be erased.
But perhaps — just perhaps — they would be seen first.
Risk and reward.
She remembered the broken food vending machines, leaking their synthetic filth onto the pavements. She remembered the children fined for laughter, the mothers scrubbing their smiles for the cameras, the fathers working themselves into cardiac arrest to climb a fraction of a PulseScore point.
“Let’s burn it all,” she said.
Omar grinned, feral and weary.
They spent the next three days preparing, scurrying through the underbelly of the city — forgotten tunnels, disused comms stations, half-collapsed libraries where the rats had long since eaten the last honest books.
Leah saw signs everywhere now, signs she had once ignored.
The mirrors that once reflected her fear now reflected her fury.
The food, so precious and poisoned, mocked her with every plastic-wrapped promise of health.
The endless background music — synthetic birdcalls and waterfalls — began to sound like funeral bells in her ears.
Even the numbers themselves, the PulseScores flashing across public screens, seemed to leer at her:
- “LifeScore: 54.2% – Moderate Risk“
- “Premium Adjustment: +24.7%“
- “Thank you for being responsible.“
The false gratitude was the worst of it.
A thank-you from a machine that fattened itself on despair.
On the night before the broadcast, Leah sat alone in the abandoned laundrette, eating a crust of bread stolen from a dumpster, her fingers shaking from exhaustion.
She caught her reflection once again — distorted in the cracked door of an old dryer.
For a moment, she did not recognise herself.
Was this broken, gaunt creature really the girl who had once dreamed of opening a café?
The girl who had once believed hard work would be enough?
The girl who had once thought she could trick the algorithm with steps and smiles?
“No,” she thought. “That girl is dead.”
And in her place: a soldier.
She slipped the data stick into her pocket, next to the small black scrambler device Omar had given her.
Her heartbeat slowed, her breath steadied.
One chance. One terrible, beautiful chance.
Outside, the city pulsed and buzzed, a monstrous machine wrapped in neon lies.
Above it all, the sky sagged low and black. Somewhere — whether in her mind or in truth, she no longer knew — she heard it again:
“Black night… weary heart… walk on, walk on…”
Leah rose to her feet.
Tomorrow, they would burn the mask away.
Tomorrow, they would break the mirror.
Or die trying.
Chapter 7: Revolt and Betrayal
It began not with a bang, but with a flicker.
One moment, the Ministry’s Grand Broadcast blazed across every screen in the city — the smiling face of Minister Bright, framed in the sterile perfection of a wellness centre, extolling the endless virtues of Pulse.
And then, for a heartbeat, for less than a breath — static.
A glitch.
Leah stood in the underbelly of the old Metro tunnels, her hands slick with sweat despite the cold, the scrambler humming in her pocket. Omar crouched beside the makeshift transmitter, muttering prayers in a language older than cities.
Another flicker.
And then — the smile vanished.
On every screen, everywhere, across streets, homes, hospitals, the truth bloomed like an ugly flower.
Tables. Charts. Memos stamped “CONFIDENTIAL.”
Pulse scoring biases: postcode penalties, DNA discrimination, psychological profiling weighted to birth order and ancestral trauma.
Every hidden cruelty, every engineered despair, laid bare for all to see.
For a moment, the city froze.
A breath held at the edge of a scream.
Leah watched from a shattered shopfront, where a cracked mirror still hung above a broken till.
In its fragmented reflection, she saw the people stop in the streets: heads cocked, mouths open, faces caught between disbelief and rage.
The numbers crawled up the screens:
- “LifeScore Adjustment Factors:
- Postcode Penalty: +22%
- Genetic Instability Flag: +15%
- Childhood Trauma Risk Index: +12%
- Income Predictive Deficiency: +30%**”
The machine had always been honest — just not in the way they’d been told.
Someone screamed. A real, raw scream, the kind no algorithm could ever mistake for anything but agony.
Then chaos.
In the main square, Pulse drones swooped low, spraying calming agents into the air. Tear gas disguised as “Wellness Mists.”
Officers in white exosuits surged into the crowds, corralling, scanning, dragging people away.
Leah ducked into an alley, heart hammering against her ribs.
Omar staggered beside her, clutching the transmitter, his face wild with exhausted triumph.
“We did it,” he gasped. “They saw it. We made them see!“
She wanted to believe him. She wanted to cling to the fire still burning inside her, fed by every broken mirror and poisoned apple she had ever swallowed.
But as they turned onto Redfern Street, she saw the second wave coming.
Screens flickered again. The leaks vanished.
Minister Bright’s face returned — a little paler now, eyes tighter, but still smiling.
A new message scrolled beneath her:
“Beware misinformation. Protect your community. Report disloyalty. Wellness is Truth.“
And then the most terrible thing:
Cheering.
Somewhere, among the terrified faces, the bruised bodies, the broken souls, people were clapping.
Whether out of fear, confusion, or simple animal instinct, Leah could not tell.
The machine had been hurt — but it had not fallen.
It adapted.
It always adapted.
They ran. They had no choice.
In the alleys and ruins, in the decaying heart of the city, patrols swept through like steel storms.
Leah caught glimpses: a boy clubbed to the ground for “resisting recalibration,” a mother dragged from her home screaming about her “right to breathe free.”
The world blurred into noise, gas, shouts, running feet.
In an abandoned station, Leah and Omar collapsed behind an old ticket counter.
For a moment, neither spoke. The old music in her mind — the black songs of loss and defiance — played on, sweet and broken.
Finally, Omar lifted his head.
“We have to go public again,” he rasped. “We find another channel. Another leak. We—”
The shot was almost tender.
A soft sound, like a cork pulled from an old wine bottle.
Omar stiffened, his mouth forming a question he didn’t have time to ask.
Blood blossomed on his hoodie like a crimson flower.
Behind him stood Janey — Janey of the workshops, Janey who had once taught Leah how to fool a biometric scanner with a cat’s heartbeat.
Gun in hand.
Expression blank.
Pulse Officers in white moved in behind her, swift and efficient.
Leah froze.
Betrayal hung in the air thicker than smoke.
Janey’s voice was calm, almost gentle:
“Compliance is wellness. Resistance is disease.”
Her mouth said it.
But Leah saw her eyes — wide, terrified, drowning — screaming a different truth.
They broke her, Leah realised.
They broke her and stitched her back together with fear.
Leah ran.
She ran through the sewers, the back alleys, the graveyards of broken machines.
She ran past mirrors that no longer reflected her at all, only a blur of motion and loss.
She ran until her lungs tore at her chest and her legs gave way.
And when she could run no more, she lay on her back in the filthy, freezing dark, staring up at the sagging night sky.
Somewhere far away, a song drifted up — faint, stubborn:
“I will walk through the black night… even with no light left in me…”
Leah closed her eyes.
The machine had adapted.
The machine had crushed their little spark.
But still — she had shown them.
The truth was a seed now, buried deep in frightened hearts.
Maybe tomorrow it would wither.
Maybe it would grow.
For tonight, it was enough that it existed at all.
Chapter 8: A New Way
The city burned behind her.
Not in flames — no, Pulse was too clinical for such crude endings — but in silence, in absence, in compliance so deep it hollowed out the streets.
Leah stood at the edge of the old railway line, rucksack slung over her shoulder, the small black scrambler pressed tight in her hand. Her LifeScore — the last one she would ever see — blinked weakly on the wristband she had not yet dared to destroy:
“LifeScore: 4.8%. Status: Critical Liability.“
“Recommended Action: Surrender for Rehabilitation.“
She ripped the band from her wrist and flung it into the wasteland.
It landed among the ruins of a world she no longer believed in — twisted beams, shattered glass, the bleached skeletons of old machines that had once hummed promises of salvation.
The river choked and mumbled behind her. In the poisoned dusk, the city’s spires blinked coldly, each topped with the familiar Pulse icon: the fake, beating heart she had given up everything to defy.
There were others, she had heard, scattered like seeds on the wind.
Out in the dead zones, past the walls of compliance, lived small pockets of the Untracked.
No terminals, no drones, no LifeScores.
Only danger. Hunger. Cold.
And the terrible, intoxicating taste of freedom.
It was not a beautiful life they promised — not the polished wellness of the Pulse screens — but it was life.
Real life.
Leah began to walk.
Each step tore at her muscles, still bruised from nights spent running, hiding, resisting.
Each breath scraped her throat raw.
But she walked anyway.
No background noise generators to smooth the air. No synthetic birdsong to soothe the mind. Only the harsh cry of real crows circling overhead, the low, sullen murmur of the broken earth.
In the distance, she caught sight of others — ragged shapes moving among the ruins.
A woman with a child clutched tight against her chest.
An old man dragging a sled laden with stolen vegetables.
A boy, no more than ten, carefully smashing a Pulse terminal with a rusted crowbar.
Leah felt something pull at her lips — a slow, painful thing — and realised she was smiling.
A real smile.
The kind no algorithm could measure.
They made camp in what had once been a petrol station.
The pumps were dry, the shop looted long ago, but there was shelter from the wind and a few scraps of wood to burn.
Someone shared a tin of soup so old the label had long since peeled away. It tasted of metal and ash.
Leah ate it with gratitude so fierce it bordered on madness.
Across the fire, an old woman produced a battered, wheezing accordion and began to play.
It was not a wellness-approved song.
It was not soothing, or polite, or in tune.
It was a wailing thing. A fighting thing. A song that clawed its way up from the roots of the earth and refused to be tamed.
Leah closed her eyes.
In the darkness behind her lids, she saw all the broken mirrors she had ever passed, all the lies she had ever smiled through, all the bruised apples and fake smiles and poisoned songs.
She saw them.
And she let them go.
Later, curled into a corner with the others sleeping around her like fallen leaves, Leah watched the night sky crack open into cold stars.
No screens, no numbers, no Pulse.
Only breathing.
Only being.
Somewhere, far beyond the horizon, the machine still ground on — polishing its lies, recalibrating its metrics, selling salvation by the ounce.
But here, in the wasteland, the pulse of life still beat — ragged, defiant, free.
Leah pressed a hand to her chest and felt it.
Her own heart.
Wild and stubborn.
Unscored. Unmeasured.
Alive.
Chapter 9: Freedom’s Price
At dawn, the wasteland was silver.
The first light did not fall gently here.
It came harsh and cold, painting the skeletal trees and ruined buildings in a light so stark it seemed to flay the city bare.
Leah stood alone on a cracked stretch of old road, the others still huddled by the dying fire behind her.
In her hand she held the last artefact of her old life — the black scrambler.
Its tiny light blinked weakly, signalling the last shreds of energy.
Soon even this small shield would die, and she would be naked before the satellites, the scanners, the endless mechanical eyes.
A choice.
She could turn back.
She could crawl back into the city’s bright prison, let herself be healed, recalibrated, reassigned.
They would feed her well enough. Let her walk among the smiling dead.
Or she could walk forward.
Into hunger. Into cold. Into the unknown.
A battered sign leaned at the side of the road, barely legible beneath layers of grime and graffiti.
Someone had scrawled across it, in furious black strokes:
“WE LIVE STILL.“
Leah reached out and touched the words.
They were real.
Rough under her fingers.
Not digital. Not calculated.
Real.
A gust of wind blew dust into her face. She coughed, laughing bitterly.
Even the dust was real here — not scrubbed, not filtered, not optimised for safe inhalation.
It tasted of death and dirt and stubborn survival.
She licked her cracked lips and smiled.
Above her, a great mirror of sky stretched out — wild, broken, beautiful.
No drones hovered.
No screens pulsed.
No numbers tallied her worth.
Only the stars remained — the same old stars that had watched humanity stumble, suffer, sing, and defy since the first fire was lit on the first night.
Leah tilted her head back and breathed them in.
Far behind her, the Pulse system would already be adjusting her file:
- “Subject: Noncompliant.“
- “Status: Deceased (Administrative).“
- “LifeScore: 0%.“
Dead, by their reckoning.
Extinguished.
Erased.
She laughed — a sharp, broken laugh that felt more alive than anything she had known in years.
She turned and began walking north, away from the dead city, her shadow stretching long before her across the cracked earth.
No map guided her now.
No algorithm chose her path.
Only the old human instincts remained — the ancient, stubborn will to move forward, to survive, to make meaning out of dust and cold and hunger.
And somewhere in the back of her mind, as faint and stubborn as the heartbeat in her chest, the old song rose again:
“Black night, weary heart, walk on…”
Leah whispered the words aloud, her voice hoarse and sure.
Walk on.
Walk on, even when no one measures your steps.
Walk on, even when no reward waits at the end.
Walk on, because living itself — messy, brutal, defiant — was the only victory left.
And it was enough.
Epilogue
Years later, long after the world had changed again — in ways Leah could never have imagined, for better and for worse — the city was found, half-buried in dust.
The terminals still blinked dimly in the ruins, endlessly calculating LifeScores no one would ever read again.
The mirrors were shattered.
The background noise had fallen silent.
The numbers hung in the air like cobwebs, meaningless.
And somewhere beyond the city’s broken bones, in a wild, nameless place where no map reached, stories were still told.
Of a woman who walked into the black night and never returned.
A woman who was not saved by numbers, or measured by compliance, but lived simply because she chose to.
They never knew her name.
They never needed to.
Her choice lived on, stubborn as weeds cracking through concrete.
And in the end, that was enough.