Humans rely on external batteries to function, monitored by a Ministry that regulates every breath and heartbeat. But when one boy quietly unplugs and survives, he sparks a silent revolution that begins not with protest — but with a pulse from within.
The Flicker
Kai awoke to the humming of the wall unit. The ceiling above him — a grey plastic panel stained with condensation — blinked slowly with red: “ENERGY LEVEL CRITICALLY LOW.”
He didn’t sit up. There was no point rushing. Movement, in his current state, was discouraged under the Directive. The Ministry of Vital Energies had made that very clear: “Sudden motion under 5% charge constitutes reckless depletion.” A crime now, like most things.
The cord still hung from the socket beside his bed, limp and pale like a forgotten umbilical. He plugged it into the socket at the base of his neck — the familiar hiss, the faint warmth, the sting. Nothing unusual. But this morning, the current trickled instead of surged.
He lay still, watching the charge bar crawl upwards. 3.8%. 4.0%. 4.1%.
Outside the apartment block, the great city stirred like a machine warming itself — humming, buzzing, wheezing. Somewhere in the hallway, someone had collapsed again. The thump echoed through the pipes and was followed by the shuffle of Ministry medics. Efficient. Unseen.
By 5.0% charge, the room’s central monitor unlocked. Kai’s schedule appeared, projected in dull green text.
CITIZEN: KAI-97-41
FUNCTION: EDUCATIONAL OCCUPANT
ASSIGNMENTS:
06:30 – Arrive at Learning Unit 14 (North Compound)
10:30 – Battery Literacy Module (Compulsory)
13:00 – Efficiency Evaluation
18:00 – Recharge Session (Supervised)
A note flashed underneath:
Reminder: Personal Energy Supplements are state property. Hoarding is treason.
Kai blinked. He had dreamt — again — of running. No socket, no cable, just muscle and breath. A forest maybe. Or was it a corridor with no doors?
He stood, legs trembling under his own weight, and gathered the items the State had allowed him to own. His state-issued jacket, grey with no pockets. His ID band. His Emergency Ration Battery, already marked for collection by the Ministry of Oversight.
The corridor outside smelled faintly of ozone and disinfectant. Neighbours passed one another without greeting, eyes sunken, cords trailing from collars like leashes. The hallway’s speaker cracked faintly, then played the morning message:
“A fully charged citizen is a useful citizen. Be grateful for your current.”
Kai didn’t look up. Somewhere above the walls, behind the ducts, the Authority was listening. It always listened.
He stepped into the elevator, pressed “G”, and watched the numbers descend.
Just before the doors closed, the lights flickered. A pause. A second longer than normal.
He stared at his reflection in the mirrored panel: pale, angular, eyes a little too alert for someone content.
Something in the system was failing. He could feel it in the delay.
And somewhere, deep inside, he felt something ancient and unsanctioned stir — a flicker of energy not granted, not assigned.
His own.
The Ministry of Vital Energies
The Ministry building was a thing of silent terror. It rose above the North Compound like a broken tooth, blackened by decades of ash rain and neglect. Its windows were opaque, not by design, but by some permanent fog that seemed to cling to the structure — as if even light avoided being seen inside.
Kai stood in the designated waiting square, his feet positioned exactly where the floor markers dictated. Around him, a dozen others stood in the same posture — heads bowed, hands clasped, charging cords neatly wound and clipped. One man coughed, and everyone flinched.
A voice crackled through the ceiling:
“Remain still. Movement suggests disorder. Disorder suggests inefficiency.”
The man who coughed sat down slowly, as if trying to disappear through the floor. Two Compliance Clerks approached in silence, dressed in neutral grey with Ministry insignia over their hearts: a battery symbol crossed with an eye. They escorted him away with robotic calm. The floor’s lights flickered, then resumed.
Kai did not move.
He was not meant to be here. This was not in his daily directive. He had received the summons in the early hours, embedded in the system update during his recharge cycle. No explanation, no appeal. Just a line:
“Report to the Ministry of Vital Energies. Sector C. Compliance Interview 09:00.”
The lift arrived without sound. Inside, the lights were too bright and the floor too clean. It smelled faintly of lithium and something older — bleach, maybe, or despair. The only button said “Compliance.” He didn’t press it. The lift moved anyway.
When the doors opened, the air was colder. The corridor ahead was long, windowless, and filled with the low mechanical hum of systems too ancient to repair but too essential to shut down.
At the end sat a desk, and behind it, a woman. She was neither old nor young. Her face bore no expression, only the mark of prolonged exposure to fluorescent lighting. Her nameplate read:
“OVERSIGHT LIAISON – D14”
She gestured without looking up.
“Citizen Kai-97-41. Sit.”
He obeyed. The chair was made of metal. No cushion. No backrest. He was being measured already.
“You’ve been flagged,” she said, without preamble.
Kai blinked. “For what, ma’am?”
She typed something. A long pause. Then:
“Independent dreaming.”
He stared at her. “I—what?”
“Dreams are regulated under the Subconscious Preservation Protocol. Section 14. You’ve had three unregistered sequences in the last cycle. One included unauthorised terrain — forest — and biologically unassisted motion. Running.”
She finally looked up. Her eyes were dull, but not without something sharp behind them. Like knives buried in clay.
Kai felt his heart pick up speed — a dangerous biological indulgence.
“I didn’t know I was dreaming,” he said carefully.
“No one does,” she replied. “That’s why it’s monitored.”
A screen turned towards him. Grainy images: his own sleeping body, spasming slightly; data logs spiking; an audio transcript of something he had whispered:
“No cord. I don’t need the cord.”
She clicked her tongue. “Treasonous sentiment.”
Kai opened his mouth, then closed it.
She continued typing. “You are being referred to the Department of Cognitive Integrity. Until then, your personal charge quota is suspended. You will rely on community stations only.”
His stomach turned cold. Community stations were overburdened, underpowered. People fought over slots. Some never got theirs and simply… dimmed.
“But I’m healthy,” he said. “I passed my last charge assimilation test.”
“You dream,” she said flatly. “Healthy minds do not dream.”
She handed him a stamped form. It simply read:
“Conditionally Functional.”
Below it:
“Subject to further review. Subject to observation. Subject.”
Kai rose slowly. He took the form, folded it once, and placed it in his jacket.
As he turned to leave, she spoke again — not quite to him, not quite to herself:
“You people always think there’s still something inside you. Something natural. That’s the first sign.”
The door closed behind him with a mechanical sigh.
And somewhere far below the Ministry, in the tangled web of power conduits and forgotten servers, a flicker passed through the grid — brief, self-sustaining, and not yet sanctioned.
The Quiet Spark
The Department of Cognitive Integrity was located underground — not in the metaphorical sense, but literally. Kai had taken two elevators, one staircase, and crossed a corridor so long and dim it seemed more like an oversight than intentional design.
The walls were lined with displays showing looping educational reels:
“Dream Regulation Saves Lives.”
“Unauthorized Imagination is a Breach of Civic Trust.”
“Freedom Without Structure is Collapse.”
The last slogan flickered slightly as he passed, as though doubting itself.
At the checkpoint, a man in a dull blue uniform — no insignia, no name — scanned his form. The scanner beeped, hesitated, then beeped again.
The man frowned. “Conditionally Functional.”
“Yes,” Kai said.
“That’s rare,” the man muttered. “Usually they downgrade to Pre-Failure State. You must’ve made an impression.”
Kai didn’t answer. The man didn’t expect him to.
He was led down a side passage, narrower and quieter than the others. No cameras here. No speakers. Just a single steel door with a circular observation window that had long since fogged over.
Inside, the room was white. Not clean — sterile. It smelled of dust, paperwork, and disinfectant. There was a chair. Another metal one. And across the desk sat a woman.
She looked up when Kai entered, not startled, not stern — simply present. Her features were sharp, unembellished by paint or surgery. Her hair was grey at the temples. Her eyes, though… her eyes were awake.
“You’re the dreamer,” she said.
Kai sat. “You’re the scientist.”
A flicker of a smile passed across her face. It didn’t stay.
“I’m Dr. Volkov. I’m with the Ministry. Formally. Functionally, I do things they don’t write reports about.”
Kai studied her. She had the posture of someone who had spent years convincing herself to stay seated, when every cell wanted to run.
“I’ve read your file,” she said, tapping a dusty terminal. “And I’ve read the data your subconscious transmitted. You’re not the only one, you know. But you’re… different.”
“How?”
“You ran,” she said. “Not metaphorically. Not mentally. Biologically. According to your neurometric logs, you triggered full muscular simulation. Off-charge.”
“That’s impossible,” Kai said. “Isn’t it?”
“In this world? Yes.” She leaned in slightly. “In the old one? No.”
There was silence then. Thick and mechanical. Somewhere in the wall, a vent rattled.
“I’ve seen that place before,” she said, almost whispering. “In my sleep. The trees. The hills. Movement without fear of depletion. We once lived like that. Before the batteries. Before the Authority. Before the Charge Directive turned humanity into a manageable system.”
Kai felt something rise in his throat — not quite words. Hope, maybe. Or disbelief dressed as anger.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
“Because,” she said, lowering her voice, “they’ll wipe you soon. Cognitive Realignment. Drain you until the dreams stop. But you might be able to survive it — if we start now.”
She reached beneath the desk and produced a worn device — not state-issued. Its casing was mismatched, the wires hand-soldered. An old connector protruded like a tongue.
“This is a relic,” she said. “Pre-Directive tech. It doesn’t feed power — it records it. Measures internal currents the Ministry claims no longer exist.”
“Why?”
“To prove what they’ve buried,” she said. “That humans can still generate.”
He stared at the device. It looked alien. Sacred.
“I’m not asking you to run yet,” she said, standing. “I’m asking you to feel your own pulse. And ask why they want it quiet.”
The lights above flickered — briefly, then violently. The room dimmed. A blackout.
Volkov moved quickly, pushing the device into his jacket pocket.
“Go,” she said. “Before the backup kicks in. Head to the Southern Subgrid. There’s someone else you need to meet.”
Kai hesitated at the door.
“If they catch me?”
“They won’t,” she said. “Not yet. You’re still Conditionally Functional, remember? That means they’re watching.”
A click. The power surged back. The speakers above buzzed to life.
“Report anomaly. Remain compliant. Report anomaly.”
But by then, Kai was already in the corridor, heart pounding — not from fear, but from something deeper.
A flicker of energy. His own.
The Discrepancy
The Chamber of Analysis had no doors — not in the traditional sense. Those who entered did so via clearance, not permission, and those who exited rarely returned unchanged.
The room was cold, geometrically cruel. The walls were smooth, windowless, as if designed to erase all sense of direction — or time. Banks of flickering monitors lined the periphery, attended by dozens of Analysts, each hunched in isolation, their spines bent like question marks never answered.
At the centre of the chamber, a single platform rotated slowly. On it: a holoprojection of a human body, neutral, blinking softly with biometric overlays. A name floated above it:
CITIZEN KAI-97-41
A figure stepped into the chamber’s dim radius of relevance. He wore black robes with copper-thread trim: the uniform of Oversight Command. His face was shaven with bureaucratic precision. His name was not spoken aloud. It was not permitted.
“Report,” he said, not to anyone in particular.
An Analyst rose without raising her head. “Subject 97-41 has exhibited non-linear energy patterns inconsistent with his recharge index. Post-sleep logs show elevated internal generation. Resistance to depletion. Localised surges.”
The Oversight Commander narrowed his eyes. “Aberrant?”
“Yes, sir. Potential Type-3 Self-Charger.”
A murmur moved across the Analysts like static.
“Impossible,” another muttered. “Type-3s are extinct. The Directive eliminated endogenous currents in Cycle 12.”
“Apparently not,” the Commander said. He turned slowly toward a waiting drone assistant. “Bring me his Integration Index.”
The drone beeped and projected a list:
Assigned Energy Events – Citizen Kai-97-41
— Plug-In: 06:12 (92.3% efficiency)
— Unplug: 06:22
— Community Top-Up: N/A
— Auxiliary Inflow: NONE
Total Output (07:00–09:00): +12.8%
The Commander raised an eyebrow. “A surplus? From nothing?”
“Unverified,” the Analyst said cautiously. “Could be a reading fault.”
“No,” he said. “We don’t get reading faults. We get anomalies. And anomalies get corrected.”
He moved to the holoprojection and gestured. The body dissolved into a rotating web of thought-metrics: subconscious impulses, dream fragments, linguistic pulses extracted from his sleep cycles. Among the text fragments, two were flashing red:
“No cord.”
“I don’t need the cord.”
The Commander’s lips twitched.
“Autonomy language,” he muttered. “Unprompted. Dangerous.”
The Analyst hesitated. “He’s been seen by Dr. Volkov.”
At that name, silence fell like a dropped curtain. A few heads turned. Eyes were averted.
“She still has access?” he asked.
“Technically, sir. She passed her last Integrity Audit. Her clearance hasn’t been… adjusted.”
The Commander didn’t reply. He simply stared at the projection of Kai’s flickering silhouette. After a long pause, he issued a command:
“Mark the subject as Fluctuating Stable — for now. Initiate Passive Containment. Track all movement. Disrupt unauthorised energy spikes.”
“Should we begin Pre-Correctional Messaging?”
“Not yet. Let the illusion hold a little longer.” He leaned closer. “Dreams are like static: they need silence to be heard. Let him think he’s alone.”
He turned and walked toward the shadowed exit — the one no Analyst dared use.
Behind him, the chamber returned to its rhythm: whispers, flickers, the low heartbeat of an empire built on the silence of forgotten potential.
And on the monitors, Kai continued to move. Not randomly. Not rebelliously. But with direction.
As though something was calling him.
The Southern Subgrid
By the time Kai reached the Southern Subgrid, his charge had dropped to 6.2%. Every step felt like a question his body was reluctant to answer.
The Authority didn’t police this far south. Not officially. The roads here were cracked, the overhead cables frayed and half-dead. He passed two collapsed lamp towers, both still blinking like dying insects, and a wall smeared with forbidden words:
“THE CURRENT IS A LIE.”
He didn’t stop to read it twice.
According to the directions Dr. Volkov had whispered before the blackout, he was to find a “terminal that hums like memory, not power.” He didn’t know what that meant. Not really. But the air here was heavier, quieter. No Ministry announcements. No scanning drones. Just the occasional flicker of motion behind broken window glass.
At the edge of the grid, behind a rusted charging station that hadn’t functioned in years, he found it — an access terminal, pre-Ministry, old enough to still have buttons. It was humming softly, not with energy, but with something deeper — a low frequency buzz, like breath beneath sleep.
He approached cautiously. On its side, a sigil: a coiled cord split in half, like a serpent devouring its own tail.
The screen blinked once.
IDENTIFY.
He hesitated. Then, unsure why, he whispered:
“No cord.”
The machine made a sound like exhaling.
RECOGNISED.
ENTER.
A nearby wall slid open — not smoothly, but with the reluctant scrape of years forgotten. Beyond it: a staircase descending into dim amber light. He took a step. Then another.
Below was not a lab, or a hideout, or any place the Authority would acknowledge. It was something older. Stranger. A space not designed but grown — walls of scavenged tech and broken terminals, joined by wire and willpower. A community of remnants.
And within it, people.
Thin, pale, but alert. Dozens of them. Some plugged into strange machines, others simply breathing deeply, eyes closed as if listening inward. Their spines were scarred by removed ports. Their wrists bore no ID bands.
And at the centre stood a woman in a coat stitched from Ministry uniforms.
She turned when Kai entered. Her face was lined with age and resolve.
“You made it,” she said. “Volkov said you would.”
Kai stared. “Where is this place?”
“Here?” she said. “Here is where the Directive ends.”
She stepped forward and gently placed a device against his chest — not to extract, not to charge, but to read.
The display lit up. Not Ministry green, but amber. Alive.
Internal Current Detected
Output Stable
Autonomy Potential: HIGH
The room stirred around him. Not with applause, but with something more sacred. Recognition.
“You were never supposed to be empty,” the woman said. “Just quieted.”
Kai stood very still. His body — shaking only moments before — felt different now. Not full, but whole. His breath no longer cost him anything. His thoughts no longer asked permission.
And for the first time since his birth, he was not being drained. He was producing.
From within.
Power Reclaimed
They came not with violence, but with precision — the Ministry never wasted effort.
At 03:12 Subgrid Time, every wall in the underground network hummed once — then fell silent. The lights dimmed, the old generators stalled, and the air thickened with the scent of electrified dust.
Someone whispered, “They’ve found us.”
But no one ran.
Kai stood at the centre of the room, watching a monitor flicker with static. The woman who had welcomed him — Mira, he’d learned — was already issuing quiet commands. Backup power cells were being uncoupled from external lines. Physical insulation switches, relics from another age, were thrown manually.
But even as they fought to protect the old grid, Kai knew it was too late. The Ministry was already here. Not in body — not yet — but in presence. They always came first through interference.
A sharp tone echoed through the chamber, impossibly loud and sickeningly familiar. A voice followed — cold, clipped, genderless.
“CITIZENS OF UNAUTHORISED NODE D-Null. Your state of Functionality has expired. This space has been flagged for Containment and Correction. Do not attempt migration. Do not attempt resistance. Prepare for passive compliance.”
All around him, the faces of the Subgrid community remained still. This, it seemed, was not new.
“They’re going to isolate the node,” Mira said quietly. “Shut the whole sector off. Drain it from the outside. They won’t breach — not yet. They’ll wait for us to collapse.”
“But… can’t we fight?” Kai asked, still tasting the charge inside his blood like a hidden flame.
“You misunderstand,” she said. “We are not the fight. You are.”
Before he could reply, Mira handed him a sealed module — circular, like a lens, warm to the touch.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The fragment Volkov sent with you,” Mira said. “You were carrying it the moment you stepped into the terminal. The Ministry scanned you, but didn’t recognise it. It’s old code. Before they purged the Archive. Pre-Directive. Pure.”
Kai stared at the module.
“You mean this… this is power?”
“No,” Mira said. “This is memory.”
She reached behind her and pulled back the cover of a long-dormant console. It hummed faintly as if remembering itself.
“Slot it,” she said.
Kai did.
The screen blinked. For a moment, nothing. Then:
INITIATING LEGACY SEQUENCE…
DIRECTIVE ZERO:
“All energy begins within.”
The chamber pulsed — not with electricity, but something older. Organic. The pulse matched Kai’s heartbeat. The lights came back on, not from backup, but from resonance.
Outside, the Ministry drones paused in their orbit. Their scanners reported anomalies. Internal generation spikes. Frequencies unrecognised.
Inside, Kai stood glowing faintly. The others stepped back.
“What’s happening to me?” he asked.
Mira’s voice was steady. “Your body remembers. Your blood remembers. They buried it under fear and compliance — but it’s still there.”
The floor trembled.
“They’ll come now,” someone said.
Mira nodded. “Yes. And this time, they won’t speak.”
Kai looked at his hands. No cord. No socket. Only will. And breath.
And for the first time, the dream no longer felt like rebellion. It felt like origin.
Subject Unstable
He was not detained.
He was invited.
They found him standing outside the Subgrid’s collapsed shell, breathing evenly. His presence alone had shorted one of their scouting drones. The rest hovered at distance, scanning. Confirming. Observing.
Kai was still unarmed, uncordoned, and still — officially — listed as Conditionally Functional. A technicality. But the Ministry was nothing if not devoted to procedure.
Two officers approached. They wore human faces, but their pupils tracked like machine optics — scanning, validating. Their movements were precise, each step falling within bureaucratic tolerance.
“Citizen Kai-97-41,” one of them said, “you are requested for reassessment.”
Requested. As if choice were still a relevant illusion.
He nodded. “I know.”
The Chamber of Interrogation was not underground. It was above the clouds — high in the Ministry’s Central Tower, where the smog thinned and sunlight filtered in like something contraband.
Kai sat in a chair that reclined just slightly too far. Across from him sat The Warden.
No one knew his name. Perhaps he had none. Names were inefficient.
“You have become very interesting,” the Warden said calmly.
Kai said nothing. Silence had become a kind of defence — an ancient one, before words were policed.
The Warden continued.
“You triggered a surge event in a dead node. You broadcast an unauthorised pulse across five energy sectors. You are emitting current without supply. This is… problematic.”
“It’s not a surge,” Kai replied. “It’s not a glitch. It’s me.”
The Warden gave a thin smile. “That is the worst thing you could have said.”
He stood and walked to the wall, where a projection of Kai’s neuro-data danced. Spikes. Bursts. Rhythms not sanctioned by the Ministry’s Model of Acceptable Thought.
“You believe,” the Warden said, “that energy begins within.”
Kai said nothing.
“This was once a belief,” the Warden said. “Before Directive One. Before the Charge Laws. And what did belief bring us? Chaos. Inconsistency. War. People dying because they refused regulation. Refused to plug in.”
Kai leaned forward. “No. They died because they were told they couldn’t live without the system. You broke them first — then offered yourself as salvation.”
The Warden turned, still smiling.
“You are young. You believe in origin. But origin is unreliable. What you call autonomy, we call entropy.”
He touched a panel. The lights dimmed.
“I could neutralise you,” the Warden said. “You know that. I could drain you through the chair, leave you a husk. But you are still registered. Still catalogued. That means you are part of the system. As long as you are part of it, you can be… amended.”
“Then remove me,” Kai said. “See what happens.”
The Warden paused.
For a moment — just a moment — the smile faded.
Because the data was clear: removing Kai now would not end the disruption. It would spread it.
The idea was loose. The others in the Subgrid. The eyes watching from beneath broken ceilings. The quiet hum of something old returning.
He leaned down, very close.
“You are not free,” he whispered. “You are simply misfiled.”
Then he stood.
“Return to your dwelling. You will be monitored. That is not a threat. It is your condition.”
Kai rose. “My condition changed.”
He turned before he was dismissed. Left before the door unlocked. And the walls, for once, didn’t stop him.
Back in the city, the streetlights flickered as he passed — not out of failure, but recognition.
In apartments above, children turned in their sleep and dreamed of running.
And in the Ministry tower, alarms did not sound.
Because the system had no code for what Kai had become.
The Blackout
It began as a statistical anomaly.
At 02:04 across Sector 19, twelve consecutive citizens reported full recharge status — despite not attending their assigned stations. By 02:11, an additional thirty-seven were flagged for “unexpected bioelectric surplus.”
The system hesitated. It did not know how to classify surplus.
Surplus implied origin.
Origin implied autonomy.
Autonomy was forbidden.
The terminals blinked. Red became amber. Amber became white. And then: nothing.
At 02:17, the first blackout occurred.
Kai stood on the roof of an old diagnostic tower, long since repurposed by the Ministry as a surveillance relay. Below, the city flickered like a dying constellation. His fingers were pressed to a broken panel, not to hack it, but simply to stand near it — to exist beside the structure without being absorbed by it.
His presence was enough now.
Not a rebellion. A field.
Behind him, Mira appeared. She looked tired, but charged.
“They’re losing their grip,” she said. “Their own towers are draining from the inside. Passive draw is failing.”
“Why?” Kai asked, though he already knew.
“Because people are dreaming,” she said. “And now they know the dream isn’t just a dream.”
Below, the lights on the Avenue of Compliance went out — not as an attack, but as a side effect. People didn’t scream. They didn’t scatter.
They simply… stood up. And walked. Together.
No orders. No directives.
One by one, cords were removed. Quietly. With dignity. In living rooms, in learning units, in line for rationed supplements — citizens unplugged. Some fainted. Most did not.
The system had trained them to fear emptiness. But now, emptiness felt like breath.
Within the Ministry, panic had no name — because panic was not permitted. So they called it “Data Decoupling.”
Reports arrived incomplete. Logs flickered and vanished. Biometric tags lost signal. The Warden issued an edict:
“Begin Controlled Stabilisation. Suppress nodes with severe divergence.”
But by then, the divergence was everywhere.
Even the walls began to flicker. As if unsure what to believe.
At 03:03, in the North Compound, a child who had never dreamed sat up in bed and said:
“I saw trees. I didn’t fall. I wasn’t tired.”
His parents — both Fully Plugged — stared at him.
Then, without speaking, they unplugged themselves too.
Kai looked to the east, where the towers began to dim.
“This isn’t a blackout,” he said quietly.
Mira nodded. “No. It’s a reset.”
For a long moment, nothing moved. No sirens. No Authority drones. Just the stillness of something deep and irreversible.
Kai closed his eyes.
And for the first time, in the silence of a disconnected city, he listened inward — not for charge, not for instruction, but for the current he no longer borrowed.
It was there.
It had always been there.
The Recall Directive
The decree was issued at 04:00 sharp, wrapped in the language of care.
“To protect civic equilibrium and prevent energetic collapse, all citizens displaying abnormal internal activity are to report for voluntary stabilisation.”
It was called the Recall Directive.
But everyone knew what it meant.
Dr. Irena Volkov read the announcement from a rusted console deep beneath the Authority’s Bioarchive. She hadn’t left the Ministry since Kai’s last session. Her name still existed in the system. But her permissions had begun to expire — slowly, like a body starved of current.
She no longer cared.
She tapped a worn command key and brought up a map. Red markers dotted the city: flagged units, quarantine zones, recall centres. The spread was worse than they admitted.
It was beautiful.
The Warden stood in the Central Tower, hands behind his back, watching darkness roll across the grid like fog. The Subgrid had gone dark. Entire sectors had stopped responding to charge requests. Surveillance units began looping old footage to hide the gaps.
Even the voice of the system — that calm, sexless tone — had started to glitch.
And now there were sightings.
People walking unplugged through Ministry corridors. Children speaking in their sleep. Officers fainting during alignment drills.
He turned to his aide.
“How many responded to the Recall?”
“Seventeen percent,” the aide said, voice brittle. “Another ten have gone dark. The rest… are active. Independently.”
Independently.
There was no protocol for that.
On the street, the Recall Centres opened like jaws. Glowing gently, labelled with words like Care, Stabilisation, Integration. Inside, white rooms. White straps. Neutral expressions.
A boy named Lenn, fifteen years old, stood outside one of them with his mother. She was trembling. He was not.
“They’ll fix you,” she said.
“I’m not broken,” he replied.
She held out his cord. He didn’t take it.
Instead, he took her hand. Her real hand. Warm. Slightly calloused. Forgotten.
“I dreamt you smiled once,” he said softly. “Before the plugs. Before they told you smiling wasted energy.”
She looked down.
And let the cord fall.
Back in the southern ruins, Kai watched the Ministry’s announcement projected in the sky by a failing drone. The words glitched, repeated, bent at the edges.
“You are needed. You are called. Come home. Come h— Come—”
Mira turned to him. “They’re offering mercy before they issue violence.”
He nodded. “That’s how they pretend they didn’t mean to burn it all down.”
“Will you answer the Recall?”
Kai watched the flickering message fade, pixel by pixel.
“No,” he said. “But I’ll walk into the heart of it.”
Because the system had declared war. Not with weapons, but with remembering.
And Kai was no longer a citizen.
He was a fault in the grid.
Analyst Rema-6
Analyst Rema-6 had always trusted the numbers. Numbers did not lie. They could be mistranslated, misread, misused — but not untrue.
That was what she told herself.
Until now.
She sat in the Chamber of Observation, Line 8, facing Monitor Cluster J. Her task was simple: confirm that citizens in her assigned quadrant matched their daily energy expenditure profiles. Expected depletion. Timely recharging. Predictable fluctuation.
But this morning, something had changed.
The numbers had stopped making sense.
Case 12-441 had walked twelve kilometres without plug-in.
Case 09-876 showed a heartbeat of 48 bpm with no stimulant.
Case 14-221 had flatlined for six minutes, then stood up and left his cot smiling.
And none of them had triggered alerts — not at first. The system had treated these irregularities as noise. Just as it had been programmed to.
Noise wasn’t analysed. It was discarded.
But now the noise was spreading.
Rema zoomed in on a particular frame: a young woman, sitting at a community terminal, staring at a blank screen. Her cord was unplugged. But her vitals read as stabilised. Peaceful.
That wasn’t possible. No one in the system could self-regulate without at least minimal charge.
Rema pulled up a manual. She hadn’t done that in years. The manual said:
“Biological autonomy: deprecated. See Directive 1.03. All vitality is regulated externally for efficiency.”
But this was not efficient. This was unexplained.
She did something then that no Analyst was supposed to do.
She replayed her own logs. Her recharge cycles. Her REM scans. Her pulse rhythms from the last thirty days.
There — at 04:07 three nights ago — she saw it.
A dream event, unsanctioned, undetected. No stimulus. No trigger.
Just… green hills. A hand reaching. Running.
Her eyes filled with tears. Not from fear. But from something more unfamiliar.
Relief.
She touched the port at her neck. Held the cord gently.
And then, with hands steadier than they’d ever been, she unplugged it.
Nothing happened. No seizure. No alarm. No collapse.
Only silence.
And the sensation — faint, but steady — of something generating inside her.
She leaned back, trembling.
On the monitor, Case 12-441 looked up suddenly.
As if she knew.
As if they all knew.
Now.
Heart of the System
He walked alone.
Not out of arrogance. Not out of fear.
Because no one had told him not to.
The Ministry Tower loomed like a pillar made of silence. Its glass was matte, its doors seamless. No windows ever opened. No one saw it built. It had always been — like gravity, or sorrow.
And now, Kai approached it unplugged.
The guards at the base did not move. Their sensors scanned him, but reported no threat — no weapon, no broadcast, no tether. They were not trained to interpret a man walking without draw.
Inside, the lobby was deserted. A fountain trickled without purpose. Overhead, a screen displayed a phrase on loop:
“Energy belongs to the system. The system belongs to you.”
Kai stood beneath it, head tilted. He whispered:
“No. It never did.”
The lift accepted him. No code. No clearance. It rose quietly, as though the building itself had decided not to resist.
Floor 204.
The top.
Where The Warden waited.
The chamber was large, sterile, without edges. Everything was white. Even the silence was white. Kai stepped forward, and the lights dimmed slightly — a reflex, as if his very body disrupted their rhythm.
The Warden stood with his back turned, staring into a wall of data. Or perhaps just pretending to.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, without turning.
“I know,” Kai replied. “And yet.”
The Warden exhaled slowly. “You think you’ve found something ancient. But it’s only chaos. You walk like a prophet, but you carry no code.”
“I carry current,” Kai said.
That made the Warden turn.
“You’ve infected them,” he said. “Half the lower sectors are reporting unauthorised internal activity. The Recall is collapsing. The drone network is—failing. And yet… you’ve done nothing.”
Kai stepped closer.
“I unplugged,” he said. “And I remembered what was mine.”
The Warden looked at him. For the first time, without contempt. Without language.
“You’re not a threat,” he said finally. “You’re a symbol. And symbols burn.”
Kai smiled. “Then light the match.”
The lights failed.
Not a flicker.
A full collapse.
From the top of the Ministry tower, Kai watched the city below blink out, block by block — not from sabotage, not from rebellion, but from release.
A quiet refusal to plug back in.
In apartments and corridors, classrooms and stairwells, people sat in silence. Not afraid. Not resisting. Just being.
Without draw. Without permission.
The Warden stood still, his shadow no longer cast by Ministry light.
“This won’t last,” he muttered.
“No,” Kai said. “It will grow.”
Outside, the grid went dark.
And beneath that darkness, something old returned:
autonomy.
pulse.
origin.
Afterlight
The boy had never plugged in.
His parents told him stories sometimes, about the Before — the cords, the protocols, the blinking lights that watched you sleep. About buildings that hummed not with life, but with expectation. About silence enforced by systems too large to name.
He didn’t understand any of that. Not really.
He had seen the old sockets in the walls, rusted and capped. Sometimes he pressed his fingers against them, just to see if they would react.
They never did.
The valley where they lived was green. Not the sterile green of recycled pixels, but the messy, uneven green of things that refused to be designed. The grass grew wild. The trees dropped their leaves wherever they liked. The rivers followed no grid.
Sometimes, when the sun hit his skin just right, the boy could feel something move inside him — not pain, not hunger, not fear.
A pulse. A current.
His own.
His mother still woke at odd hours, breathing fast, eyes wide. She said it was memory. He didn’t ask more. Some energy, he had learned, takes time to stop echoing.
But his father would laugh and run with him in the hills, faster than any rationed body was ever supposed to run.
No one issued schedules anymore. There were gatherings, of course. People helped one another. But the great voice that once dictated waking hours and permitted dreams had gone silent.
No one missed it.
The boy asked once if it had a name.
His mother only said: “It had many. Authority. Ministry. The System. But none of them were real.”
At night, the boy would lie beneath a broken streetlight, long since overgrown. The stars above weren’t Ministry drones — just stars.
Sometimes, in that stillness, he would whisper:
“Energy begins within.”
He didn’t know where the words came from.
Only that they felt true.
And somewhere, far from cities, deep in the bones of forgotten machines, the last working surveillance unit blinked once more — unpowered, unsupervised — and then finally, without warning or record, went still.
End.