Short story – Science Fiction, Futurism

Completion

Humans are fragile. The system just forgot.

The rest of Caleb’s shift blurred by, stacked with endless micro acknowledgements, sensory pulses, and dull-eyed compliance. He filed forms he didn’t read. He validated shipments he didn’t see. He stood, sat, acknowledged, and synced in perfect alignment with the others around him, another body lost in the hum of collective output.

The implant buzzed every twelve seconds, a rhythm so familiar he no longer noticed it. What he did notice, what he couldn’t stop seeing, was Lena.

She was seated four workstations down. Mid-twenties, maybe. Thin but wired tight. Eyes like cracked glass. He’d seen her syncing faster than most Tier-6s, lips always moving in a silent mantra of task loops. This morning, her coherence had been green. 97%.

Now she was twitching.

Her fingers stuttered over her input pad. Her overlay flared red for just a moment, then blinked back to amber. The sync assistant chimed in her periphery.

She didn’t respond.

Caleb’s eyes flicked toward her again. The tremor in her right hand had spread up her forearm. She was still mouthing something, but the rhythm was broken now, ragged, gasping.

Then her face locked in a half-expression. Pain or confusion, he couldn’t tell. And then.

She crumpled sideways.

Not dramatically. No scream. No crash.

Just… folded. Like a marionette with its strings cut.

Two drones appeared within seconds. Silent. Smooth. One lifted her under the arms, the other cradled her legs. Her workstation screen dimmed. Her overlay dimmed. Her existence, too, dimmed.

The workers around her barely flinched.

A voice pinged across the room, flat and calm.

Sync disruption. Subject completed.

Caleb stared.

No alarm. No grief. No disruption protocol. Just completion.

He felt his stomach tighten, and for a flicker of a moment, his own overlay flashed amber.

Buffer: 0.4%

He inhaled. Deep. Silent. Controlled.

One second. Two.

The hum resumed.

He looked back at Lena’s now-vacant chair.

A new unit arrived twenty-seven seconds later. Same uniform. Slightly taller. No reaction.

No one spoke.

No one ever did.

---

Coherence Drift

Caleb couldn’t stop shaking.

He made it to the hygiene pod on his next buffer break and stood in front of the mirror. The glass blinked and scanned him, then dutifully displayed his facial stats: stress markers, hydration, blink rate.

Coherence: 88.9%. Consider sync recalibration.

He gripped the basin. The porcelain felt oddly warm. Or maybe it was his hands. His skin looked wrong, too pale under the sterile light, veins visible like river maps.

His implant pinged again.

Sync booster available. Opt-in?

He ignored it. The tremor in his hands was spreading.

He turned on the tap, letting the water run until it reached max temp, then plunged his hands beneath it. The shock grounded him for a second. The burn was almost real.

A memory surfaced, his mother’s hands, covered in garden soil. Her laugh. Wild. Free. Not part of the system.

It didn’t belong.

The memory vanished as quickly as it came.

He splashed his face and looked back up.

His reflection shimmered, distorted.

And for a moment, the implant glitched.

His overlay blinked out completely, leaving just him. Raw. Alone.

The silence was deafening.

It lasted less than three seconds.

Then the system roared back in.

Sync re-established. Attention deviation: logged.

He gasped and staggered backward, knocking a supply tray to the floor. The clang echoed through the otherwise silent hygiene pod.

He froze. Listening.

No footsteps. No alarm.

Just the hum of the air filters and his own pulse, ragged and human.

He stared into the mirror again, and this time whispered:

“Am I next?”

The mirror did not respond.

But somewhere in the back of his mind—beneath the static—he heard it again:

> Can you hear the signal?

---

The Defectives

Caleb didn’t return to his post. He walked instead.

Not far at first. Just a corridor loop. Then a sector boundary. Then deeper, until the system’s guidance arrows thinned, then vanished altogether.

No one stopped him.

At some point, the overlay began to lag. Notifications slowed. His bio-data became less detailed. His sync monitor simply showed:

Location drift. Tier logic override. Proceed with caution.

He felt something unfamiliar. Not freedom. Not yet. Just… friction. The absence of imposed movement.

Then, he heard laughter.

Actual laughter.

A soft, ragged chuckle that bounced off the walls like an echo from a forgotten world.

He turned a corner and saw them.

Three figures sitting around a decommissioned task node. One wore a maintenance shell patched with scraps of fabric. Another had a half-shaved head and bare feet. The third was leaning back on an old seat, legs propped on a crate, chewing something green and leafy.

They looked at Caleb like he was a glitch.

“You look like a sync ghost,” one said. “Fresh off the grid?”

Caleb said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

“You’re twitching,” the one on the crate added. “Buzz too loud?”

Caleb nodded slightly. The tremor had returned to his hands.

The barefoot one stood and stepped closer. Her implant was dark. Or maybe missing.

“We call it burn,” she said gently. “System runs hot. You run hot with it. One day, it cooks your head. If it doesn’t cook you, well…” She smiled faintly. “You find your way down here.”

They weren’t like Jax. Not ghosts. Not rebels. Survivors.

Defectives.

People whose implants never quite worked. Units who couldn’t stay in sync. Outliers. Errors that never got erased.

“What is this place?” Caleb asked.

The one with the crate smirked. “Call it a dead zone. Call it junkspace. Doesn’t matter. You’re not tracked here. Not fully.”

He looked up. The ceiling was dark. No visible cams. No drones. The quiet was heavy.

And beneath it all, a sound.

A low, pulsing hum. Not from a machine. Not quite.

One of the defectives tapped their temple. “Took me weeks to hear it. Took Jax days. Maybe you’re fast.”

“Hear what?” Caleb asked.

They all looked at him.

The deep signal.

---

📡 Stay Tuned

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Part 3 drops tomorrow. The system is tightening. Choices are narrowing.

Are you still in sync?