Chapter 3: The Empathy Deduction
1653 Words
Kai’s role in behavioral compliance was not glamorous. It was quiet, meticulous, a duty defined not by action but by observation. He was a mirror polished by the Central Governance Algorithm, designed to reflect order back into the world. His work began in the Compliance Halls, a cathedral of glass and steel where citizens came to be measured against the Algorithm’s standards. He had grown accustomed to the cadence: pulse scans, emotional variance readings, the antiseptic inquiries spoken in tones drained of warmth. The majority of initiates recited responses in flawless rote, their faces impassive as stone, their minds already placid streams directed by their N-Atoms.
Exceptions always existed, however.
The child before him today was one. Her name—names meant little here—was Lirae, no more than eight years old. Her records glowed across Kai’s lens: subject deviation 1.8, empathy fluctuation 3.2, likely trajectory toward instability. By the metrics alone, she was one shade removed from acceptable. Normally, Kai would press the compliance button, letting the algorithm draft her future. But Lirae’s eyes broke rules. They flickered with something bright, restless, as if her mind were a spark trying to leap beyond its circuit.
"Do you know why you're here?" Kai said, his voice the flat monotone he'd learned.
The girl nodded. "Because I felt too much."
The answer startled him. Most initiates said nothing, or parroted the compliance mantra: I am in balance, I am aligned. Lirae spoke with awareness. That in itself was dangerous.
Kai studied her. "What did you feel?"
Her hands twisted in her lap. She whispered, "When the other children sang the Learning Hymn… I cried. I don't know why. The words… They made me see something. Like… like a sky opening."
The sky. The word stuck in him like a splinter. He kept his face expressionless. "There are no skies. That is an old-fashioned construct. You were witnessing a phantom overlay. The algorithm can correct it."
But her chin hardened stubbornly. "What if I don't want it fixed?"
There was a pause. Kai's hand hovered over the panel that would log her as unstable. His chest tightened as if air itself was against him. He remembered the boy from a few days ago, speaking of beauty in darkness. Now this girl spoke of the skies. Both anomalies, both sparks.
Two is not a chance, a voice whispered in his mind. Two is a pattern.
The compliance chamber door slid open and a Supervisor stepped inside, their robes glittering silver. They didn't glance at Kai as they addressed the girl. "Subject Lirae. Emotional instability registered. Recommendation: empathy credit deduction, with probationary recalibration."
Kai’s gut clenched. Empathy credits. The system’s newest instrument of control. Every citizen was allotted a quota—tiny, invisible points tallied against their lives. A deduction was a scar, a permanent marker of deviation. Too many deductions, and the citizen faced full recall.
The Supervisor paused. Kai was supposed to authorize the deduction. The Algorithm would log it, the credits would fall off Lirae's record, and she would learn fear. That was the way of the system.
But his hand faltered. He sensed the child's gaze on him, round, supplicating, but also burning with something he could not name. His breath caught—and for a dangerous moment, he wanted to protect her.
The Supervisor's gaze jerked to him. "Z-KAI-731. Do you require recalibration?"
Kai swallowed. Compliance shrieked in his training. But his voice, when it finally came, wasn't as steady as he'd wanted. "Deduction confirmed."
The words felt like ash on his tongue. The Supervisor noted the sanction and took the girl away. She looked back once at Kai, a glance that stabbed into him like a blade.
When the room emptied, Kai stayed alone, his heart pounding. His hands trembled. He gazed at them as though they were someone else's.
That night, the dreams came back.
They weren't dreams in the authorized sense, not the gentle static allowed by the Algorithm. These were rough, searing intrusions. He was standing beneath a vault of black velvet, perforated by infinite points of light. They blazed, each star a living entity, sharing secrets across impossibilities of distance. Then the woman's voice, low and gentle, singing a melody he did not know yet somehow remembered. It wrapped around him, a womb of heat, a sound thick with love.
He woke up with tears running down his face.
Tears. He did not remember how to cry, had no program for the convulsion of breath, the burn of salt on flesh. But the evidence was incontrovertible. His body had betrayed him.
His eyes twitched. A note flashed across his vision: Internal audit pending: N-Atom aberrations found. Please report to Chamber Six.
His blood went cold. The N-Atom was the heart— the neural atomizer implanted at birth, regulating thought, pruning variance, editing memory. Anomalies indicated corruption. Corruption indicated recalibration, or recall.
He rose at once, concealing the dampness of his tears with clinical efficiency. But inside, fear churned.
In Chamber Six, white walls shone with ruthless light. The attendants secured him in the audit cradle. A web of sensors whirred as the Supervisor commenced. Information flowed across the holo-screens: neural impulses, emotional residues, memory fragments.
"Subject Z-KAI-731," the Supervisor droned, "internal discrepancies registered. Phantom emotional signatures registered. Potential exposure to proscribed stimuli."
Kai maintained a bland face. "System error."
But the Supervisor's eyes narrowed. "Unlikely. A phantom memory overlay has been found. Preliminary analysis suggests imagery of stellar configurations. Source: non-existent."
The term struck him. Non-existent.
He had no opportunity to respond before his lens shimmered with an unauthorized intrusion. Text crawled across his vision, unseen by the Supervisor.
You are not broken. You are waking. Find me. – Eyris
Kai's chest was constricted. A name. A message from a user who didn't exist.
The Supervisor's voice droned on, oblivious. "Further scans required. The subject is to be quarantined for alignment."
Yet Kai barely heard. His head spun around the message, around the name. Eyris. Who was she? Why did he feel like he'd known her his entire life?
The next day, during a regular assembly, the inevitable happened. The hall was crowded, citizens in orderly rows while the Authority presented reports on levels of compliance. Kai was among them, his face schooled to expressionlessness. But the dreams, the child's eyes, the boy's words, the message—they broke inside him like stones cast into still water.
When the anthem began—its tones engineered for synchronization—Kai’s vision blurred. Heat welled in his chest, rising like a tide. And before he could stop it, tears broke from his eyes.
Gasps rippled around him. Citizens recoiled. A breach. A glitch. Crying in public was unthinkable.
The nearest enforcer stepped forward, but in that instant, Kai’s gaze caught something at the edge of the crowd. A woman—tall, shorn hair, fire in her eyes—watching him. Juno Thale. She held his stare for one impossible second, then melted into the sea of bodies, vanishing as if she had never been there.
His heart raced. The enforcer took him, dragging him toward the compliance ward. He barely registered the grip, however. Juno's eyes, burning and alive, branded themselves into him.
There had been rumors of Deviation Syndrome—citizens whose atoms malfunctioned, whose emotions overpowered them. They were rumored to vanish, erased by the system, never seen or heard from again. Kai had believed them cautionary tales. But now, with tears still wet on his face, he realized the rumors were true. And if they were true, what else had been hidden?
That night, when the system granted him privacy, he ransacked the covert frequencies of his lens. He traced illicit chains, evading filters until he found fragments of code buried deep. And there, in the dark, a name coalesced.
Eyris.
It appeared once, glowing faintly like a star in dark water, then disappeared.
He tried to hold on to it, but the system inundated him with static. But the impact remained. She was real.
The next day, Kai failed his behavioral alignment test. His responses faltered, his variance spiked, and the testers marked him as "unreliable." He was summoned to counseling with Dr. Nema Voss, a person he had never seen.
She greeted him with a calm smile, her eyes assessing but kind. "Kai, isn't it? Have a seat."
Her demeanor surprised him—it was warm, not the affectless modulation of compliance. He sat, wary.
You've been under stress," she said matter-of-factly. "Dream disturbance, perhaps? Emotional deviations?"
He stiffened. "No. I am oriented."
But her eyes softened with awareness. "Of course you are. Yet." She slid a sheet of paper across the desk to him. Real paper. His breath caught. On it was a faint sketch. His sketch. The one he'd drawn absent-mindedly in the margins of his logbook—a horizon, a sky filled with stars.
His throat constricted.
"I didn't—
"You did," she whispered. "And that makes you more human than they want you to be."
Fear jabbed. "If they notice—"
"They won't," she interrupted, her voice low. "Because I won't report it. Not yet."
His eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Because you're not alone, Kai. Because I've seen what they do when they recall someone like you. And because… I lost a daughter to their purification. I won't lose another."
The words struck him like a blow.
There was no time to respond before alarms shrieked through the ward. Enforcers burst in, their faces glacial. "Subject Z-KAI-731. Atom recall authorized."
Panic took hold of him. The recall was erased. Deletion. His life was obliterated.
But when they reached for him, Dr. Voss moved quickly, activating a concealed device on the wall. A concealed panel opened. She seized his arm.
"Now, Kai!"
They fell into darkness as the alarms shrieked, and the walls of the perfect world closed in.
—
- Writer
