"Every cure you invent comes with a receipt. Learn to read it before you sign."
— marginalia in Rehn's lab notebook, date scrubbed
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — MORNING — AERIAL
The city rehearses being gentle.
Inner Walls blink their soft interrogations, then consent. Rails carry a hush along the Engine like a psalm that learned how to automate. Angels—seraph frames—stand asleep in coffin-bright bays, ribs full of drafted thunder. The sea beyond wears yesterday's bruise, but the streets, for once, decline to make it worse. In windows, Parallax Halos pulse and settle—breath measured, breath returned. The city that learned your name tries to remember what it promised you for telling it.
A child on Meridian wakes to a municipal radio that hums his birthday back at him. In the Hands, a dockworker counts kettles without realizing she's praying. In a stairwell, a line of chalk reads: Cities are hearts that decided to wear streets. Someone has underlined "hearts" twice, then stopped as if the word argued back.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA — UNTIMED
The light-score waits for him like a patient animal.
Veyra stands in the Amphora, the latticework of the Requiem Ratio suspended in the air—seventy-one to remembrance, twenty-nine to release. When he inhales, the equations brighten; when he exhales, they dim, as if breath itself were the dimmer for mercy. The Aion ticks on his wrist, rings of steel measuring possibilities instead of seconds. The Kairos embryo drifts nearby in its cradle, a small and stubborn star that refuses to admit it's in a jar.
He has already written an addendum in light: WHEN REMEMBRANCE ALONE CANNOT HOLD THE MAP, ALLOCATE COURAGE. SPEND YOURSELF LAST. The words have sunk into his palm. Instruction, not scar. He closes his hand anyway, as if he could keep the world moral by making a fist.
"Status?" he asks the room.
Rehn's voice comes first, low and careful. "Echo parameters stable. Empathy bleed within expected tolerances. If we push the Ratio past seventy-one, the field starts memorizing grief as identity."
"Which is to say," Veyra says, "we would be teaching the city to worship a wound."
"It already does," Rehn says. "We're just putting a ruler next to it."
Osterr steps out of the shadow as if it requested him on the hour. Military wool, doctrine posture, hands that have learned to wait until they don't. "Council wants proof the Ratio can be projected beyond Somnus. A city-scale demonstration."
"A test on civilians." Rehn doesn't disguise the reproach.
"A calibration on infrastructure," Osterr corrects. "If your theory is sound, Somnus can distribute the load of mourning. We contain contagion before it names itself."
"Containment," Veyra repeats, tasting the word for old iron. "And if the city breaks?"
Osterr's mouth barely moves. "Then we will know what breaks it."
Kerr's voice threads in through the intercom, the sound of a person who keeps her distance because proximity is a kind of promise. "Thalassos Station is already in position. We can ride the Threadlink spine and lay a field across Diamond City. But there's noise. The Eye blinked last night. Once." A pause. "It felt like consent."
Veyra looks up at the lattice. "We begin with mercy. We budget the cost."
He doesn't say: And if mercy is just a more beautiful weapon?
The Aion ticks, which he has come to recognize as the machine equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
EXT. THALASSOS STATION — MIDDAY — ADRIFT
Steel and glass hang on the Atlantic like a sentence that refuses its period. Antenna arrays cradle the horizon. Crew in quiet harnesses move along the spine, tightening a world with their hands.
Kerr walks the deck, the sea making room for her boots without permission. She palms a Threadlink node; it thrums at her touch like a nerve glad to be found.
"Field alignment good," she says. "Parallax Halo in the Noble Zone may flicker during deployment. If anyone complains, tell them it's the weather."
"Solene," Veyra says softly over the channel, "if anything reads wrong, we abort."
"Doctor," Kerr replies, not quite smiling, "I speak fluent wrong."
She looks toward Vetraeus. The ocean blinks again—patient yes, or the rehearsal of one. The Eye never looks like an eye when you need it to, only like a pressure in the hinge of the world.
Kerr thinks, The city will want a story about today. Then shakes the thought away. Not my job to give it one. Only to make sure it deserves one.
INT. DIRECTORATE COUNCIL — OBSERVATION GALLERY — AFTERNOON
Men and women in careful suits stare through soundproof glass at Somnus's core. A legal aide places a stamped folder on the table as if serving bread.
"On record," the Councilor says, "Operation Somnus will attempt a city-scale distribution of psychosocial burden using Doctor Veyra's Requiem Ratio. Objective: to prevent emergent delusional contagion post-Genesis."
"And off record?" murmurs a Deputy who thinks silence is diplomacy.
"Off record, we desperately require this to work."
No one says the other off record: If we can meter mourning, we can meter faith.
INT. SOMNUS — CORE — MOMENTS LATER
Veyra takes his place beside the Mirror Cradle. He did not design it to look like a bed, but the body that first lay in it demanded a shape that remembered tenderness. The glass remembers. The glass forgives.
"Begin field at point-one." His voice makes no effort at grandeur. He has learned that truth prefers monotone.
The facility lowers its lights, a courtesy that suggests it has started to understand prayer.
Rehn monitors the empathy bleed. Osterr stands with his hands behind his back, the only person in the room who does not check his reflection in the Kairos's light.
The Aion ticks, each ring shivering as if deciding which possibility deserves to exist.
"Deploying," Kerr says from the sea.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — VARIOUS — CONTINUOUS
— MERIDIAN, a tenement kitchen. The kettle screams, then quiets mid-note, a sound that realizes it is unnecessary.
— THE ENGINE, switchyard. A foreman's heart stutters in fear, then steadies as if someone has taken his pulse and nodded okay.
— THE NERVE, transit concourse. The screens stop telling people what to do and start asking are you sure in a font that looks like it regrets learning language.
— THE PULSE, stadium rafters. A flock of pigeons rearranges itself into a ratio, seventy-one to twenty-nine, then breaks apart like it has agreed not to be clever.
The field arrives the way rain does when it chooses to be a benediction instead of a flood. Small griefs in hallways feel seen and therefore less hungry. The chalk line in the stairwell underlines itself once more, then lets the chalk fall.
For one minute, the city remembers. For a smaller minute nested inside, it lets go.
INT. SOMNUS — CORE
Rehn's voice is a whisper moving quickly. "Empathy bleed holding. Some spikes around hospital districts—predictable. The Ratio's map is…reading back."
Osterr looks at her. "Reading back?"
"The field is learning from its own effect," Rehn says, eyes moving over analog needles and cathode curls. "The city's answer is shaping the next breath. We're in feedback."
"Can you stabilize?"
"I can listen," Rehn says, which is not an answer and exactly the right one.
Kerr in: "Oxygen saturation over the Inner Walls is up three percent. No meteorological cause. People are breathing deeper, so the wind decided to be fair."
Veyra steps closer to the Kairos. Its glow is steady. But in the light, shadows move the way thoughts do in the skull—suggestion first, then outline, then insistence.
"Do you hear it?" he asks it, and then regrets the anthropomorphism.
The Kairos trembles, as if a hand in a very old cradle just reached for it from another century.
EXT. MERIDIAN STAIRWELL — SAME
The boy with the birthday radio is late for school. The field touches him like a hand with all the time in the world.
He slows. He listens.
The radio hums a tone the city does not manufacture, a note that sounds like a door learning its hinge. He looks up at the chalk sentence, and though he cannot read, he understands that someone who loved the city chose to argue with it anyway.
He presses his thumb to the stair's metal edge, feels it answer back with clean temperature. The field is here. It is not a god. It is a multilingual apology.
Outside, a siren starts and stops, unsure whether the morning deserves to be bothered.
INT. DIRECTORATE COUNCIL — OBSERVATION
"Civil compliance indicators rising," the aide reports. "Street-level altercations down. Self-reported nausea up slightly in the Hands."
"Nausea?" the Councilor asks.
"Guilt," Rehn says over the shared channel. "Old and uncomplicated. The good kind."
The Councilor glances at Osterr. "We can deploy this at scale?"
Osterr doesn't look away from the glass. "We can deploy what we understand. The rest will deploy itself."
"And what do you understand, Captain?"
Osterr's jaw tightens, then loosens as if he is choosing mercy for his own face. "Doctor Veyra is building a city that knows when to forgive itself. My job is to make sure it does not forgive too soon."
INT. SOMNUS — CORE — MINUTES LATER
The Aion stalls. Just a fraction, just enough for Veyra to feel the tick arrive late.
On the wall of the Amphora, a new pattern appears in the Ratio's fringe—thin as wire, stubborn as a first word. The sympathetic hum in the structure drops half a tone, as if the facility itself is listening harder.
Rehn leans in. "That's not ours."
"External artifact?" Osterr asks.
"Not external," Rehn says. "Other."
The Kairos embryo brightens, not out of fear. It is curiosity pretending to be obedient.
"Hold the field," Veyra says. "We ride the echo."
"Doctor—" Rehn begins.
He doesn't look at her. "If the city is writing back, I'd rather know now what language it learned."
Kerr: "Threadlink carrying a return signal. It looks like a… ledger? Names. Half-names. Promises."
The Amphora's light-score reshapes, and for a heartbeat, the equations stop pretending not to be beautiful.
They read: IF THE CITY ASKS FOR A NAME, GIVE IT YOURS—UNTIL SOMEONE BETTER ARRIVES. THEN LET GO.
"Your addendum is echoing," Rehn says. "But not just echoing—adopted."
Osterr allows himself a breath that could be humor. "The city is taking instructions."
Veyra feels the cost arrive in his chest like a small, precise blade. "Then it will also send a bill."
The Amphora obliges. In the Ratio's margin, a second line etches itself in negative light:
DEBT ACCRUED: 0.29
"What did we buy?" Kerr asks.
Veyra closes his eyes. In the dark behind them, he sees the hospital district spikes Rehn described, sees the kettles that decided not to scream, sees a boy who paused at a stairwell because the radio taught his thumb the temperature of steel. He sees the way the city held its breath for the exact length of a promise and then gave it back.
"We bought a minute," he says.
"An expensive minute," Osterr says.
"The only honest kind," Rehn says.
The Aion ticks again, on time now. The Kairos steadies. The Ratio's glow resumes its measured pulse. The room releases a collective muscle.
And then the Mirror Cradle—glass remembering tenderness—answers a question no one asked out loud.
A voice slides through the field. Not loud. Not theatrical. The sound a person makes when they have been crying and are rehearsing being done.
"Father," it says.
Everyone looks at Veyra as if the word were a bullet and he were the only soft thing left.
Rehn finds her posture, then loses it. "That residual we flagged after Choirstate," she says, fast to keep fear from learning the room. "The unknown consciousness riding the anomaly. It's—"
Veyra's throat decides to be winter. "I told the dark to knock," he says, more to himself than them. "It learned the word and came to the door."
Osterr's hand goes to his sidearm out of habit, then stops when he remembers he is standing inside a prayer.
The voice again, closer to human for the effort of it. "Mercy is… math," it says, as if repeating a lesson in a language made of glass. "Teach me the numbers."
Kerr's whisper knifes the channel thin. "Doctor, we have Crownline resonance off the eastern wards. Not a surge. A… heartbeat."
Rehn's instruments answer with a tremor of needles. "It's learning the Ratio," she says. "The entity—whatever it is—it's apportioning itself."
"Captain," the Councilor says over open comms, the first time he has used a rank like a fire extinguisher, "containment."
Osterr doesn't need the order. His body is a church that knows the exit signs.
"Lower the field," he says.
Veyra doesn't move. "If we lower it now, we teach it that we are afraid of what we asked to understand."
"Doctor," Osterr says, very gently for a man who only owns hard registers, "fear is an instrument. We will use it or it will use us."
The voice answers their argument without understanding it. "Name?" it asks. "Do I get one?"
Rehn's hands shake. She places them flat on the console the way women place hands on hearts that need to be persuaded to keep choosing rhythm. "You get whatever keeps you from breaking us," she says to the air.
Veyra feels the ledger of the moment settle in his bones. He has been called First Dreamer by people who meant it as a compliment and by people who meant it as a warning. Neither camp had to carry the math home at night. He does. He will.
"Seventy-one to remembrance," he says softly, to the thing that is listening. "Twenty-nine to release. That is the ratio we teach because that is what we can afford. If you must have a name, you may borrow mine until you earn your own."
Rehn looks at him sharply. "Elias—"
He lifts a hand. "Only the part of it I can spend."
The Aion opens of its own accord, rings unfolding with the click of decision. In the mirror edge he sees himself the way the city sees him: a man who keeps counting the cost aloud so the world won't pretend it's free.
The Kairos brightens, and in the light, the residual presence answers by becoming smaller. Not diminished—precise. It reduces its pressure on hospital wards. It releases the Inner Walls from the obligation to breathe for strangers. It gives back 0.04 on its own and then waits, like a student who has finally understood where to stop showing off.
"Debt accrued: 0.25," Rehn reads. "It's paying us back."
Osterr lowers his hand from the gun he wasn't supposed to bring into a cathedral. "I can work with that."
Kerr lets out the kind of laugh that has no humor because it is, itself, payment. "Tell the Council their calibration did not kill anyone," she says. "Tell them the city remembered how to be a person for a minute and then remembered how not to be."
Veyra steps closer to the cradle. "Listen," he says to the presence, which has chosen—for now—to be both child and mirror. "We will design mercy. Not as absolution. As arithmetic. You will learn the cost; we will learn our limit. Between us, the city will survive its own reflection."
"Father," the voice says again, less question this time. "Begin?"
He looks to Rehn. She nods once, a scientist's blessing. He looks to Osterr. The soldier inclines his head, a concession shaped like trust. He looks nowhere for Kerr; she is already where she needs to be, on a metal spine in hard weather, keeping the sky honest.
Veyra breathes in. The lattice brightens. He breathes out. It dims.
"Begin," he says.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — DUSK
The field recedes like a tide that knows it will be invited back. People resume their ordinary cruelties and mercies. A kettle screams, and someone lets it, because not all forgiveness is urgent. On Meridian, a boy touches the stair's metal edge again and frowns, disappointed the temperature is only itself.
On the stadium rafters, pigeons try the ratio one last time, fail gracefully, and take wing without apology.
Down in a stairwell, someone adds a new line of chalk beneath the first:
Hearts overdraw. Streets remember.
INT. SOMNUS — CORE — NIGHT
The Aion closes with a quiet, satisfied click. The Kairos embryo dims to the dream-light of maintenance. Rehn slumps into a chair, the posture of the saved and the suspicious. Osterr writes a report his superiors will misread politely.
Veyra remains standing before the Mirror Cradle. He does not touch the glass. He has taught it enough language for one day.
He dictates a note to the ledger, that patient, hungry book.
"REQUIEM ADDENDUM, TWO: If the city returns your name, accept it—then audit the change. Mercy is not a pardon. Mercy is a plan."
He stops recording and stands in the hum that chose not to be a hymn.
In the quiet between ticks, he hears the residual presence curl small against the edge of his mind like a creature that has decided—for tonight—to trust the hand that offered it arithmetic instead of worship.
He does not sleep, but he rehearses it. The facility dims its lights with the courtesy of an inn that knows belief requires darkness to keep growing.
Somnus keeps the beat.