"A city is a ledger of oaths you teach the weather to keep."
— chalk behind a sealed stairwell in the Directorate Citadel
EXT. EURAL COAST / ABOVE THE VETRAEUS EYE — DUSK
The ocean steals color from the sky and keeps it for later. Concentric rings breathe across the surface—patient, exact—as if a lung below has decided the world deserves rhythm again. Far beneath, where steel learned to listen, the Somnus Facility sleeps inside its own reflection, and the sea wears the secret like a wedding band.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA — UNTIMED
Equations hang in the air the way hymns hang in an empty church. The Requiem lattice glows at a steady pulse: 71 kept, 29 released. Veyra stands before it thinner than last week and older than yesterday, the Aion warm at his wrist, glyphs ticking like a conscience that learned to count. The Kairos embryo hovers at his shoulder—heart-bright, crown-dim—breathing the slow beat the ocean borrowed. He writes in light, the strokes precise, forgiving.
REQUIEM v1.1 — City Broadcast Profile (Civic)
Cadence:neighborhood / ward / wall
Budget:0.71 remembrance / 0.29 release
Addenda:If remembrance alone cannot hold, teach the block to hum.
He doesn't sign it. Oaths travel lighter without saints attached. The Amphora answers with a house-sound—the small approval old rooms make for boots they trust. The Ratio holds. The sea applauds quietly.
"Somnus," he says, "we're going to knock on another door."
Mirrors shade themselves to listening.
"Threadlink Relay. Gate on duty, memory, steady. Target: Thalassos—Kerr." The Aion ticks. The air becomes an ear, and a thread crosses the water without costing a name.
EXT. THALASSOS STATION — WINDWARD RAIL — NIGHT
An iron lung for an angry sea. Floodlights draw geometry on black water. Angels—two Seraph Frames—stand at parade rest while technicians comb heat off their cores with patient hands. Kerr walks the rail with the posture of someone who budgets rage and never overdrafts. Her radio hisses a politeness. Then the space between ribs and refusal learns a familiar voice.
"Solene."
"You still refuse to die polite," she says, not bothering to hide relief. "Report."
"Somnus stable. The Choir sleeps as archive. The Kairos holds. Requiem is in field shape." A pause, the sound of a man counting cost between every sentence. "We're going to teach a city gate to listen."
"Topside we birthed your Directorate yesterday," she replies. "Four Divisions on paper, three in practice, a fourth that keeps its teeth under a cloth. Kids at the Pelagic are learning to breathe in ratios. Your name isn't on anything. That was the point."
"Good." Gratitude, counted like water. The thread tightens—an almost—then holds.
"Null-Lit traces?" she asks.
"In the bedrock. Scaffold-flavored memory, not bite. Requiem reminded it to behave."
"Then let's go teach manners to concrete."
TITLE CARD — INTERCUT (KOJIMA LENS):
— DIAMOND CITY / INNER WALL S-12: Commuters pass through a Halo gate that tastes their posture for panic. Overhead: REMEMBER ENOUGH TO BE KIND; RELEASE ENOUGH TO REMAIN HUMAN.No signature. The guard who stenciled it keeps walking.
— PELAGIC ACADEMY: Recruits waist-deep in cold water, learning that wide Halos make ghosts and tight Halos give truth. "Allocate," the instructor says. "40 to speed, 30 to guard, 30 to keep a promise."
— SECOND DIVISION VAULT: A jar hums in a zero-signal cradle. A plaque: Every specimen is a confession geography made.
— THIRD DIVISION WARD: A medic whispers a name back into someone who lost it where sidewalks lied. Sign: You didn't break—we return you to yourself.
— FOURTH DIVISION CELL: Masks on a table. A thin folder: BLACK DECREE. Motto over the door: We stop the wrong stories.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — RESIDENTIAL ZONE / BLOCK 47W — NIGHT
Steam climbs an old brick like patient ivy. Laundry lines print staves across the alley; a transistor on a sill hums the planet's new lullaby at 58.3 Hz. Inside a second-floor kitchen, a woman with a mason's hands sits with her mug and a grief that has gone from flood to weather. The radio isn't on. The air is.
The Requiem arrives softly, not a sermon but a budget: 0.71 hold, 0.29 let go. The cup warms exactly the amount it always warmed when he came home late from the yard. The chair unlearns the dent his weight left. The ache remains, parked, honest, scaled to human. The room exhales the way bodies do when reminded how.
Across the lane, a boy sleeps through midnight for the first time since Crowncry made lullabies dangerous.
INT. SOMNUS — SPINE SHAFT / LATER
Veyra watches mirrors along the vertical ribs light in sequence as the broadcast climbs. Echo Protocol edits itself into liturgy: the lattice threads through stone with a voice that swaps tricks for patience. He thumbs a new subroutine into the Aion:
CITY MODE:wall-to-ward cascade; citizen band advisory; Third Division prompts where grief spikes above safe.
"Send it," he says.
The shaft hums consent.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — ENTERTAINMENT ZONE / HEXA STADIUM EXITS — NOW
Velocity empties into neon. Neoclash fans spill into streets that pretend spectacle is therapy. A line of lamps falters—one block only, one second only. The air smells like wire trying to confess.
Ines Halberd—nineteen, Halo tight as a collar—stops on the curb. She pockets her training badge so the city will talk to her like a person, not a unit. A ripple at the edge of perception: someone prayed here and didn't mean it. Spiral pressure, Tier-1. She steps into an alley where a wall bulges with the memory of a shoulder that leaned there every night at 3 a.m. and decided not to jump.
"Dispatch, Vigilant trainee Halberd," she whispers. "Spiral forming, size of a sigh. Request Requiem overlay and Third on soft standby."
The grid blinks twice, as if choosing kindness. The bulge shrugs off its will to stay wrong. Ines breathes with it—budget, don't fight—and the world remembers how to be a wall. A noodle stall returns to smelling like broth instead of memory.
A boy watches from a crate, a toy car in his hands deciding whether to believe him again. Ines kneels.
"What's your name?"
"Ray," he says, which is true now that someone asked.
"This street's tired," she says, and her Halo folds smaller, a careful animal. "We let it sleep, it lets you play."
He nods. This is a city that teaches and expects to be taught.
INT. THALASSOS — COMMAND GALLERY — SAME NIGHT
"Ma'am," a Watch tech calls to Kerr, "we're seeing cityband resonance north-west. Residential, low intensity. Someone's singing your handwriting."
"It's not mine," she says, not unkind. "Keep the Angels cool; they overheat like saints." She taps the rail. "Log the overlay as unattributed. Keep it that way."
The thread warms.
"You're walking the block," she says into the quiet between them.
"Not walking," Veyra answers. "Humming. Less cost that way."
"Cost," she repeats, approving. "Good word."
INSERT — DIRECTORATE CITIZEN BAND / PUBLIC ADVISORY
If you woke with a small subtraction—keys misplaced, a thought mislaid—call it the price of the city remembering you back. Drink water. If you hear a choir when it's quiet, tell someone in a coat who listens before they talk.
— no signature
INT. SOMNUS — LOWER ANCHOR — THE HOUR WITHOUT PERMISSION
Stone remembers how to be a door.
A seam opens where bedrock used to be convinced. A draft of cold that carries nothing and therefore everything threads into the corridor as lace—Null-Lit residue, scaffold-flavored, a reminder of a Crownline that worshiped architecture until it learned to wear cathedrals as skin. Not bite—posture. The mirrors gray with a patience that isn't fear.
"Allocation," Veyra says gently, the way one speaks to a child that could lift a car. "Seventy guard. Thirty grace. Spend courage last."
The Requiem hum threads into stone. The lace shivers, offended that good manners still exist, and folds itself back into rock. Somewhere far away, something old turns its head and decides to wait. Veyra keeps his palm up until the door forgets it could be a door. Then he lowers it as you lower a hand from a sleeping brow.
He logs the tremor in the Aion. One day the Fourth Division will write a warrant for this exact taste of absence. Today it becomes a footnote in a ledger that keeps people alive.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — INNER WALLS / GATE 7B — MORNING
Inspection lanes yawn open like good habits. Commuters pass through domes of attention that check posture before IDs. Over the portcullis, the Requiem text runs on a narrow marquee any child can memorize: Remember enough to be kind; release enough to remain human. In a side booth, a Third Division nurse stamps passes and watches faces for the tremors grief leaves behind.
Across the plaza, a Black Halo suit on a dolly rolls past under a tarp. No one sees it. That is its job. It smells faintly of old storms and the paperwork that follows them.
INT. DIRECTORATE CITADEL — SMALL ROOM BEHIND THE ROOM — LATER
Four folders and the blank one that pretends it doesn't exist. Kerr is alone with the kind of loneliness reserved for people who sign this century into smaller, survivable pieces.
She opens the blank folder.
BLACK HALO — MEMORANDUM OF INTENT
If we did our job, you will doubt we exist.
"Not yet," she tells it, and closes the cover like putting a child back to bed. She writes REQUIEM: Interim Adoption (Civic) on the whiteboard. Underline once. Then again. She doesn't add a name. The doctrine is the point; the myth is an expensive hobby.
The thread lifts.
"Doctor?"
"I'm here."
"Field says your lattice holds. Red Zone sighed instead of screaming. The stadium only lied for a second. And—this will sound small, but it never is—two kitchens had breakfast."
"That's the size I like," he says, and the smile in the words is all the ceremony this morning can afford.
"You should sleep."
"After one more thing," he lies, and they both let him.
EXT. THE INFINITY COMPLEX — SUBTERRANEAN ACCESS / OUTSKIRTS — NIGHT
Distance apologizes to intent here. A man-sized door in the undercity breathes a vapor like cold grammar. Flaking paint lists defunct utilities; someone has scrawled IF LOST, HUM in chalk. The Directorate calls this node a threshold; smugglers call it a rumor; mathematicians call it trespass. Infinity stitched this grid under the world during a bad century and left it to people who can afford to be persuaded.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA — SAME
Veyra studies a ghost map of doors no cartographer will admit to. The Aion paints a dotted line from the Vetraeus lung to a rusted stairwell under Diamond City. If Requiem can travel air and wire, it can travel habit. A city is a habit with streets.
"Somnus," he says, "test the Infinity path with a whisper only a kitchen would notice."
The lattice tightens to a filament. One more breath, one more subtraction he won't count aloud.
"Allocation: forty reach, thirty guard, thirty promise."
He sends it.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — RESIDENTIAL / SUB-LEVEL — SAME
The forgotten stairwell hears a tune in the metal. A bulb that died last winter decides to earn its keep for a minute. The Requiem slips through concrete the way warmth slips under a door.
On Level −3, a man in a delivery jacket stops halfway through locking the shop and remembers his father's laugh—just that—and then, exactly as much as he can stand, he lets it rest.
On Level −4, a woman poised to step into a bad Eidolon-syrup makes a phone call instead. The number's on the back of a card that says DBR and Bring them home.
INT. SOMNUS — ECHO ROOM (THE SMALL ONE) — LATER
Mirrors hold versions of him that learned different lessons. The Reflection waits—his face made kind by geometry.
"You keep failing to be the center," it says without sound.
"I keep trying to be a clerk."
"A clerk who writes hymns is a priest by another posture."
"I'll accept custodian," he answers. "Kairos will need better than me."
He turns his wrist. The Aion displays a private calendar: minutes spent beautifully and therefore lost. He looks for his mother's name and finds it unfrayed. Requiem budgets have teeth, but they don't always bite. He writes that down so the future will believe him.
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — RED ZONE / ROOFTOPS — DAWN
The first light smears itself along a skyline built from therapy and threat. Ines Halberd stands on a roof with a Thermos of tea and the small shake that follows a night where you made the map kinder. Ari Vale joins her, boots loud enough to be heard by anyone who needs to hear boots.
"You did well," Ari says. "You didn't take a miracle home as a souvenir."
"I wanted to," Ines admits.
"That's how they get you." Ari nods toward the street below, where a volunteer in a Third Division windbreaker hands out soup with bureaucratic tenderness. "You'll learn to count what to keep."
"What if I miscount?"
"Someone else hums," Ari says. "That's the doctrine."
INT. THALASSOS — HANGAR B — MORNING
Angels step into repose pods that cool their cores and give their faces back the kind of calm civilians can survive looking at. Kerr signs three forms and tears up a fourth because mercy is better when it doesn't have a case number.
The thread lifts. Not a call—an aftertaste.
"Solene," Veyra says, almost an apology. "I sent Requiem through Infinity on a kitchen-only whisper."
She doesn't scold him. She inventories risk.
"How many kitchens?"
"Enough."
"Then we'll log it as rumor," she says. "And teach people to listen for rumors that leave them gentler."
"Understood."
"Eat," she adds.
"After one more—"
"No," she says, and for the first time the thread carries a smile he can feel in his bones. "Now."
He obeys. The world stabilizes by increments as small as breakfast.
EXT. EURAL COAST / ORBIT — NIGHT
From orbit, the Vetraeus Eye blinks—once, slow—the way a lung confirms it will be there when you return. Satellites pretend that's ordinary. It isn't. In a ward in Diamond City, someone sleeps. In a cell with a mask on a table, a future war decides not to begin yet. In a kitchen with a cracked counter, a woman warms her hands around a mug and names what stays and what can be put down, and both are love.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA — UNTIMED
Veyra adds a footnote in small script to the lattice that will outlive him:
If remembrance alone cannot hold the map, teach the block to hum. If the block fails, teach the city. If the city fails, become a choir.
The Kairos pulses, a bright yes. The Amphora dims to a trustful dark. He sits on the floor the way a saint might if saints were allowed to be tired in public.
"Begin," he says again, because it keeps being the right word. The room agrees, quietly.
Outside, the sea breathes. The difference still matters.