That evening, I walked through my front door and offered the scripted greeting. "I'm home."
My father looked up from the couch and smiled. It was a perfect, warm smile. "Welcome back, Kai."
We sat at the dinner table in a silence broken only by the clink of silverware. I studied him—the way his eyes tracked the screen in the other room, the way his jaw moved with mechanical precision.
"Dad," I said carefully. "Did I go somewhere yesterday?"
My father didn't pause his meal. He didn't blink. "You studied. Ate. Slept. Why are you asking?"
"No reason," I whispered.
He took another bite, but I noticed his grip on the spoon. His knuckles were white, his hand trembling just enough to make the liquid in the bowl ripple. He was terrified.
That night, I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. I fell into a sleep that brought no rest. In the void of my mind, a symbol began to appear. It was sharp, abstract, and entirely unfamiliar—a jagged shape that looked like a broken crown.
It flashed in the darkness. Gone.
It flashed again. Gone.
It began to loop, faster and faster, a relentless strobe light in my subconscious. There were no images of the white room, no memories of the men in uniforms, just this one error message repeating itself over and over again. My body shifted under the sheets, my hands gripping the fabric until the threads groaned.
The symbol accelerated, a violet spark in the center of the dark, looping and looping until it was the only thing left in the universe. And as I lay there, trapped in the cycle, I realized that the "Harmony" hadn't just taken my yesterday. It was coming for my tomorrow.
Sunday was the only day the machine seemed to breathe. There were no jarring alarms, no synchronized morning announcements echoing from the street-corner speakers, and no mandatory schedules pinned to the kitchen corkboard. It was the only time the city of Harmony felt like it belonged to the people, rather than the other way around.
I rolled my cycle out of the house, the gate giving a small, rebellious creak that seemed to punctuate the morning silence. I paused, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath of the crisp, sterile air. This was my ritual—my one moment of unscripted peace in a world that demanded a performance. I pushed off, the tires humming against the pavement as I rode toward the outskirts of the residential district.
The streets were cleaner than usual, almost eerie in their emptiness. The wind brushed past my face, cooling the heat that always seemed to simmer beneath my skin these days. For a few fleeting moments, as the familiar architecture of the neighborhood blurred past, I felt almost normal. I felt peaceful.
I reached the crossing where I usually turned back toward the center of the city. I slowed, the pedals clicking rhythmically. I looked straight ahead at the usual route—the safe route, the one lined with perfect trees and smiling neighbors. Then, without really deciding to do it, I turned left.
The shift was gradual. As I pedaled further away from the city center, the background noise of Harmony began to thin. The distant hum of the power grid faded; the chirping of the "wellness" birds grew distant and eventually stopped. Even the wind seemed to dull, turning heavy and stagnant. My own pedaling echoed against the surrounding walls, the sound louder and more isolated than it should have been. I frowned, a cold knot forming in my stomach, but I kept going. I had to know what was at the end of the road.
I came to a stop in front of a rusted metal sign. It was bent and chipped, the red paint flaking away to reveal dark, corroded iron beneath.
NO ENTRY
It looked like it had been ignored for decades. I stared at it, the silence pressing in on my eardrums until they began to ring. I nudged my cycle to turn back, the instinct to obey the sign clawing at my mind, when a sudden, white-hot headache struck.
I gripped my head, my vision swimming. It wasn't just pain; it was a thought—an intrusive, alien concept that didn't feel like it originated in my own brain.
What if this place has something about the past?
The idea felt planted, a seed dropped into a crack in my psyche. I exhaled shakily, my breath hitching in my chest. I looked at the sign again, then at the desolate road stretching out beyond it. I swallowed hard, parked my cycle in the tall, yellowed grass beside the sign, and stepped over the invisible boundary.
The first step felt normal. The second step changed everything.
The ground cracked under my shoe, the sound of splintering asphalt echoing like a gunshot. I looked down at the broken, heaving road, then looked up. The world had transformed.
Ahead of me lay a skeletal landscape of fractured buildings and shattered glass. Streetlights were bent and snapped like toothpicks; windows were nothing but jagged teeth in the mouths of darkened apartments. There were no plants here, no birds, no life of any kind. This wasn't just decay; it was a crime scene frozen in time. This was the aftermath of a violence I had never been taught existed.
I took another step, the crunch of glass under my shoe unnaturally loud in the dead air. I turned in a slow circle, my heart hammering against my ribs. In school, they taught us that the city was built on a foundation of peace, that there was nothing before the Architects. But the evidence of a war—a massacre—was standing right in front of me.
I moved deeper into the ruins, my breathing becoming the only rhythm in the silence. That's when I saw it.
Hanging crookedly from a shattered support beam in what used to be a storefront was a video camera. It was covered in a thick layer of grey dust, looking like a relic from a forgotten era, but the body of the device appeared intact. I approached it with a hesitant hand, my fingers trembling as they brushed the cold metal.
I pulled it down, turning it over in my palms. The lens was cracked, but when I pressed the power button, the screen flickered to life with a burst of static.
The footage was distorted, the colors bleeding into each other, but it stabilized just enough for me to see the horror. People were running—normal civilians, people who looked just like my neighbors. But they weren't smiling. They were panicking, screaming in a silent, digital agony. I watched as they tore at storefronts, breaking windows and fighting each other with a desperate, animalistic ferocity. It wasn't an organized protest; it was total, unmitigated chaos.
My breath quickened. The camera in the footage shook violently as a distant explosion rocked the frame. People fell, disappearing into a cloud of smoke and dust. Then, a voice glitched through the audio, stripped of its humanity by the degradation of the file.
"System error… bio—"
The static surged, swallowing the rest of the message. The screen collapsed into a storm of black and white noise.
My hands shook so hard I almost dropped the device. My eyes were wide, fixed on the dead screen. This area hadn't been abandoned because it was old. It had been erased. The "Peace" of Harmony was built on the bones of this chaos.
I shut the camera off, and the silence of the ruins crashed back into me like a physical blow. I looked around at the shattered buildings, and for the first time in my life, I felt pure, instinctive terror. The silence felt aggressive now, like a predator watching me from the shadows of the broken windows.
I gripped the camera to my chest and ran.
My footsteps pounded against the cracked asphalt, a frantic beat as the blurred shapes of the dead zone raced past. The NO ENTRY sign loomed ahead, a beacon of the "safe" world I had abandoned. Relief surged through me as I neared the boundary.
I crossed the line—
BOOM.