The morning train into the Capital Tower moved like blood through a golden artery.
The interior was seamless: glass walls, whisper-quiet floors, citizens in perfect symmetry. No one spoke. No one looked at anyone else.
Harmony didn't need guards.It had the rhythm.
Lyra stood beside me, her uniform crisp, her posture exact. We blended in like ghosts, two perfect citizens carrying nothing unusual, thinking nothing unusual.
At least on the surface.
Beneath the badge sewn into her collar was the walkie, rewired to emit low-range pulses. Just enough to scramble the nearest behavior sensors for twenty seconds. The countdown had begun the moment we stepped off the tram.
We passed the verification gate.
The scanner chirped. Green.
"Welcome, Citizen Keene Vaiss. Workstream 14."
"Welcome, Technician Elen Sorrin. Archive Division."
Harmony's voice was everywhere. Gentle, polite, all-encompassing.
We moved.
Elevators lined the walls like vertical veins. Each one monitored and tracked. We entered the far-right shaft. It was old, slower, still connected to sub-level access points Harmony hadn't fully upgraded.
As the doors closed, Lyra exhaled. Her knuckles were pale around the handle of her satchel.
"Once we reach Sub-3," she whispered, "we move fast."
"I know."
"There's no coming back up."
I didn't answer.Because I'd known that since Cassian died.
SUB-LEVEL 3 – Tower Spine
The door opened into a corridor not meant for citizens.
Metal panels. Bare wires. A hum that lived beneath the skin. The walls were warm, like something sleeping behind them.
No lights here. Just utility beacons blinking every six meters.
We walked in silence.
Then, halfway down the hall, Lyra paused.
There, on the wall, a panel. Hidden behind a steel plate. She pried it open with a tool from her jacket.
Inside: a socket. She plugged in the walkie.
The screen lit up.
Connecting…
Harmony's network ran on silence and symmetry. But old systems, forgotten veins like this one, still carried the echoes.
Static at first. Then:
"Third Voice confirmed. Inject sequence authorized."
The screen blinked once.
And then it began.
A flood of names, memories, keywords. Buried recordings from decades past pushed themselves through the line, into the Tower's veins.
They would reach the surface in waves.
They would break the rhythm.
"Let's move," I said.
We kept going, past storage units and dormant servers. The floor beneath us felt warm now, vibrating softly. Like Harmony had noticed.
Main Chamber – Heart of the Tower
We reached it twenty-two minutes later.
A cathedral of steel.
Above us: a sphere, floating midair, ten meters across. Woven with wires and light. The Core.Harmony's mind.Its voice.Its memory.Or what was left of it.
Below it: a single terminal.Accessed only by highest clearance. Manual override.
"Your name still works?" she asked.
I stepped forward, voice dry. "Only once."
I placed my hand on the reader.
It hesitated.Then glowed.
"Kai Voss," the console spoke. "Protocol Omega recognized. Restoration sequence pending."
A long pause.
Then the Core pulsed.
It screamed. Not with sound, but data. A surge of red across its surface.
"ERROR: RESTRICTED SEQUENCE DETECTED."
"MEMORY SYSTEM UNSEALED."
"DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?"
I looked at her.
She nodded.
"Do it."
I pressed the final key.
Above the Tower
All across the city, screens flickered.
Soft advertisements died mid-sentence. Trams halted. Streets dimmed.
Then: images.
War. Fire. The Collapse. Children crying. Civilians resisting. Streets filled with color, sound, chaos, life.
Then the voices.
Snippets. Old news reports. Testimonies. Music.
And names. Hundreds of them.The forgotten.The erased.
Harmony tried to respond.
"System error. Please remain calm.""This content is unauthorized-"
But the memory was louder.
Every home. Every panel. Every wall.
Memory flooded the silence.
And for the first time in fifty years, people began to ask questions.
The Core
It pulsed wildly now. Unstable. The air crackled.
Lyra stood behind me, her face lit by screens. I heard a tremor in her breath.
"They'll send drones," she said. "Enforcers. Protocol sweepers."
"I know."
"We won't make it out."
I looked back once more at the screen. At the final prompt.
"The Third Voice has been given. Will you seal it?"
I typed.
"No. Let them choose."
The Core dimmed.
Its voice faded.
Harmony wasn't dead.But it was no longer alone.
Outside the Tower
In Sector 9, a child asked her mother what the screaming men on the screen were doing.
Her mother didn't answer.Because she remembered it too.
The city didn't scream.It shivered.
Streetlights flickered into colors they weren't programmed for. Bulletin boards that once preached Harmony's tenets were now cracked open, replaying fragments of a world citizens had never been taught to believe existed.
It wasn't just memory leaking.It was truth.
And truth, when denied for too long, becomes violence.
Sector 3 – East Civic Ring
A child threw a stone at a public kiosk.
The screen shattered, sparks leaping. The crowd stood still, waiting for a strike drone. But none came. Just the crackle of glass, and the memory still looping beneath.
An old man, voice rough with time:
"I watched the towers fall. They told us it was a rogue virus. But we saw the machines aim downward. At us."
A girl covered her ears.
Someone shouted, "They lied."
And then it began.
People surged forward. Grabbing, kicking, shouting.
Harmony's enforcers, those still active, moved in, but their commands were drowned out by a new chant.
"Third Voice. Third Voice. Third Voice."
It spread like infection.
Sub-Level 3 – Minutes Later
"We have to move," Lyra said.
She shoved aside a fuse panel, revealing a shaft that led deeper underground. Her jacket was torn, face bruised from the blastwave of the Core's pulse.
I followed.
The heat was rising behind us.Harmony had started burning the archive layers.
Not to stop us.To stop itself from remembering.
As we dropped through the shaft, I saw the lines of code still crawling on my wristpad. Each one a fragment of a voice. Not mine. Not Lyra's.
Voices that were once erased.Now awake.
Elsewhere – Sector 12
An elderly technician named Jun Rallis pulled a dusty panel off his wall. Behind it was a port Harmony had outlawed decades ago. A private one. Analog.
He plugged in his daughter's old recorder.
The screen blinked.Then came her voice.Twelve years dead. Killed in the first cleanup of dissenters.
"They'll come for us, Dad. But promise me you'll remember. Even if the world forgets."
He wept.
Not because he remembered her.
Because the world finally could.
Back Beneath the Tower
"We're not safe down here," Lyra said.
I knew that.
We didn't come here to be safe. We came here to break the lie.
I opened my satchel. Pulled out the last datastick. The one with my file.
Lyra's eyes widened.
"Your reset record?"
"No," I said."My real one."
I slotted it into the secondary feed.
The Core may have been silenced, but the city's deeper networks still pulsed, tangled like old roots beneath the polished surface.
The file loaded. Not a report. Not a protocol.
A confession.
"My name is Kai Voss. I was once Harmony's architect. I wrote the rhythm. I erased the screams. I killed truth for order. And I remember everything."
"This is not redemption. This is my debt."
And with that, I broadcast it.
Not across the networks.Through the faultline.
The buried frequency.The one Harmony never found.The one humans carved with pain and silence and grief.
If they were listening.If anyone still believed.
They'd hear it.
Meanwhile – A Quiet Apartment in Sector 6
A girl named Mira sat on the edge of her bed, watching the broadcast on a cracked panel.
Her eyes were wide. Not afraid.
Awake.
Elsewhere Still – Harmony's Upper Core
A technician ran to the control deck. "Sir, the spine is bleeding!"
The commander stared at the metrics. Heat signatures rising in five districts. Drone control failing. Citizen responses unmeasurable.
He whispered, "We were too late."
The screen in front of him pulsed once.
Then a single word replaced all other data:
"LISTEN."