Eira pressed her cheek to the cold glass pane, eyes tracing the curvature of a passing transport drone, sleek and soundless like a fish gliding through sterile air. The city blinked in calculated pulses beyond it, lights rising and falling like breath in a machine that never slept.
Aurelis was always humming. You could almost ignore it—if you'd never heard anything else.
The room behind her was immaculate, like all rooms in Aurelis. Bleached walls, smoothed corners, zero dust. There were no shadows in the city—artificial lighting adjusted for mood calibration. Everything was designed to prevent disorientation, anxiety, deviation.
But alone, with no cameras watching—and there were blind spots if you knew where to stand—Eira leaned slightly out of posture.
And sighed.
Not the kind of sigh you logged with your biometric mood sync. Not the pre-coded, calibrated exhale of mild fatigue. This one was soft, and real, and it hurt a little on the way out. As if it carried something forbidden.
Something like feeling.
She pulled her legs up into the seat, resting her chin on her knees. Her body folded neatly, like it had learned to take up as little space as possible. She wore the standard synthweave uniform—monochrome silver, wrinkleless, heat-balanced—but her sleeves were quietly frayed at the ends. She'd done that herself. A tiny rebellion, easily missed.
Her appearance? Statistically optimal. Engineered to be symmetrical—but not too symmetrical, lest she seem uncanny. Skin pale but not ghostly. Eyes large, but not wide. Hair a uniform chestnut—though she secretly curled the ends at night. Not enough to trigger alerts. Just enough to feel like her own.
Her face was beautiful. Of course it was.
But when no one was looking, she would stare into the reflection of her own irises and whisper:
"You're boring, aren't you?"
Then she'd frown. Not visibly—frowns could be tracked. But internally. Quietly. In the tight muscles beneath her cheekbones.
Eira liked silence, but not this kind.
She missed noises that didn't loop every 3.8 seconds. She missed imperfections. The static hum of broken lamps. The clink of misaligned glass. The ragged wheeze of someone else's breath in the same room.
And sometimes—like last night—she dreamed of laughter.
Not the programmed kind that chirped through public broadcasts, carefully timed and modulated to imply "acceptable levity."
But real laughter.
A voice cracked open by joy. Her mother's voice, maybe. In that dream, she was telling the moon a story. She called it "Selene." That was the moon's name. She'd whispered it like it mattered.
But that was before her mother nodded at her instead of smiling.
Before she'd said, "You are performing well."
Before she said, "Love is inefficient."
The glass fogged slightly from Eira's breath. That wasn't supposed to happen. The room's temperature regulator must have fallen by 0.3 degrees.
She smiled, just barely.
"A flaw," she whispered. "You're just like me."
The city never rests, but it never celebrates either. There were no holidays—no days for joy or sorrow. Those were human distractions. The citizens of Aurelis had no need for them. Their days began at dawn and ended at dusk, but time itself was irrelevant in a world of perfection.
Every breath was coordinated. Every gesture calculated. A measured, harmonious flow of activity that moved through the city like a well-oiled machine.
Eira stood in front of a mirror, running her hands over her uniform, smoothing invisible wrinkles. Her posture was perfect—she'd made sure of that—straightened back, chin slightly raised. Just the right amount of tilt to her head so it didn't seem too stiff. She stared at herself for a long moment, as if looking for the smallest fault she might have missed.
A slight twitch in her right eyebrow. Just barely noticeable.
She blinked. Shook it off.
Then, something else.
A noise.
Not the hum of wall-circuits. Not the soft rhythmic clicks of thermal regulators.
Something... off.
A faint scrape, like a footstep.
Out of sync.
She turned sharply—too sharply—and scanned the hallway.
No one.
The silence returned. But it wasn't the same.
Eira stepped back. Smoothed her expression. Watched the corridor. Then, as a line of citizens passed by, she straightened. Reflexively. Their movement was seamless—shoulders squared, gazes locked forward, their minds tuned to the rhythm of the system.
But this time... she felt it.
One pair of eyes flicked—just for a second—toward her.
And held.
He was gone before she could tell who it was.
The rest of the citizens passed without falter.
Eira's heart beat faster.
She told herself it was a sensory misfire. A fatigue error. She filed it under "unverified input."
But her fingers twitched.
They always twitched when no one was looking.
She didn't move.
Not until the hallway was empty again.
The dining hall was next. A sterile room filled with trays in perfect rows. The food was colorless. Calorie-aligned. Tasteless. Designed for function. No sweetness. No bitterness. No warmth.
Perfection had no flavor.
Eira sat in her usual spot. She could hear their breathing—measured. Chewing—uniform. No one spoke. It was forbidden.
But beneath the mechanical precision, something moved in her chest.
A flicker of the dream again. Her mother's cracked voice. Selene. The moon's name was Selene. That name didn't exist in the Aurelis registry.
That meant she had remembered it.
That meant it was hers.
She pressed the edge of her spoon to her plate a little too hard. The sound it made—just a tiny scrape—caused someone at the far table to glance up.
But only for a moment.
Eira's reflection stared back at her in the polished tray.
Blank face. Still posture.
But her hands were sweating again.
Not supposed to sweat.
She gripped the spoon tighter. Then slowly, carefully, dragged its blunt edge along the inside of her wrist. Not to hurt. Just to feel.
The cold. The pressure. The scrape of imperfect metal against flawless skin.
It didn't leave a mark.
But it left something else.
"I'm not broken," she whispered. Her breath barely moved. Her lips didn't shape the words fully.
But her chest ached anyway.
That ache—that question—kept returning.
Am I really perfect?
She stood with the others when the meal ended. Moved in sync. Filed out in order.
But as she walked, her eyes lingered on the door by the far corridor.
Someone had left a fingerprint on the frame.
Just one.
Small.
Out of place.
She looked around. No one else noticed.
She reached out and pressed her hand next to it.
Her thumb—ever so slightly misaligned.
Then she walked on.
The system would wipe it clean within the hour.
But maybe, just maybe, someone would see it first.
Someone like her.