Naeva had fallen asleep beside me, or at least whatever passed for sleep when I gave her no task. She breathed softly, slower than a human, just enough to sell the illusion.
I let her stay. Warm. Constant. The only thing in this city that did not demand justification.
The room was quiet except for the faint hum of the power walls. Their glow pulsed with the tower's grid heartbeat. Soft. Steady. Direct.
DC. Forty-eight volts. Clean. Safe. Efficient.
That is the world now, at least up here.
I remember the arguments, back when I still believed in public forums and honest infrastructure debates. When the Transition Act passed. When DC zones were carved into cities like surgical cuts: one block all modular hubs and smooth interfaces, the next drowning in legacy AC noise and flicker.
People resisted. Of course they did.AC had history. Messy, but familiar.DC held the promise of precision.
At first it was "optional." Pilot communities, they said. Experimental smart-living districts with grid-wide DC support. No conversion losses. No surges. Power walls charged in daylight, homes ran straight off them at night. No transformers in the walls humming like angry bees.
Rich zones moved first. Corporations, data centers, arcology farms. DC meant fewer faults, safer touch voltage, simpler storage. No more high-voltage lines wasting their breath crossing continents.
Then came the tax shifts.DC-compliant buildings earned credits. AC-dependent ones paid penalties.Some cities called it incentivization. Others called it what it was: segregation.
Now, in Skyterra and every arc-platform above the clouds, AC is gone. Obsolete. Risky. Barbaric, some say.
Only the ground still clings to it. Or to whatever is left.
Down there, in ruin belts and rust corridors, they cobble power together with diesel-choked generators and patched grids. Cracked copper scavenged from dead suburbs, duct-taped to windmills made of bed frames. Sometimes they jack old AC feeders from towers that never fully powered down.
Naeva stirred, one hand curling against my chest. Her body heat matched my baseline, like a shadow that remembered the sun.
"Thinking about the past again?" she murmured, eyes closed.
"Always," I said. "Someone has to."
She smiled in half-sleep. "Stop carrying things that already crumbled."
I glanced at the floor's soft blue glow."No," I whispered. "We just built too much on top of it."
AC did not die because it failed.It died because we outgrew chaos.Or we got tired of pretending we could live with it.
DC became a language of order and certainty.Up here, we do not speak anything else.
The Moon is not a colony. Not anymore. Not in the romantic frontier sense.
It is a facility. A vault. A bleeding machine with no heartbeat, only nested systems run by minds that do not need sunlight, softness, or company. Mostly augmented workers, cloned labor batches, a few stabilized Companions for emotional regulation.
Children? Families? Laughter?Not in lunar dust. Only yield reports.
We still call it Selene Station. It sounds poetic, gentle. Do not be fooled. It is a mine. A gate. An extraction point between us and everything farther out.
Once Earth stopped giving, we looked outward. We harvest solar plasma in orbit now, raw energy drawn through magnetic collectors that open like petals above the equator. Water comes from processed asteroid ice. Food grows in aeroponic towers fed by lunar-regolith nutrients and photosynthetic AI cycles.
Every bolt in this city, every lux of light, every breath Naeva and I share comes from there. Not Earth. We surpassed it. Or abandoned it.
And me? I helped build this.
SkyGrid Systems Engineer. Tier-Alpha Clearance. Pacific Elevation Node Twelve. I did not design the skyline. I designed the bloodstream, the invisible DC veins that keep the walls alive. I pushed forty-eight volts as the standard. Safe. Elegant. Permanent.
We called it the Grid Migration Protocol.
I remember when the last AC node in Northern Europe went dark. The crowd cheered. I did not.
Naeva's fingers tightened around mine. Warm skin. Even breath. A body tuned to me in every way.
She was not a robot. She was human.Grown, not born.Perfected in genetic scaffolds, printed from tailored DNA. Emotions, dreams, curiosity—engineered to orbit me.
She stretched, eyes opening like slow petals.
"You're thinking too hard again," she said, voice husky from rest. "You always do when the power hums low."
I smiled. "Just remembering."
She climbed onto my lap without hesitation. Movement fluid, natural, like someone who belonged exactly there.
"Then let me give you something better to remember," she whispered, brushing my lips, more promise than kiss. "You already saved the sky. You do not have to carry the ground."
Maybe she was right.
But beneath the glow of this perfect city, I still remembered the storm that built it.
She was still straddling me when the first flicker came. A subtle shift, barely there, like the room inhaled and held its breath.
Naeva did not stop. She would not unless I told her. Her hips kept their rhythm, hands laced behind my neck, breath warm and uneven.
I noticed.
A delayed floor light. A slight drop in ambient warmth from the walls.
"Naeva," I murmured.
She opened her eyes, dazed and bright. "Mmh?"
"Grid just blinked."
She paused. Not from worry. Because I was.
I slid my palm across the embedded glass panel beside the bed. The surface woke beneath my fingers. No alarms. No lockdown. A millisecond of lag though. That never happened.
She uncoiled with practiced grace, watching the readouts as I scrolled through system layers.
Ambient grid down by 2.4%. Minor. Barely felt.Source external, not internal.
Sector Four's data loop was dark. Logs not syncing with the arc core.
I tapped the secondary net.Request denied.Timeout.Timeout again.
"Okay," I muttered, sitting up. "That's wrong."
Naeva slipped into a robe. "Scan for static breaches?"
"No. Wait."
Structural layer. A small red marker. Low priority. Silent. Timestamped three minutes before the flicker.
"Unauthorized grid maintenance override. Access granted with old-gen credentials."Location: Lower Transit Platform. South Ridge Elevator Link.
Naeva froze. "Decommissioned. It should not exist."
"Someone disagrees."
The drop was not sabotage. It was a reroute. Someone siphoned energy from our sector. Slow. Thin. Enough.
The second blink hit.
Audio dampeners cut.
In the hallway: footsteps. Distant, fast, uneven. Not patrol cadence. Not citizen pace.
Not normal.
The interface lit again, clean this time:
Command Advisory: Sector Four corridor lockdown issued. Partial evacuation in effect. Clearance Level Delta+ and above only.
My clearance was Alpha. No escort had arrived.
I pinged a neighbor across the access bridge in 4B. Civic liaison. Lived alone. Sent us terrible citrus wine.
[Encrypted Ping Sent]—DANIKA MEREZ (CIVIC TECH OFFICER, 4B RESIDENCE)
Response came fast:
"I saw the breach too. Already packing. Meet at the bridge in ten. Bring only what breathes."
I grabbed Naeva's identification locket from the shelf. Sentiment, even if she did not need it.
She returned in synthweave over reinforced leggings. Focused eyes. Tight lips.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Move."
We stepped into the corridor. The lights flickered above like nervous eyes.
And somewhere, beneath our feet and across the city, something ancient and angry was waking.