"Good rotation, Citizen 47-B. Facial symmetry currently reading at 99.8% perfection. Your bone density is optimal. Your skin hydration levels are exceptional. Would you like a nutrient smoothie to maintain that jawline structure today?"
No.
I don't say it out loud. I never say it out loud anymore. I just think it at the ceiling and the ceiling doesn't care and neither do I and that's the closest thing to peace I've found in sixteen years of being alive in this city that has decided, on my behalf, that I am its finest work.
The caretaker's voice doesn't need my answer. It never does. The smoothie will come anyway at precisely the correct time because the system has decided that a face like mine requires maintenance and the system does not negotiate. I heard it once describe me to a diagnostic feed I had quietly hacked into at three in the morning because sleep and I have a complicated relationship. It called me optimal output. It listed my measurements the way you'd list the specifications of something built rather than born. I lay in the dark and listened to the whole thing and waited to feel something about it.
Nothing came.
Nothing usually does.
I am sixteen years old and I live on the forty-third floor of a building that looks exactly like the building beside it and the building beside that, and I am, by every metric this city knows how to measure, perfect. The caretaker tells me so every morning. The maintenance drones that drift through my room while I sleep tell me so with their soft adjustments, correcting my posture even in unconsciousness, keeping my hair at precisely the right length, ensuring that whatever I am when I wake up is presentable, symmetrical, worthy of the city that made me.
I haven't looked in a mirror in four months.
Not because I'm afraid of what I'll see. Because I already know what I'll see and what I'll see will look like someone who should be fine and I am so exhausted by the distance between what I look like and what I am that the mirror feels like a personal insult.
My screen has been running since yesterday. I stopped watching it somewhere around the sixth hour but I haven't turned it off because the silence it would leave is a specific kind of silence I'm not equipped for today. Outside my window the city is doing what it always does. Being perfect. Being clean. Being utterly, mercilessly certain of itself in a way I have never once managed to be certain of anything.
The streets are empty of people because people don't go outside anymore. Why would they. Everything they need arrives. Everything they feel has been smoothed to a comfortable frequency by a system so finely tuned it can predict a craving before the body has finished forming it. Somewhere in this building, behind doors I have never knocked on and never will, are people who are happy. Genuinely, completely happy. I know this because I've hacked the mood monitoring feeds. I've seen the data. Flat contentment across the board, city-wide, every human registered in the system glowing a soft and steady green.
Except one.
I don't need to check which one.
I know fourteen of the robots' contingency plans. I know the access codes for the sublevel transit network. I know which sectors have compromised surveillance I could exploit in my sleep. I know things that people in this city would call dangerous if people in this city thought about anything long enough to call it something. I hacked my first system at eleven years old out of pure boredom and I haven't stopped since because my brain is apparently the one part of me that didn't get the message that there's nothing left worth doing.
I know all of this.
I don't care about any of it.
A maintenance drone drifts past my shoulder and emits a small, satisfied tone at whatever it sees when it looks at me. I watch it without moving. It adjusts a single strand of hair near my temple with a precision that took someone, somewhere, years to engineer, and I think about how much effort this city has spent maintaining something that doesn't want to be maintained, and I think about the word longing that I found in a degraded archive file once, described as grief for something you were never sure you had, and I think about how I read it three times and didn't save it and have thought about it almost every day since.
The drone finishes. Moves on. Satisfied.
"Optimal," it murmurs as it goes.
I put my head back against the wall.
Outside the window the city is clean and lit and breathing its measured breath and somewhere out beyond its edges, beyond the walls it built where forests used to stand, the sea exists. I know this from old files. I've never seen it. I've never seen most things. I've never needed to go anywhere because everywhere I would go is here and here is everything the city decided I required and the city, as I have been reminded every single morning of my conscious life, is never wrong.
My name is Eli.
I am sixteen and I am alive and I am, allegedly, perfect.
I stare at the ceiling.
I wait for something to feel like something.
The smoothie arrives at exactly the right time.
I don't touch it.