Perfection was boring.
Taylor had known this long before he had words for it. In a world where hunger was a myth told to children, where illness was a chapter in history books, and where work existed only as a form of personal expression, boredom had become the last socially acceptable discomfort.
The city reflected that perfection with embarrassing enthusiasm. Buildings curved softly toward the sky as if competing to be least offensive to the eye. Streets cleaned themselves.
Screens adjusted their brightness to match your mood. Every problem had been solved so long ago that people had forgotten problems were ever a thing.
Taylor was a systems observer—an occupation so light it barely qualified as labor. He monitored abstract flows: energy usage trends, social satisfaction metrics, error logs that almost never populated. His job wasn’t to fix anything; it was to confirm that nothing needed fixing.
Most days, nothing did.
He sat alone in a public atrium, watching artificial sunlight drift across a garden that had never known dirt. People passed him in ones and twos, smiling softly, their lives complete in ways that left no room for friction. They had lovers, hobbies, passions carefully curated by a system that knew them better than they knew themselves.
Taylor had none of that. Not because he was denied it—denial didn’t exist anymore—but because nothing ever stuck.
It wasn’t sadness, exactly. Sadness implied loss, and he had never lost anything. It was a quieter erosion, a sense that every experience slid off him before it could leave a mark.
Conversations looped. Faces blurred. Even memories arrived pre-softened, as if the system had compressed them for storage efficiency.
Sometimes he wondered whether loneliness still counted as loneliness if it caused no pain. If it was simply the absence of signal rather than the presence of noise.
He had tried to rebel in the ways that were allowed. Randomized hobbies. Unscheduled walks. Manual food preparation, once, just to feel the inefficiency of it. Nothing worked.
Every attempt at friction was absorbed, neutralized, improved upon.
The system did not punish deviation.
It perfected it. Relationships dissolved politely. Interests flared and died. He felt like a background process running without purpose, consuming resources simply because it could.
The first bug appeared at 14:03.
It was nothing dramatic. No alarms, no red banners tearing across his interface. Just a single line in the system log that didn’t resolve itself.
\\ SOURCE UNVERIFIED. ORIGIN: NULL.
Taylor frowned. Origins were never null. Everything had a traceable lineage—every particle, every decision, every fluctuation in the system’s vast, invisible machinery. A null origin wasn’t just an error; it was a contradiction.
He refreshed the feed. The line remained.
Normally, unresolved anomalies corrected themselves within milliseconds. This one didn’t.
Instead, a second line appeared beneath it.
\\ RESOURCE FLOW DIVERTED. DEPTH CLASSIFICATION: BELOW.
“Below?” he muttered.
There was no such classification.
Taylor hesitated. Observers weren’t encouraged to dig. Curiosity wasn’t illegal, but it was inefficient—and inefficiency was the closest thing this world had to sin. Still, boredom pressed heavier than caution. He opened the trace.
The interface resisted.
That alone made his pulse quicken.
He bypassed the first restriction with a credential he’d never needed before. The second bypass requested justification. He typed the first thing that came to mind.
\\ Routine verification.
The system paused. Then it opened.
What he saw didn’t make sense.
The city’s immaculate energy grid folded inward, descending instead of spreading outward.
Vast quantities of power were being funneled not into homes, not into infrastructure, but down—deep below the surface. Deeper than transit tunnels. Deeper than maintenance layers.
Deeper than anything marked on public schematics.
Taylor leaned back, heart thudding.
The world above ground was powered by abundance. The world below, apparently, by necessity.
That was when the warning appeared.
\\ ACCESS FLAGGED.
The interface dimmed, and Taylor felt a sudden, irrational certainty that he was being watched—not by people, but by the system itself. Like an immune response waking up.
He closed the trace.
The logs returned to normal. The null-origin entry vanished as if it had never existed.
Around him, the atrium remained serene. People laughed softly. The artificial sun warmed the leaves just enough to feel real.
Taylor stood up.
For the first time in years, something inside him felt awake.
He didn’t know yet that this was the moment he’d stepped off the surface of the world.
He only knew that something beneath the perfection had shifted—and that it had noticed him.
The system had glitched.
And for the first time in his life, Taylor felt certain that the world was hiding something from him.