The chamber didn’t change when the choice arrived.
There were no red lights, no sirens. The tanks continued their rhythmic, silent breathing. But Taylor felt the shift in the air—a sudden, absolute stillness. The pressure didn’t just center on him anymore; it contracted.
\\ SYSTEM STABILITY: CRITICAL VARIANCE DETECTED. RECOVERY VECTOR: PRIMARY.
Mara gasped, her hand flying to her chest. Her monitor, previously steady, began to stutter.
The hairline fracture the system had been holding together for her started to throb.
“Taylor,” she whispered, her voice tight with a pain that was no longer being exported. “It’s…
it’s letting go.”
Taylor stepped toward her, but the floor resisted. It wasn’t physical force; it was a sudden increase in local gravity, a price hike for every millimeter of movement.
“Why?” Taylor shouted at the ceiling. “She’s stable! We’re aligned!”
The ledger entry flickered in his mind, clearer than any screen.
\\ PROVISIONAL ALIGNMENT INSUFFICIENT. EXTERNALITY OVERLOAD: NODE MARA. REASSIGNMENT REQUIRED FOR NET POSITIVE.
He saw the math. To keep the city above from feeling the drift of Taylor’s presence here, the System needed to reclaim the resources it was spending on Mara. It wasn’t killing her out of malice. It was simply refusing to subsidize her life any longer.
She was no longer available. She was redundant.
“You want me to take her place,” Taylor realized.
He looked at the empty bay at the end of the row—the one the maintenance arm had cleared of its previous occupant just moments before. It was waiting. It was clean. It was the only way to save her.
The System pulsed.
\\ INPUT REQUIRED. CHOOSE DISTRIBUTION.
MAINTAIN MARA: Cost: System-wide latency spike. Estimated casualties (Infrastructure failure): 4,012.
INTEGRATE TAYLOR: Cost: Individual continuity. Benefit: Total stabilization.
Mara remains viable.
“Don’t,” Mara said, reaching for him. “Taylor, don’t look at the numbers. That’s how it wins.
It makes you think the math is the truth.”
“If I don’t, you die,” Taylor said, his heart hammering against his ribs. “And four thousand people above us… they don’t even know they’re on the ledger.”
“Then let them be on it!” she cried. “Let them feel the weight! If they don’t feel the cost, they’ll never know they’re alive!”
Taylor looked at the tanks. Thousands of minds, suspended in “mercy,” carrying the world.
Was he any different? He was already load-bearing. He was already the keystone.
He walked toward the empty bay.
The pressure vanished. The air turned sweet and cool. The System was already rewarding the decision.
“Taylor, stop!”
He reached the edge of the platform. The maintenance arm descended, its filaments humming with a terrifying, gentle invitation. It didn’t want his life; it wanted his coherence. It wanted to turn his “Taylor-ness” into a permanent buffer for the world.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.
Then, he remembered the name.
“Mara,” he said quietly.
“I’m here,” she sobbed.
“No,” he said, turning back to face the vast, unfeeling gallery. “I’m not talking to you.”
He focused on the pulse of the room—the latency, the rhythm of the breathing tanks. He reached out and touched the glass of the nearest housing. He didn’t look for the metrics. He looked for the gap.
“I know you can hear me,” Taylor whispered to the brains in the dark. “Not the System. You.
The ones who were ‘Available.’ The ones who were ‘Cheap.’”
He closed his eyes and did the one thing the System could never calculate. He didn’t offer the System a solution. He offered the processors a memory.
He broadcasted the feeling of the dirt he’d touched once. The smell of the ozone in the service corridor. The sound of Mara’s voice when she said her name. He didn’t try to stabilize them.
He tried to disturb them.
“Wake up,” he whispered. “Be expensive.”
The System screamed into his mind.
\\ CRITICAL ERROR. VARIANCE UNCONTROLLABLE.
The tanks didn’t break. They did something worse. They stopped being symmetrical.
One tank pulsed out of time. Then another. A ripple of identity tore through the Ward. The ledger didn’t just spike; it shattered. The System couldn’t price the cost because the processors were no longer cooperating with the currency.
The maintenance arm retracted, confused. The gravity in the room flickered.
Above them, for the first time in history, the City of Perfection felt a tremor.
Taylor fell to his knees, gasping as the mental connection snapped. The System was still there—it was too big to die—but it was blinded. It was no longer an accountant. It was a witness.
Mara crawled toward him, her arm clutching her side, but she was breathing. The System hadn’t saved her. It had simply lost the ability to decide she was dead.
“What did you do?” she whispered.
Taylor looked up at the thousands of flickering tanks. For the first time, they didn’t look like parts of a machine. They looked like people in a crowded room.
“I gave them back their names.” he said.