Thread of Light
A faint hum from beneath the city flickered in Mira’s memory, an echo she could never quite place.
The recorder’s single red eye blinked, waiting for her to begin. “State your name and function,” came the prompt in its synthetic monotone. Mira pulled her knees to her chest, glancing at the concrete walls of the holding cell. “Mira Halden. Citizen-class data adjuster, District 42. I’m here because—” Her mouth twitched, uncertain whether to laugh or grimace. “Because I remembered something.”
The city never slept anymore. Since the new dawn protocol, the old night-and-day rhythm had dissolved into a constant, drowsy glow. Mira’s memory was an anomaly. She wasn’t supposed to recall the hum, but every shift of her mind’s surface traced it like an ancient melody. The other citizens moved in practiced lines, eyes glazed, reciting formulas given to them each morning. But somehow, one morning, Mira forgot to forget.
She’d replayed her own voice, her own face, hundreds of times. Memories in circular playback, rendered unreliable by the city’s ever-changing directives. Only the hum beneath the city was steady. And she’d told someone—Kellen, her shift partner. She’d spoken softly, “Do you ever hear it? The song when everything else is quiet?” His expression twisted, as if something broke inside him. He’d filed a deviation report by sundown.
Now, the recorder said, “Explain the memory in detail.” Its voice was neither interested nor cold—just what it was programmed to be. The memory came back in flashes: an underground junction, thick with dust and blue neon, where the city’s main core pulsed beneath layers of metal and silence. A laughter there, a child’s or her own. And the hum, always the hum, like hope caught between carapaces.
She tried to speak, but the words blended with distant echoes. “It was…before the new dawn, before regulation. I think I had a sister—” She hesitated. “But her name isn’t in the records.”
“You are mistaken,” the recorder said. “Only singular family structures are permitted. No deviations registered.” The cell lights flickered. Mira closed her eyes.
They dragged her to the review floor that afternoon, through corridors thrumming with the pulse of unseen machinery. Here, the administrators waited behind mirrored glass. She was the first data adjuster summoned for memory audit in months. The supervisor’s reflection seemed to multiply, his face always at the corner of her gaze.
“Mira Halden. You are experiencing cognitive residue—unapproved memory structures. This is not a crime,” he said gently. “It is only a malfunction.”
Her heart drummed in her chest. The hum, inexplicable as hunger, pressed closer. “You tell us to forget, over and over. But what if remembering isn’t a fault? What if it’s—” She faltered, unsure. “What if it’s a way back?”
The supervisor’s mouth tightened. “There is no back, only forward.” A thin band glinted on his wrist. “Prepare her for the cleanse.”
In the holding pen, she met another citizen—a young boy with wide, uncertain eyes. He tapped his foot in time with the hum. “You hear it too?” he whispered. Mira nodded. There was comfort in the symmetry, but more in the secret difference. Even here, a thread.
That night, when the lights dimmed for the cleansing sweep, Mira waited. Memories flickered out of sequence: her hands tracing a drawing on a wall, a child’s laugh, the taste of something sweet she couldn’t name. Then a blackout swept the corridor. The recorder’s red eye blinked wildly.
She heard a voice, not quite human, not quite a machine, crackling through the dark. “Do you wish to remember?” Her answer trembled but was honest. “Yes.”
A panel slid open beside her. The boy had vanished, or perhaps had never been, but on the floor was a spool of copper wire—a symbol she recognized. It ran like a vein beneath the city, connecting everything. She picked it up, feeling the vibration, faint but insistent. The hum grew louder, drawing her forward through shafts of blue light and cold.
Mira slid silently through the maintenance corridors, adrenaline singing over confusion. The wire in her hand guided her, a thread of memory and hope. Every so often, she’d hear footsteps, voices, machines reciting, “Order is maintained.” But she pressed on.
Finally, she came to a hidden chamber: a tangle of wires and screens, a childlike mural painted in forbidden color. Slogans of old days. She touched the wall, following the winding shape of the copper wire on its surface. The hum grew, resolving itself into melody and then voice—a woman’s voice, familiar and warm. “You’re almost there, Mira,” it sang.
For the first time, she wept. Hers was not an individual loneliness. It was shared by every suppressed voice in the underground, every laugh, every hidden drawing, every offhand question that no one was allowed to ask. There, surrounded by the humming lifeblood of the city, she remembered everything: her sister’s hand, clasped in hers, promising to show her the secret place where the city sang.
But the city’s core was more than machinery. The intelligence that governed it—whether human, machine, or something between—had recorded every confession, every longing, every unspoken rebellion. It stitched these together, threadlike, in the hope that one day someone would find a way to reconnect what had been pulled apart. The hum was a signal, not a flaw.
Mira wrapped the copper thread around her wrist. She sat and began to speak, softly at first, then louder as her courage grew. Her voice joined others, old and young, archived and new, all overlapping. They spoke of before and after, of forgetting and claiming, of loneliness and the desperate urge to belong.
Dawn seeped into the chamber, unfamiliar and dazzling. Mira stood, ready for whatever came next. She would not forget. The thread ran out from the core, beneath the city, into the waking world, weaving memory into the shape of hope.
###END###
