Chapter One

Seconds later.

He sat in the chair his mother never used and waited to feel grief. Three hours passed.

During their visits, when she thought he was looking elsewhere, she had a habit of pressing her hands to her chest. Discomfort, he'd decided.

She would ask about his work, he'd summarise. He would ask about hers. She'd redirect, always.

He slept through each night and ate his allocations on schedule. The system logged no deviation. It expected his return on the fourth day.

His pod passed the eastern checkpoint at 8:47. A scanner flashed once, soft blue washing across his face and resolving into the two-note chime he'd heard each morning for years.

The designation faded from the display.

Beyond the curved glass, Haven-GB appeared in stacked tiers as the pod accelerated along the transit tube. Vertical gardens climbed the walls of residential towers, all identical. At the base of each, provision distribution hubs glowed green, and above it all, the monitoring arrays tracked movement without pause.

Historical Records occupied levels forty-one through forty-seven of Administrative Tower 4. Nobody mentioned his mother. Margaret Reid, ninety-nine years old, seventy-nine years in Cultural Preservation, reduced to a status change and a scheduling adjustment. Ceremony was outside the system's vocabulary. It had already administered whatever remained of Margaret Reid.

Twenty-three years he'd sat at this cubicle, making amendments to the historical record. Small corrections, mostly. A date refined. Population figures were updated. Redundant entries were merged with their more complete counterparts. It required precision and a tolerance for repetition.

Fourteen amendments waited in the morning's queue, routine priority. The first three cleared without thought.

Nine fewer citizens, no reason given. The system reclassified people, relocated them, occasionally marked them deceased. Numbers changed. The records reflected the changes.

“7741-C. Confirmed.”

Three more amendments cleared without resistance. A population forecast adjustment and a pair of residential corrections.

Near the end of the queue, the nine citizens returned to him. His mother was one status change. One entry, updated, closed. These nine were a column figure, adjusted downward. Identical formatting applied to both. He noted the equivalence.

He cleared the queue. The system logged no deviation.