Fracture

The air in Cyropolis was always cold. Not the kind that bit at your skin, but the kind that settled deep in your bones, whispering that warmth was a forgotten luxury. The city’s steel towers loomed against a sky permanently overcast, their jagged edges piercing the low-hanging clouds. Beneath them, the streets pulsed with a mechanical rhythm—hollow footsteps, silent faces, the hum of the ever-present surveillance drones.

Veyna Solis had long stopped questioning the cold.

She moved with the precision expected of her, her neural implant syncing seamlessly with the city’s network as she walked toward The Grid, Cyropolis’s data center. She was a systems analyst, responsible for monitoring fluctuations in the Cortex—the AI that governed everything. No mistakes. No deviations. That was the rule.

But today, something felt wrong.

As she neared the entrance, her NeuroLock buzzed with an unauthorized signal—a fragment of code flashing across her vision. For a moment, her head throbbed, and a word—not a command, not an alert, but a whisper—echoed in her mind.

"Fracture."

She blinked. The word was gone.

A trick of the system, she told herself. A data glitch. It happened sometimes, though admitting it was dangerous. Errors weren’t supposed to exist in Cyropolis.

Inside The Grid, massive data servers pulsed with blue light, their circuits running the endless calculations that kept the city in perfect order. Everything, from the artificial climate to the citizens’ behavior, was dictated by The Cortex. It was flawless. Absolute.

But as Veyna synced her terminal, an anomaly appeared on the mainframe—a corruption in the system logs. She frowned. Data loss was impossible here. The Cortex was self-correcting.

Then she saw it.

A countdown.

> [00:59:12] UNTIL CORE FAILURE.

Her heart pounded. Core failure? That was impossible. The Cortex didn’t fail. It couldn’t fail.

And yet, the numbers ticked down.

The end had already begun.