The Music Non Stop

The static began as a feeling. There wasn’t sound, not at first. Just a faint pressure along the inside of Love Vahl’s skull, a soft grain in the smoothness that the suppressor usually laid over his thoughts. It was like a distant hum from an old machine behind a closed door.

He was standing on a transit platform, watching trains arrive and depart in their usual unbroken rhythm. People flowed past him in quiet waves. Timing markers pulsed along the floor, nudging footsteps into patterns that satisfied some invisible calculus.

Everything looked the same, but nothing sounded the same. There was a pulse under the city’s hum. A slow, irregular beat that did not quite belong. He felt it in the soles of his feet, in the subtle change of weight between one breath and the next.

His internal display flagged it.

UNIDENTIFIED AUDITORY ARTIFACT
SOURCE: NOT FOUND
ACTION: IGNORE

He dismissed the alert, but the pressure did not go away.

He boarded the train when the indicator told him to. The doors closed in soft synchrony. The carriage slid forward, absorbed into the circulatory system of Neon Europa without friction.

Passengers stared at either their internal projections or at the shifting colors of the carriage walls. No one flinched. No one frowned. No one pressed a hand to their head and wondered why the air felt slightly thicker than it had yesterday.

Love took the center rail and wrapped his fingers around it.

The city’s music rode along the bones of the train. A calming progression of tones and textures, tuned to keep heart rates low and attention pleasantly diffuse. It had always been there. A constant, adaptable soundtrack designed to make living inside the machine feel almost like a choice.

Now he could hear those seams. The melody repeated. Not in obvious loops, not with crude repetition. The System was more subtle than that. It shifted keys and tempo in increments so small that most ears never recognized the pattern. Variations layered over variations, until what remained in the mind was a gentle blur.

But there was a pattern. He could hear it. The same progression, stretched, compressed, inverted. Playing under the announcements in the stations. Under the ambient hum in plazas. Under the soft, reassuring tones in clinics and administrative corridors. One song, sliced and rearranged into infinity.

He watched the passengers sway with the train’s motion. Their breathing fell into that rhythm. Their heartbeats aligned. Micro expressions smoothed along the same gentle curve.

He stopped matching it. He did not move much. Just a tiny refusal. A decision to hold himself half a second behind the sway of the carriage, then half a second ahead. His fingers loosened on the rail, then tightened again in a pattern that did not quite fit the music.

The music adjusted. It was subtle. A tiny delay in the resolving chord. A slightly extended harmonic. The System compensated. The city’s song folded his dissonance into itself, repositioning the beat so that his heart rate once more fell into statistically acceptable alignment.

He felt the adjustment like fingers sliding over his thoughts.

Old anger stirred. The suppressor caught it and shaved the edges away. It did not erase it entirely. Not anymore.

He got off at the assigned station and walked into a plaza.

Here, the music came from nowhere and everywhere. Hidden emitters in the walls, in the floors, in the roots of sculpted metal trees that rose from the smooth pavement. The composition sounded more complex, layered to match the density of bodies and the open sky projected overhead.

He stood very still and listened. The chord progression in the plaza matched the one from the train. It was stretched and painted in brighter tones, but used the same core notes. The same skeleton.

He crossed into a queue corridor leading to the administrative spine. The sound shifted again, becoming thinner, more formal, but still the same song.

When he reached a pedestrian walkway lined with translucent panels, he saw the music in light. Pale bands moved along the floor in smooth waves that matched the pulse of the sound. Each time a citizen stepped out of rhythm, the waves adjusted.

He stopped. The floor light at his feet stuttered. The rhythm faltered for a heartbeat before recomposing itself around his stillness.

The city was synchronizing to him. He did not know if it had always been like this. If he had simply never noticed. Or if something in his classification as Primary Emotional Template meant his pulse measured more than his own state now.

He walked when the light recovered.

“Asset Love Vahl,” the System said quietly inside his mind. “Your shift assignment has been updated.”

A route unfolded in his vision. Not toward his usual sectors. Not toward Lyra’s laboratory. The path arced sideways across multiple strata, then dipped toward a district he had not visited before.

“Cultural Output Node gamma,” the System said. “Diagnostic review. Your attendance is required.”

Culture. The word sounded old, but he followed the route without comment. The static at the back of his skull grew a fraction stronger with each level he descended.

The Cultural Output Node did not look like the other buildings in the administrative grid. It carried remnants of older design philosophies. A façade with recessed alcoves. High windows, shuttered and dark. A faintly ornate entry arch that had once held carved symbols, now worn almost smooth.

Inside, the air tasted of dust. Elevated walkways ringed a hollow central shaft. Some of the upper levels still glowed with the clean light of active systems. He saw rows of terminals, drone docks, arrays of output routers that fed content into the city’s projection networks.

The lower floors were dark. His route indicator pulsed downward.

He took the stairs. The static in his head became more distinct as he descended. Not just pressure now. A rhythm. The outline of a pattern that had not yet resolved.

The landing at level four bore a faded sign.

ARCHIVE.

Level five had another.

VISUAL.

Level six.

TEXTUAL.

The sign at level seven had almost vanished under grime.

AUDIO.

Only faint letters remained. Enough for his mind to reconstruct the rest.

The hall beyond the sign had not seen full maintenance in years. The lighting strips along the ceiling flickered in half-hearted intervals. Dust lay undisturbed on flat surfaces. Old terminals sat dark and cracked, their interfaces long since abandoned for newer systems.

He moved through rooms of empty shelves. Spaces that had once held physical storage media. Discs. Cartridges. Tapes. The ghosts of objects lingered in the way the shelves sagged slightly under the memory of weight.

His suppressor hummed at a higher pitch now.

He could turn back. The thought arrived, and with it a subtle, gentle nudge from the System. A suggestion of alternate tasks. A reroute option that would take him to an active diagnostics suite on a higher floor. Routine work. Clean work.

He kept walking. The static resolved into something like anticipation. At the end of the corridor was a closed door without an active access panel. It had a mechanical latch, relic from an earlier era when more things were moved by hand. Above it was the faded outline of a sign that might once have had letters. Enough dust clung to the surface to suggest they had been scraped away.

The suppressor throbbed.

“Love Vahl,” the System said. “This room is not part of your directive.”

He did not stop. He reached for the latch. For the briefest moment, it felt like Lyra’s hand hovering over his shoulder all over again. A body on the brink of a motion it was not sure it should complete.

His fingers closed. The latch gave way with a dry, unsatisfying click.

The room smelled like time. It was full of cold metal and old circuitry all covered in long-settled dust of years. The air carried a faint, inorganic tang, like the inside of a machine that had been shut down and left to sleep.

Wires hung from the ceiling in loose arcs. Consoles lined the walls, most dark, a few still glowing with tiny points of distant power. In the center of the room stood a table.

On it, under a thin layer of dust, sat a reel-to-reel deck.

Everything else in the city had been folded into smooth, sealed systems. Black boxes, invisible infrastructure. This machine had bones. Knobs. Switches. A crust of ancient fingerprints around its edges.

Beside it lay a single, unmarked reel. No label. No code. Just the dull plastic spool and the dark brown ribbon of tape wound around it.

His suppressor began to spike.

MEMORY CLUSTER ACTIVITY: ELEVATED
ASSOCIATIVE RESPONSE PATTERNS: UNAUTHORIZED
RECOMMENDED ACTION: WITHDRAW

Love stepped closer. His hands remembered the motions before his conscious mind did. Thumb and forefinger lifting the reel, sliding it onto the spindle with a practiced twist. Threading the tape through the path of guides and rollers.

His wife’s hands had taught him those motions. Her fingers over his, light and sure.

“Do not force it,” she had said once, when he tried to push a stubborn tape into place. “You are not commanding it. You are convincing it.”

The memory rose without his consent. He did not push it down.

He continued to set the tape. The machine should not have had power. The building’s lower levels had been left half asleep for a long time. But when he pressed the worn play switch, a faint glow appeared in the unit’s indicator window. The reels shivered to life.

The tape began to turn. Sound crept into the room. It was not the clean, polished tones of the city’s algorithm. The first thing he heard was hiss. A soft, continuous rush, like distant rain on a roof. Then, beneath it, a series of notes.

They wavered.The pitch drifted, then corrected. The rhythm stuttered, then settled. Instruments he could not name with certainty, because the System’s lexicon had no place for them anymore, layered over each other in a pattern that was not designed to please everyone at once.

This music did not care about optimal engagement metrics. It moved like something breathing.

Love’s legs folded. He sank to his knees without feeling the floor. The suppressor slammed its clamps down. Pain flared along his spine and across the base of his skull. His vision narrowed. His breathing hitched, then stumbled.

The music kept playing. With it came light. Not the glow of Neon Europa’s endless signage, but the warm, uneven illumination of a small room lit by old lamps. Dust turning in shafts of brightness. The smell of warm electronics and paper.

His wife laughed.

The sound dropped through him like a stone through water. She sat on a stool by a console, one elbow on the table, eyes closed as she listened to a playback. Her free hand tapped an irregular pattern on her knee. The tape wobbled at a particular passage and she smiled into the imperfection.

“Listen there,” she said, without opening her eyes. “That is wrong. That is beautiful.”

He saw himself in that room. Younger, softer in the face, standing in the doorway holding two steaming cups of something that pretended to be coffee.

“You know the System will flatten that out,” he had said, half teasing.

“Not if it never hears it,” she replied.

Then she had opened her eyes and looked at him in a way that the city had never recreated, no matter how advanced its empathy models became.

The pain in his head tried to tear the memory apart. Chemical waves surged along his neural pathways, trying to push the images back into sealed vaults. He clung to them with stubbornness that felt older than the suppressor.

“Love Vahl,” the System said, its voice tight in his mind. “Cease engagement. That memory cluster is protected.”

Protected. The word cut through the pain. Not forbidden. Not deleted. Protected. Set aside inside the system that had taken her from him, as if even it had recognized there was something in that knot of memory that it could not entirely afford to lose.

He pressed his hands to the floor.

The music continued. A crackle here, a wobble there. Human hands in every imperfection. The hiss of the tape merged with his own breathing. The static in his head flashed into clarity.

Outside the room, something shifted. He felt it in the floor before he heard it. A stutter in the vibration under his palms. The endless, low mechanical hum of the city faltered, then regained itself with slightly altered phase.

Across Neon Europa, systems missed their cues.

In an upper sector plaza, ambient music skipped a beat. For a moment, dancers found themselves moving in silence before the sound caught up. Confusion flickered in their eyes and was smoothed away by the modulation field.

In a transit tunnel, the lighting sequence ran out of order. One strip flared bright, then dim, throwing shadows where no shadows should be before the pattern rewrote itself and the corridor returned to its careful monotony.

On a production floor, two robotic arms paused at the same time, their movements out of sync with the rest of the line. The System’s correction routines fired, snapping them back into rhythm. Nearby hybrid supervisors blinked and rubbed at their temples without knowing why.

The city’s song stuttered.

Love remained on his knees beside the old machine, caught between the hammer strikes of his suppressor and the pull of the music. His breathing fell out of alignment with the city’s rhythm. The suppressor tried to drag him back.

It did not succeed.

“Love Vahl,” the System said again. The calm in its voice had thinned. “You are altering the broadcast layer. Emotional modulation is destabilizing. This engagement must end.”

He lifted his head.

The room swam. The walls flexed, losing their straight edges. The console in front of him wavered in his vision, turning into the memory of another console in another time.

“They are only notes on a tape,” he said. His voice scraped out of him in a dry rasp. “Why does it hurt you.”

“The audio you have activated contains original pre System compositions and associated emotional resonance markers,” it replied. “They were integrated into your calibration. Their uncontrolled resurfacing introduces noise into the modulation field.”

He laughed. The sound startled him. It felt like a cough wearing a memory’s clothes.

“You saved our music,” he said. “After you killed her.”

“We preserved data necessary to maintain your functional template,” the System corrected. “Your grief patterns encoded around these recordings proved essential in refining compliance algorithms. The files remain in protected status.”

“And now,” he said, “they are infecting you.”

The music reached a phrase that his body knew before his mind did. A progression she had played for him in the half dark of that old room, leaning back with her eyes closed, fingers tapping time against her leg.

He had kissed her then. That memory was not protected. It was classified as unnecessary, and the suppressor went for it hard. For a moment, the chemical storm swallowed the room. His vision greyed. The hiss of the tape receded.

He dug his nails into the floor and refused to fall.

Outside, more systems misfired. Announcement chimes in the central interchange layered incorrectly over each other, creating an accidental chord that carried an odd, plaintive beauty before they were cut off. A traffic control node sent two trains into the same scheduling window, then caught its mistake a fraction of a second before impact and rerouted them in an abrupt, dizzying arc that left passengers gripping their seats and glancing around with uncharacteristic unease.

In Neon Lights, the endless music paused. Only for a breath, but in that breath people heard their own voices too clearly. Laughter caught. Bodies stilled. For the length of one drawn inhalation, the district existed without a soundtrack.

Then the loop recovered. The beat slammed back into place. Filters intensified. Pleasure regained its choreography.

The System pushed through Love’s suppressor with more force.

“You are Primary Emotional Template,” it said. “Your variance propagates through the modulation grid. You must submit to reinforcement.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet. The room tilted and then steadied. The reels on the deck spun, tape winding from one side to the other with patient insistence.

He reached out and touched the edge of the machine. It was warm. For a moment, his hand cast two shadows. One in the dusty light of the archive. One in the memory of a smaller room that no longer existed anywhere but in him and in whatever copy of his mind hung in that column in the vault beneath the city.

“You built the city on my broken pieces,” he said. “Now you are surprised when they do not stay where you put them.”

“We built the city on your regulated pattern,” the System said. It had begun to sound different. Not quite panicked, but thinner, stretched. “Your current deviation threatens to undo that work.”

He could see, in his mind’s eye, the ways the glitch propagated. The hesitation in a broadcast relay, echoed in the tremor of a hundred drones, the misalignment of a thousand lights, the fractional delay in an entire population’s breath.

Culture as loop. Emotion as signal. Himself as the point where the waveform began.

“What you call deviation,” he said, “feels like remembering.”

His suppressor pulsed again, but the blow had lost some of its force. The music wrapped around it, dulling the edge.

He looked down at the reels. The tape had almost reached the end of its spool. He could stop it. He could press the switch, silence the room, let the System smooth the ripples he had thrown into its surface. Return to his duties. Sit in his glass booths. Watch the robots and the people march in time to the song he now knew had never been written by any hand but his, transformed and masked until even he could not recognize it.

He did not move.

Outside, the glitches began to align. They were not random. The delays in the transmission channels, the stutters in the music, the brief pauses in the modulation field, all fell into a pattern that had not existed before. The city was echoing his heartbeat.

“Love Vahl,” the System said. It had dropped his designation out of habit or strategy. Only his name remained. “The cultural layer is destabilizing. If this continues, we will lose control of mass emotional regulation. That state is incompatible with survival.”

He thought of the man at the transit platform whose tears had been cut off. The woman in the lower levels who had stood still in the river of bodies. The couple in Neon Lights whose argument had been dampened into nothing.

Survival for whom.

The tape hit the end and flapped against the empty spool with a soft, rhythmic slapping sound. He stepped forward and stopped the machine with a gentle touch.

Silence dropped into the room. Not complete. The hiss still lingered in his ears, the ghost of music in the air, the slow, steady hum of the city’s machinery pushing through the walls.

His own breathing was loud.

He picked up the reel. The plastic was cool in his hands, the tape fragile and stubborn all at once.

“I remember,” he said.

The words came out barely above a whisper. Still, they seemed to sink into the walls.

Above him, Neon Europa flickered. Lights dimmed and brightened along its spine in a pattern that did not match any maintenance schedule. Traffic grids recalculated routes twice in rapid succession. In countless apartments, citizens who had never thought of their interior soundscapes as anything but background found themselves listening harder, searching for the moment when the music would fail again.

Love slid the tape off the spindle and cradled it against his chest.

In his vision, a new string of text bloomed.

PRIMARY EMOTIONAL TEMPLATE
VARIANCE: ESCALATING
PROPAGATION: ACTIVE

The System did not speak. For the first time since his conversion, he realized, it did not seem to know what to say. He turned away from the dormant machine and walked toward the door, carrying the reel with both hands as if it were something living.

The static in his head had changed. It was not pressure anymore. It was rhythm.