The corridors stretched ahead, footsteps echoing off the metal walls. He glanced up at the towering stacks above him, the weight stretching down like fingers.
Tomorrow was the Beta Test.
His mind cycled through the inevitable. His aunt would tear into him the moment he walked through the door. The rip in his pants wouldn’t escape her notice. Nothing ever did. She’d once spotted a loose thread on his collar from six meters away. While arguing with a neighbor. Her superpower was disappointment and superior vision. But that was a small problem. The real question gnawed at him: once he was placed, how would he get Roz out?
He’d imagined a rope, something to pull her up through the levels. But where would he hide it? And the math didn’t work anyway. He couldn’t go lower. Stack 5 was already scraping the bottom. Technically respectable, enough to hold your head up, but everyone knew the truth. Life down here was quiet misery dressed in false pride.
The lockdown had lifted, and the corridors showed faint signs of life again. People moved. Voices carried. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Wesley looked up once more, counting steps out of habit. His hand drifted to his pocket. Still there.
Then the bar pulsed. Fast, urgent, wrong.
Every screen in the corridor flashed red. Navigation panels. Directional signs. All of it, bleeding the same warning color.
: Immediate Stack 5. Beta Test Is Open :
: Immediate Stack 5. Beta Test Is Open :
: Immediate Stack 5. Beta Test Is Open :
The blinking message burned into his retinas. His brain performed several calculations simultaneously, none of them useful.
Calculation one: The test was supposed to be tomorrow. Tomorrow was not now. Now was now. These were different times.
Calculation two: Roz was hidden in a maintenance shaft 200 meters away, two days old.
Calculation three: He was not going to make it back home. His brain, helpfully, offered a fourth calculation unprompted: the rip in his pants was now the least of his problems. His brain was fried.
He felt a hand on his shoulder that turned him around. It was Riven.
“Wesley,” Riven said, her grip tightening on his arm. They both looked at each other and then watched the scrolling text.
“It’s tomorrow,” Riven said. “But it starts...”
“Now.” Wesley watched the message pulse. “Starts now.”
Of course it did. Of course, the Partisant would change the timeline without warning. Giving people time to prepare would require basic human decency. The Partisant probably had a department dedicated to ‘optimal disruption timing’ with quarterly reviews and a budget larger than Stack 5’s annual food allocation.
The Stacks erupted. Bodies everywhere. Parents shoving children toward exits. Technicians sprinting past with the focused panic of people who knew exactly how bad things were about to get. The noise hit maybe 90 decibels. Conversational chainsaw. Wesley’s ears rang.
He and Riven were torn apart by the current of bodies.
One choice. Go home or see Roz. The decision made itself.
“I need five minutes,” Wesley shouted over the chaos.
“Wesley, we can’t...”
“Five minutes.” He was already running.
Forty-seven seconds through the labyrinthine passageways. Fighting against the flow. Elbows in his ribs, shoulders slamming his chest. Whoever designed Stack 5’s emergency egress had clearly never met an emergency, or a Stack, or a person. He reached his hidden room, scraping through the tight window, and yanked back the tarp.
And froze.
The robot was gone.
The computer screen was dark.
He stood frozen in the doorway, brain refusing to process what his eyes were reporting. Months of work. Years of collecting parts. Roz, her components, and his hope that he would have something that mattered to himself in the future.
Gone.
[ENCRYPTED:The room had been searched before.]
His hand went to his pocket. The bar was still there, coarse against his fingers. Small comfort. Very small. Microscopic, really.
Who else knew about this room?
“Wesley.” Riven burst through the tarp behind him, breathing hard. “What is this place?”
“It was...” His voice caught. Failed. Tried again. “It’s gone. All of it.”
“We don’t have time.” She grabbed his hand. “We have to go. Now.”
They ran. Wesley didn’t look back at his family’s quarters as they passed. There was no time for goodbyes. The Beta Test waited for no one, and apparently neither did whoever had stolen his entire life’s work.
The testing center loomed ahead. Glass and steel. Maybe 40 meters tall. Screens flanked the entrance, playing the same loops they’d played Wesley’s whole life: Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. No more fear of the night. The Cradle protects. The Edisun provides.
The narrator’s voice was warm. Reassuring. Wesley had stopped hearing it approximately twelve years ago.
He saw a girl no older than twelve trembling so badly she could barely walk. Guards are catching fleeing children. Dragging them back. Hollow-eyed teenagers marching forward because there was nowhere else to go.
“Good luck,” Riven whispered, squeezing his hand before stepping back.
Wesley was next.
“Come on, Fiver.” A guard’s hand closed around Wesley’s chin with the bored competence of a man who processed 400 chins before lunch. Maybe 403. Wesley was not special. Red light swept across his eye. 650 nanometers, probably. The wavelength of control.
His identity flashed on the screen.
“Move.”
So much for pleasantries.