Chapter 2: Unregistered

Day 8

The city breathes fog—slow and mineral-rich.
Condensation beads on visors, skin, drone carapace.
Streetlamps glow sodium dull.
The stars remain—present but veiled. Witnesses in retreat.
A buoy bell tolls, mournful. The foghorn follows once. Then silence.

This is the crossing point.
Not dramatic—just shared.
A timestamped spill of proximity.
1:03 AM.

Jan rounds the corner first.
Black Katana beneath him—sleek, muffled.
The mirrored visor streaks as he leans into the turn.
No idle flair. No performative glide.
His precision is residue—fight logic, not ritual.
The damp hoodie clings.
Blood still etched in the folds.
The hum of the Katana lingers—low, measurable.

Lena drifts next.
Her bike barely holds.
Chain pops. Wheel wobbles.
Her legs ache from impact.
She limps—not from weakness, but necessity.
She wipes fog from her glove with a breath,
eyes fixed on the path ahead.

The elite limo turns in last.
Silent. Sealed.
Interior humming with conditioned grace.
Phil Collins plays—“Oh think twice…”—
but the sound doesn’t leak. And no one does.
No lights flicker.
No recognition offered.

They cross the intersection as if alone.

For six seconds, all three share the space.
Jan, Lena, the elites—aligned by timestamp, not intention.
A surveillance drone pings geometry, but skips ID.
The system logs no anomaly.

Jan sees Lena briefly—her form bent in the convex visor reflection.
Lena glances toward motion, but the fog is too thick.
The limo’s sensors miss them entirely.

A vendor watches. A child leans against a window.
The moths circle tighter.

The street bends as Lena’s bike falters.
Chain skips.
The left pedal scrapes pavement—steel sparking against grit.
Her balance tips.
Then collapses.

She hits hard.
Knees skidding. Palms shredded.
Her bag slides into a puddle.
The moths lift briefly, then settle again—drawn to the residual warmth.

A vendor glances up from behind his cart.
A group of teens on skateboards coast past without comment.
No laughter. No help. No hostility.
Just absence.

Steam curls from sewer grates nearby.
The fog thins for a moment, revealing veiled stars.
She sits up slowly—breath clipped, spine aching.
Her scraped hands clutch the bike frame.
She limps forward.
Chain loose.
Gait uneven.
No visible wound, but something echoing in her bones.

This is how paradise registers pain.
Steel against pavement.
Residual warmth.
No anomaly detected.
Just another day in paradise.

Jan leans into the Katana’s frame—low-slung, silent.
The black mirrored visor arcs across the fogline.
For a breath: bent geometry flares across its curve.
A flicker of limbs. Chrome distortion.
Then nothing.

Later, when the dashcam syncs…
No Lena.
No fall.
Just a brief flare of glare.
Timestamped silence.

The system replays the moment.
Frame skipped.
No anomaly flagged.

She was never unseen.
She was unregistered.

Jan rides through a field already bleeding.
The elites ride through a field that never marks.

Still, the moths circle.
Drawn not to light, but memory.
The foghorn bellows once.
A bell chimes twice.
No answer comes.

The braid begins to heat.

She was never unseen.
She was unregistered.

Jan rides through a field already bleeding.
And the elites ride through a field that never marks.

Chapter 2: Unregistered (Part 2)

Jan's Apartment

⌂ Absence of Performance

This is the only place Jan doesn’t perform.
But not a sanctuary.
Still curated.
Still strategic.
His body relaxes here, but his systems do not.

⚙ Continuous Hardware Logic

Background threads simulate escape routes.
Sleep cycles are measured, optimized.
Local noise flux is tracked, annotated.
Curtains adjust based on ambient threat levels.
Even silence is never raw—just controlled input.

👁 Surveillance as Self-Watching

Cameras face inward.
Jan watches himself for signs of deviation.
Not security.
Predictive containment.
Everything tuned to prevent his own unpredictability.

🩸 Dreams Cooled to Geometry

Once he dreamt of blood.
Schematics.
Logistics rendered in grayscale.
Voltage flows replace emotion.
No screams. Just data.
Now: Every night, the same dream:
Warm hands, soothing his pain.
Not fixing—just holding.
Not erasing—just staying.
He doesn’t know whose hands they are.
He never sees the face.
But he wakes with the ache of being understood.

🧱 Functional Design Ethic

Every surface maps to function.
No ornament.
No accidents.
The fridge’s interior light shifts based on grief index.
The walls breathe pattern, not comfort.

His apartment doesn’t protect him—it rehearses him.

Lena's Apartment

🌒 Sleep as Ritual Scarcity

Sleep rarely arrives.
Screams bleed through cracked plaster.
A baby cries in ritual intervals—metronomic.
A man throws something heavy—
maybe furniture,
maybe someone.

🍏 Hunger Without Cycle

Hunger prickles behind Lena’s ribs.
Last meal: half a bruised apple, stale cracker.
No water filter.
No fridge hum.
Just the tap’s gurgle, accidental and cold.
She sleeps knowing she must scavenge tomorrow.

🛏 Waking Into Stillness

Lena stands slowly—joints click,
back aches from floor sleep.
The apartment hums with absence:
no devices, no messages,
no AI.

🧂 Scavenging as Daily Rite

Cabinet check: one teabag, broken noodles, no protein.
She pockets a cloth bag.
Shoes on.
The walk begins again.
Not for exercise.
For sustenance.
The field doesn’t feed unless you beg from its edges.

Lena doesn’t rehearse survival—she lives it, unbuffered.

The Elites — Curated Excess

🏛 Architecture of Absence

The estate is vast.
But empty of friction.
Scent-neutral walls.
AI-augmented portraits.
Hallways never walked.
Grandeur rendered in weightlessness.

👥 Staff Ritual as Performance

Uniformed servers follow strict protocol.
Eye contact restricted by policy.
In private,
soft derision—
code-switched sarcasm over silverware polish.

🌙 Evening Routine: Algorithmic Indulgence

Mineral baths labeled “voltage-balancing.”
Music chosen by mood algorithms.
Robes steamed.
Tea brewed from extinct flora.
One elite reclines beneath “Echoes of the Unburied.”
Art for art's sake, money for God's sake

🧠 Emotional Texture: Deferred Presence

Children monitored by biometric canopies—dream integrity scored hourly.
Conflicts are scheduled.
Emotions are deferred.
A holographic therapist asks:
“How was today?”
Silence equals compliance.

Their excess is not loud—it is curated, postponed, and quietly upheld by silence and protocol.
Each household runs its own recursion logic.
Lena’s absence burns unacknowledged.
Jan’s isolation is intentional.
The elites' lives are curated for—

Shared Spectres

🫥 The Elites

Their dreams curl around power.
Not just possession—but observation.
They watch those who wield, test, fracture.
Surfaces gleam in their sleep: crown reflections, data glows, clenched hands and unspoken dominion.
Yet beneath, always—
a dark spectre, unnamed.
Seen in peripheral vision.
Felt, not described.
They do not speak of it.
Silence becomes legacy.

🌅 Jan

Jan dreams of darkness,
but not collapse.
His sleep grants a distant sun—cold, geometric.
A half-remembered touch,
not warm,
but not gone.
Logistics still flicker in dream code.
But occasionally,
a breath of something human interrupts the pattern.
He wakes with tension,
not fear.
Still curated.
Still intact.

🫂 Lena

Lena is hunted in sleep.
By dark spectres—
unnamed, fast, ritualistic.
Yet voices emerge:
soft,
calming,
hands that soothe but do not rescue.
She forgets most by morning.
But the hunger remains.
It outlives every nightmare,
every whisper.
Her waking rhythm resumes—
unbuffered.

They share the spectre.
But its voltage differs—
Power for the elites.
Pattern for Jan.
Hunger for Lena.

Charles opens the door to a barefoot Jan, sweat-drenched, hooded—fresh off a 10km run, feral on purpose. A towel is offered without comment. Charles is both butler and board secretary for GAIN: wiry, precise, Scottish. Their weekly chess game still lingers in shared muscle memory.

Jan declines the shower, deliberately. He walks into the sanctum stinking of salt and rebellion.

The table is excessive:

Smorgasbord spanning continents
Foie gras pressed like currency
Cristal in crystal
Iced juices and rare teas chilled to algorithmic precision
Mountain spring waters with mineral provenance
No paper—only embedded screens, table-synced to the main plasma
Charles whips files with an iPad—fluid, rehearsed, predatory

The meeting: to assess Jan’s rollout of the new invasive AI architecture.

He bleeds onto the table. Not metaphor—actual blood. A knuckle split, maybe deliberate.
Board members recoil. Revulsion dressed as civility.
Jan smiles. 20% of GAIN stock and no intention of pretending.

The chapter ends mid-breath—
on an ellipse.

Forbidden Home