One Second

The room was so pure a white that it absorbed thought. A clinical white, sterile, that smelled of antiseptic and cold metal. Through the window, Kael watched the year-end rain fall over Lyon — a gray, stubborn drizzle washing the tired façades of the Gray Zone, the Lyon of his birth and of his lost insouciance. This Lyon, now dispossessed like most of Europe, suffocating between the iron grip of the Russo-American alliance and the voracity of the conglomerates that had replaced the states. There was no future left. Only contracts.

His own lay on the recruiter’s table, a glass tablet displaying clauses in microscopic type. He had signed it, a bitter sneer on his lips. CT Corp’s advertising hologram looped through the office — radiant families against a backdrop of lush forests, a promise of a New Dawn built on lives consumed in silence. Hunger was a pragmatic advisor; despair, an excellent negotiator. Orphaned since the industrial accident that had cost his father his life a year earlier, he had no choice left but to sell the only thing he had: his time.

Two technicians in sterile suits entered without a glance at him. Their movements were precise, economical, stripped of any superfluous humanity. They were not men, but extensions of the machine they served.

— Subject EL-03, in position, said the first, his voice filtered through his mask.

Kael sat down on the metal seat, the cold of the contact climbing his spine. He felt a glacial bite at his neck. The gel of the neural interface — the conductor of his own undoing — seeped in, viscous. A probe clicked against his vertebra, anchoring him physically to his fate.

— Injection.

The word, flat and lifeless, crackled from a speaker. It was not meant for him. It was a confirmation for the machine.

Behind the armored glass, the chief technician watched his monitors, not him. His finger tapped a command on the touchscreen, adjusting a parameter. A mundane gesture, the same one he would make to order a coffee. To this man, Kael was nothing but a line of fluctuating data, a thermal signature to be regulated. A biological body whose consciousness was about to be ground down by an equation. Replaceable.

A wall screen displayed a line of green text:

#> NAOS-9: Subject EL-03. Chronon density stable. Initiating cycle 1/180.

The contract came back to him, the keywords that sealed his sacrifice. Derealization, depersonalization, chronological hallucinations. Clean terms for an unspeakable agony — a footnote in exchange for a life.

The hum of the gravimetric rings rose a notch. It was no longer a sound but a pressure on every square centimeter of his skin, in his bones, in his teeth. He felt the metal of the seat become an extension of his own frozen flesh. The densification of the chronons had begun.

The air puckered. The light of the ceiling neon trembled like a reflection on water, then shattered into a kaleidoscope of impossible fragments. The room’s immaculate white broke down into colors he had never seen, hues that seemed to vibrate at a forbidden frequency. The chronospheric shield had just activated, severing him from reference time.

One second.

In the outside world.

For Kael, it was an endless fall down a bottomless well, the scream of his own nervous system stretching into a boundless sheet of sound. He saw himself, from the outside: a broken-jointed puppet whose strings had been cut, a seventeen-year-old boy frozen on a metal seat, eyes wide open on a spectacle no human brain was wired to comprehend.

Time did not tear all at once. It frayed, fiber by fiber, carrying away with it the certainty of being himself. His childhood, his father’s face, the grayness of Lyon — all of it was flattened, compressed into a single mental image, then dissolved into the white noise of the machine. He was no longer Kael Mironen. He was EL-03, a variable in a process.

His existence was reduced to a notification on a screen he could not see.

#> 00:00:01

A single second had passed.

The first of his 180 days of labor could begin…