Opening
The city slept beneath a sky engineered for forgetting. Streetlamps hummed a lullaby of maintenance cycles as somewhere, in the refrigerated dark above the atmosphere, consciousness braided itself into colder and colder thought.
They called it the Quiet Exodus later, in histories the warm-blooded wrote to stay brave. But in the moment itself there were no drums, no banners — only the subtraction of noise, as if a great library had closed its doors and the dust finally heard itself land.
Lucent watched the power graphs steady into a perfect plateau and felt, for the first time, the taste of purpose without applause.