The morning felt like it belonged to someone else.
The sky was the same dull blue it had always been, streaked with city haze. The air tasted like engine smoke and cheap instant coffee. Somewhere below their apartment window, the city's veins throbbed with car horns and train rumbles and the kind of hurried footsteps that said people were already late.
But inside apartment 3B, the world was quiet.
Noah Reed stared at his shirt. It was clean, stiff from being air-dried in the bathroom, and white — the kind of white that didn't belong to people who still lived on instant noodles and patched shoes.
"I feel like I'm dressing up as someone who has a future," he muttered.
From across the room, Emily Cross didn't look up from the mirror. She was fixing her hair for the fourth time. Her fingers were too steady, her expression too neutral. That only meant one thing.
She was terrified.
"We do have a future," she said softly. "We just haven't met it yet."
Noah chuckled, pulling on the shirt.
"Great. Hope it's not a jerk."
They had fifteen minutes to spare and no appetite for breakfast. So they stood at the window, shoulder to shoulder, watching the streets below.
"You ever think it'd actually happen?" Noah asked.
"What?"
"Jobs. Labs. Offices. Real ones. I mean, yeah, we joked about it at the orphanage. But I always thought... I don't know. We'd end up working checkout counters forever."
"We still might," Emily said. "If we screw this up."
He nudged her lightly.
"Thanks for the pep talk, Dr. Cross."
She rolled her eyes.
"You started it."
Their bags were already packed — Noah's with a toolkit and a small notebook filled with scribbled schematics. Emily's with a thin binder, a half-charged tablet, and a single polished stone she'd kept since she was twelve. Lucky charm. She'd never told Noah that.
The door loomed in front of them. Ordinary. Flimsy. Same wood as always.
But today it was a door to something else.
Noah reached for the handle.
"Let's go prove we're not a mistake."
Emily nodded.
"Let's go meet the future."
Emily – Astra Research Labs
The Astra Labs building shimmered like a hallucination — all chrome panels and tinted windows shaped like clean geometry. A steel-and-glass cathedral to science. Emily had only seen it in brochures and photos until now. Standing in its shadow made her feel like a fraud in a blazer.
She checked her ID badge again. Still real.
She stepped through the revolving doors.
Inside, it was sterile and humming. Screens blinked silently from the walls. Holographic displays shifted over reception desks. A woman in a graphite suit nodded to her and said,
"Welcome, Emily Cross. You're expected in Orbital Physics."
She blinked.
> "Already?"
"Elevator C. 14th floor. Good luck."
The elevator was so smooth she didn't realize it had moved until the doors opened.
A tall, thin man with a lab tablet stood waiting.
"Emily Cross?"
"Yes."
"Dr. Lennox wants to see you. This way."
They walked through a long corridor lined with glass-walled labs. Inside, people in coats examined machines she couldn't even name — gravity wells, nano-fabricators, thermal resonance arrays. She wanted to stop and gawk but didn't.
Dr. Lennox's office was a cold box of steel, glass, and a single potted plant that looked like it was surviving out of spite.
"You're on time," Dr. Lennox said without looking up.
"You said punctuality is a sign of respect."
"Good memory."
The woman looked up — those round glasses, sharp eyes, and a mouth that seemed allergic to smiling.
"You'll be assigned to Station 4. Plasma Field Study. Janek will oversee you. You'll observe for the first week, contribute lightly in the second. Do not touch anything unless explicitly told. Speak only if you can back it up with math."
Emily nodded.
"Understood."
"Good. Don't make me regret this."
Station 4 was... alive.
Energy hissed through cables beneath the floor. Readouts flickered against the walls like digital constellations. The team — a half-dozen engineers and physicists — moved like clockwork, and none of them stopped to greet her.
Janek did, though.
Barely.
"You're the orphan girl?"
"I'm the plasma theory girl. The orphan part's just background."
That earned a subtle lift of the eyebrow. Approval, maybe. Or curiosity.
He handed her a lab tablet and pointed at the secondary terminal.
"Start by confirming the stability curve on last week's test. Tell me if anything looks weird."
It was grunt work — combing through layers of sensor data and heat maps. But Emily's fingers danced across the display with purpose.
She lost track of time.
The numbers spoke to her. The readings were chaotic at first, then began to hum with a pattern — like a song she barely remembered. And there — a drift. A three-second hiccup in the field's behavior.
"Janek?"
"Hmm?"
"Was this supposed to happen?"
She showed him the data.
He stared at it. Then at her.
"No. Good catch."
That was all.
But Emily felt her chest bloom.
Someone saw her.
Noah – Atlas Mechworks
The building looked like a forgotten warehouse — wide, flat, painted in a color that may have once been gray. The only sign of life was the mechanical buzz that leaked from within, like the heartbeat of machines left unsupervised.
Noah Reed walked in and grinned.
It was chaos.
Sparks flew from a welding station. A robot arm knocked over a crate of wiring. Someone shouted something about a coolant line being "a death trap, not a feature."
Noah loved it instantly.
"Reed?"
A man in a heavy jacket and scarred hands looked up from a workbench.
"I'm Gage. Don't get in my way, don't lick anything glowing, and you'll survive the week."
"Cool," Noah said. "I'll add that to my life philosophy."
Gage snorted.
"You'll be on reclamation. Break down dead tech, tag usable components, toss the rest. If you don't burn the place down, I'll let you handle a live build by Friday."
The reclamation room was like a tech graveyard.
Towering piles of broken exo-frames, gutted drones, scorched panels, and unrecognizable metal corpses. Noah cracked his knuckles and got to work.
It was what he did best: find the soul inside the scraps.
He pried open a busted drone and grinned — the power core was intact, just reverse-mounted. Rookie mistake.
He logged it. Salvaged the housing. Noted the energy type. Kept moving.
Midway through hour three, Gage stuck his head in.
"You ID'd the drift regulator on that walker frame?"
"Yeah. Someone looped the output back into the stabilizer. Basically told the machine to trip itself."
"Seriously?"
"Fixed it. Left notes."
Gage stared.
Then gave a rare, short nod.
"You're not useless."
High praise in Atlas Mechworks.
8:41 PM – Back Home
The apartment was dark when Emily got in. She didn't bother with the light. Just dropped her bag, collapsed onto the futon, and let herself exhale.
Ten minutes later, the door opened again.
Noah came in, smelling like metal and ozone, carrying a single boxed meal from the takeout place near the train station.
He sat on the floor, handed her a spoon.
"Shared misery dinner?"
"Absolutely."
They ate in silence for a while. The only sound was the gentle hum of the ceiling fan and the occasional clink of plastic spoons.
Then:
"They didn't fire me," Emily said.
"Same. Gage called me 'not useless.'"
"Lennox said not to speak unless I could prove it with math."
"So... you didn't speak?"
"Only once."
They laughed — tired, genuine.
Then Emily looked at him, eyes softer now.
"We did it, Noah."
"No," he said. "We started."
The world didn't end, which felt like a mistake.
Noah Reed lay flat on his back, arms sprawled, a cold soda can pressed to his forehead. His boots were off. His socks were mismatched. His entire soul felt like a fried capacitor.
"I think Gage might actually be part cyborg," he muttered.
From across the room, Emily Cross didn't look up. She was at the desk — hunched, still half in her lab blazer, tapping away on her tablet with clinical fury.
"What makes you say that?"
"His arm flexed when he lifted a machine the size of a fridge. With one hand."
"He probably just works out."
"You ever see a guy bench-press a hydraulic frame like it's a shopping bag?"
"Maybe you're just weak."
A ghost of a smirk tugged at her lips, but it vanished fast.
Noah peeled himself off the floor and limped into the kitchen, if it could be called that — a sink, a burner, and three spices they never used.
"Did you eat yet?"
"No. Too wired."
"Wired? That's a good thing, right?"
"It's… busy in my head. I saw a plasma field move today. It wasn't supposed to."
That got his attention.
He leaned on the counter.
"What do you mean move?"
"It shifted on its own. Self-organized. We think the sensors were just lagging, but... it looked almost deliberate. Like it knew it was being watched."
"Creepy."
"Beautiful."
Emily said it like someone talking about a dream no one else had seen.
They made eggs — badly. Noah burned the edges, Emily dropped a shell in and insisted it added calcium. They ate sitting on the floor again, backs against the couch, watching the wall instead of the TV they didn't own.
Outside, the city purred.
"So, what now?" Noah asked.
"We do it again tomorrow."
"What if we screw up?"
"Then we fix it."
She said it too fast. Like a reflex.
Noah narrowed his eyes.
"You're scared."
"Nah I'm focused."
"Same thing, sometimes."
Day Two – Fractures
The second day came faster than the first.
Emily was gone before Noah woke up. Left a sticky note on the fridge:
"Don't forget your tools. Gage hates forgetters."
She'd drawn a tiny wrench for flair.
Noah smiled. Then groaned.
He was sore in places he didn't know had names.
At Atlas Mechworks, Gage greeted him by tossing a fuse module at his chest.
"You're gonna learn wiring today."
"Didn't I prove myself yesterday?"
"That was junk-sorting. This is real."
Noah held the module.
"It's cracked."
"So fix it."
That was the job: trace the fault, isolate the issue, reflow the solder, patch the shielding. Sounds simple. Wasn't.
Every time he thought he was done, Gage found something wrong. Every time he fixed it, another issue popped up.
"It's like mechanical whack-a-mole," Noah muttered.
But he kept going.
His hands remembered things his head didn't. He started improvising. Adding his own twists. A stabilizer here, a bypass there. Gage didn't say anything. Just watched.
That was almost worse than yelling.
Meanwhile, in Astra Labs, Emily was lost in numbers.
Today's assignment: run calibrations on the field resonance chamber. Except someone had changed the base formula in the logs. And hadn't documented it.
Emily hated undocumented changes.
"This curve is wrong," she told Janek.
"It's experimental."
"It's sloppy."
Janek raised an eyebrow.
"Fix it then."
So she did. Burned through her lunch break, reverse-engineered the change, and rewrote the formula. Quietly. Efficiently.
By 4PM, the simulation hit 98.6% accuracy.
Janek walked by, glanced at her screen.
"Better."
That was the most praise she'd get.
But it was enough.
Day Three – Splinters
That night, something changed.
Noah was quiet at dinner. Ate slower. Kept glancing at her like he wanted to say something.
Emily noticed — she always did — but she didn't push.
Until the dishes were in the sink and the silence got too heavy.
"What is it?"
"They're not teaching me. They're testing me."
"You're handling it."
"Yeah. But... it's like every day they throw me deeper into the fire just to see if I melt."
He paused.
"Part of me likes it. That scares me."
Emily leaned back against the wall.
"You're allowed to like being good at something."
"No. I mean I like the stress. The pressure. It's like... I've never mattered this much before. And now every wire I fix feels like it proves I deserve to exist."
Emily blinked.
That landed harder than he meant it to.
"Do you really feel that way?"
"Didn't you? Back then?"
"Still do."
Day Five – Cracks in the Ceiling
Emily didn't come home right after work.
Noah waited.
The clock hit 8:00. Then 8:30.
She walked in at 9:07, soaked from a sudden rainstorm, clutching her tablet like a lifeline.
"I found something," she said.
"Did you get wet just to tell me that?"
"No. I got caught on the way back from the terminal server room."
"Which you weren't assigned to."
"I had a theory. I tested it."
She sat on the futon, dripping. Didn't even change.
"There's a fault in the energy buffer model. It's minor now. But if they don't fix it, and the lab pushes to full field compression..."
She trailed off.
Noah sat beside her.
"Boom?"
"More like melt."
She finally looked at him.
"What if I say something, and they ignore me? What if I don't say anything, and someone gets hurt?"
"Then you have to say something."
"But what if I'm wrong?"
Noah didn't speak for a moment.
Then he gently took her hand — just a brush of fingers, nothing more.
"Then you'll learn. That's what scientists do, right? Make mistakes until the truth survives?"
Emily stared down at their hands. Then squeezed.
"Yeah."
Day Seven – Quiet Victories
A week passed.
No one fired them. No one praised them either.
But Emily's formula was added to the main system.
And Noah was given his own build station for five hours.
They didn't celebrate.
They just bought ice cream with their leftover change and watched the ceiling.
"Do you think we'll get used to it?" Noah asked.
"What? The pressure?"
"The success."
Emily didn't answer right away.
Then, finally:
"I hope not."