The building dreamed in metal. Kael woke to it - thin vibrations in the wall like a coin deciding which side to show. He did not open his eyes yet. He named the sounds. Pipes: thermal tick. Fridge: variable hum. Street: distant, woven siren. Stairwell: quiet, but quiet like a held breath.
He sat up, counted the objects he owned that mattered, and then the ones that pretended to. The distinction steadied him. On the notebook, he wrote the day: 1. This was a lie in the useful sense. Day 0 had been the night the system arrived and taught his fear algebra. Day 1 would be the day he changed the apartment without the apartment changing him.
He cranked the lamp, drank measured water, ate an unromantic spoon of peanut butter and a plain cracker with the seriousness of a treaty. The System slid into view without ceremony.
[System: Day Plan] - Checkpoints: reassess door, window, water; noise floor mapping; Threshold Protocol refresh. - Priority tasks: obtain screws (>= 50 mm), sharpen knife or replace edge tool, locate radio (low - drain), identify water fill source. - Optional: roof reconnaissance (defer if risk unacceptable). - Note: mimicry probability for name - use increased (district trend).
"Understood," Kael said, not because the System required acknowledgment, but because the room did. Words kept him from becoming only a list.
He looked at the knife. It was a kitchen knife with aspirations beyond its steel. Blunt is generous; it was a suggestion shaped like a knife. He labeled it in the notebook: edge tool, insufficient. He tried to imagine leaving the apartment with an insufficient edge tool and found that imagination - usually a negotiator - walked out of the meeting.
[System: Micro - mission - Edge Improvement]
Options:
1) Stone (absent): not available.
2) Ceramic (mug, tile): partial.
3) Steel - on - steel (poor), risky.
4) Sandpaper variants (absent).
5) Improvised strop (cloth + paste): partial.
Recommendation: ceramic + strop. Expected improvement: low to medium.
Kael smiled at the word expected. He took a coffee mug, tested the unglazed ring at the base, and pulled the blade across it in steady passes that sounded like someone erasing pencil from bone. He kept the angle by imagining a tiny man standing on the edge and not sliding off. He stropped the knife on a strip of cloth with toothpaste, because mint belongs in heroic stories if you have to choose. The edge did not become good; it became possible.
He tested the wedge, the brace, the bell. He adjusted the blackout cloth until the room became a night that obeyed. He wrote water tallies and underlined them. He waited five minutes and then listened to the stairwell through the door, using the Context Audio Filter like a loaned ear.
[System: Context Audio Filter] - Stairwell: 50 Hz base resonance; intermittent shifts; no voice; distant contact sounds, periodic, irregular. - Confidence: medium. - Annotation: no mimicry at threshold; risk decreased but not removed.
He made tea from a bag that had seen more optimistic mornings and let the smell assert that something civilized still applied. He drank it too quickly and forgave himself. He needed a radio and screws. Screws first. They were a mission shaped like reason.
[System: Mission #0005 - Screw Run]
Objective: acquire long wood screws (>= 50 mm) and related hardware (washers optional) from storage cages or maintenance areas.
Constraints: silent, no open exposure, minimal time.
Steps:
1) Pre - stage door for fast re - seal; carry set ready.
2) Recon storage level (basement) via stairwell; stop at threshold if anomaly persists.
3) Identify target cage (yours/empty/common tools).
4) Collect: screws, driver, spare batteries (if any), tape, cordage.
5) Return, re - seal, audit.
Reward: Fabrication Tree (I) branch unlock: Fastener Use.
Basement. He disliked the idea. Basements hoard both resources and regrets. But the door would not become stronger because he pretended to admire it.
He prepared. Carry set: water half - liter, crank lamp, improved knife, rag, tape. He shrugged on a jacket with real pockets, because pockets are strategy. He set the wedge to travel position, unhooked the bell, loosened the belt, and opened the door a hand - width. He smelled dust, old paint, and someone's perfume from a lifetime where smelling like someone else was a compliment.
He used the Context Audio Filter as he moved. The hall gave him carpet hush and the stairwell gave him steel silence. He paused at the stairwell door. Yesterday, breathing had lived behind it like a bored animal. Today, the spectrum held only the hum of a tired building.
He opened the stairwell door and slipped in. The stairwell had its own weather. Cool, a little damp, with a draft that knew how to find ankles. He closed the door behind him, the latch catching with a click he judged immodest.
Down. He thought the word instead of listening to his feet count, and his feet obeyed. The first landing: discarded flier, shoe scuff, a gum wrapper anchored to the floor like a cheap flag. Second landing: a smear he refused to identify. Basement door: steel, with a fire exit bar and a sign that belonged to law instead of survival.
He placed two fingers on the bar and breathed. The Filter framed the sound beyond with a thin halo: LOW VARIABLE, DRIP; INTERMITTENT METAL; NO VOICE. He pushed. The door groaned because doors do not care about your missions. He slid through, one shoulder at a time, and let it close slowly until it almost clicked, then held it, then allowed the last whisper of sound to happen like a confession.
The basement hallway offered choices: left toward storage cages, right toward utility rooms. Cages first. He wanted his own space before he braved places the building thought were neutral.
The light motion sensor did not wake. He did not wake it. He cranked the lamp just enough to remind his eyes that contrast exists and held it low to the ground so the glow would crawl instead of announce. The cages were welded wire with cheap padlocks, a democracy of security theater. He counted doors until he found his number. The padlock stared at him with a charisma it hadn't earned.
His key was upstairs. He removed a shoelace, tied it to the wire, and pulled to test flex. The cage panels groaned like an old man getting up to make a point. He examined the hinges. Three. Screws on the inside - someone had been smarter than average. He smiled because it was nice to meet a ghost of competence, even when it was an obstacle.
On the floor near the wall, a fallen screw glittered like a joke aimed at him. He picked it up and measured it against his finger. Not 50 mm. Closer to 30. Still worth pocketing. He moved along the aisle toward the end cage - often where odds and ends live when people tire of storing their own odds and ends.
He found what he needed in a cage that had lost the argument with a crowbar many months earlier. Inside: a toolbox with the personality of a lie. He opened it carefully. The tray held a reversible screwdriver, a handful of bits, two rolls of old tape, nails like tiny punctuation, and - he breathed out - wood screws in a plastic bag, long enough to talk to a doorframe like an adult. He counted eight in the bag. He found three more loose in the corners where every box keeps confetti.
He took the screws, the driver, the bits, and a coil of cheap nylon rope that would be excellent at failing under load and good at everything else. He put everything into the bag he'd brought and added a roll of tape taken for moral reasons.
The Filter flickered. A sound traveled down the hallway toward him - a brush of fabric, a slow foot, a second slow foot. Kael killed the lamp and let the dark take his eyes away. He pressed himself to the wire and breathed shallow, the way swimmers do when they decide water and air are the same religion.
The footsteps stopped. Silence. Then a voice that had learned too much too quickly. "Monsieur Kael."
It had his name. It did not have his cadence. The stairwell had not led a building manager down here to check on bins. Kael let the quiet expand between the syllables and stepped backward in thoughts as if thoughts could move a body.
He counted to twenty with the slow patience of a safe dial. He imagined the map from here to the door and traced it with his mind's finger. He imagined the mimic standing where the hall narrowed and let that possibility solidify until it became a reason not to move.
The voice tried again. Softer. Closer. "Kael." This time, the vowel wore the right shoes.
The Filter labeled it: VOICEPRINT UNKNOWN; MATCH PATTERN: PROBABLE MIMICRY; CONFIDENCE: MEDIUM - HIGH. The halo trembled as if sound could sweat.
Kael remembered a game he had once played with a boy named Nox on the roofs - naming the city's noises like constellations. He let the nostalgia pass through him like a train he would not board. He needed a new constellation: screws, door, stairwell, apartment, wedge, bell. He waited until the quiet had shape again.
A drip resumed somewhere, rude with relevance. The voice retreated, or never existed, or lost interest, or learned. He did not announce his new life to the dark. He moved only when he had a sentence to describe his movement: three steps to the corner, pause, listen, three steps more, bar, hinge, door, stairwell, breathe, close, breathe.
He ascended. His calves negotiated a truce with adrenaline. He slipped into his hallway, shut his door, slid the wedge home, belted the brace until it declared an allegiance, and only then allowed his body to feel the weight it had been refusing to notice.
He set the screws on the table like gifts he would thank a god for if he believed in one.
[System: Mission #0005]
Status: complete.
Reward unlocked: Fabrication Tree (I) - Fastener Use.
The System showed a new diagram: not a literal tree, but a set of sequences that hung off verbs like ornaments. Fastener Use branched into Door Reinforcement (I) and Window Frame Locking (I). Each oval contained a sentence; each sentence was a task that would forgive him for being human in some other task later.
He worked the latch plate first. He removed the short screws and replaced them with the long ones, kissing the metal with the driver as if tenderness mattered. It did. He could feel the frame accept the change like a spine receiving a brace. He added a second screw through the hinge side where the door's soul lives. He drove the last two into the jamb at an angle, because force respects geometry.
He tested the door. It said no with more conviction. He pushed. It said still no but in a voice that was preparing lawsuits.
He sat on the floor and let himself grin. He turned the knife on the stone that wasn't a stone again and attended to the edge like a monk who writes a single letter in a thousand fine versions. The steel did not become heroic, but it agreed to negotiate with the idea of cutting.
Water. The System's list did not stop listing because he had done a thing well. He needed a source if the building forgot him. Roof tanks maybe. Or the ancient tap that lived like a rumor in the basement near the boiler room. He sighed. Basements were becoming a habit he wanted to quit.
[System: Mission #0006 - Water Chance]
Objective: identify and test a fill source without public exposure.
Options:
A) Boiler room emergency tap (likely);
B) Roof tanks (key required, high exposure);
C) Pipe bleed (risky, low yield).
Constraints: speed, light, noise minimal; do not carry more than 2 L per test.
Reward: Hydration Protocol (I).
A. He would do A. He pre - staged the door again. The ritual had weight now. Wedge, bell, belt, breath. He entered the stairwell and turned left at the basement door instead of right. The utility hallway smelled like metal that had learned to sweat. The Filter framed the room beyond: PUMP HUM; THERMAL TICK; NO VOICE. He liked rooms that did not produce sentences about voices.
He opened the boiler room door and stepped into a riot of pipes that knew their names and did not need his. Valves with more history than his entire life, gauges with faces too tired to lie convincingly. He saw it at once - the tap that had been installed for emergencies and forgotten's comfort. He filled a half liter, tasted it, decided the taste was the taste of surviving. He sniffed the water the way his grandfather had taught him with wine. He pretended to be wise and chose caution. He filled another bottle, capped it, labeled it BOILER A with the marker. He would wait to drink it unless the world argued persuasively.
The Filter twitched and added a sound at the door - footfall, soft. Kael killed the tap, pocketed the bottle, moved left into a shadow behind a pipe riser. The door opened a hand's width. No light entered. Something else did. The smell of outside shoes. He waited. A long, slow breath - a metronome for something that did not know time signatures - stroked the air and withdrew. The door whispered shut like it had an opinion.
He returned to the apartment with the exact reverse of his path and labeled the second bottle BOILER B and put both bottles on a shelf that would be proud to hold them. He wrote in the notebook: A source exists. He drew a rectangle around exists because existence was not guaranteed.
[System: Mission #0006]
Status: complete (test phase).
Reward unlocked: Hydration Protocol (I). - Guidance: rotate sources; boil if possible; mark lot; track effects.
He boiled a cup as demonstration and discipline, even though the gas frightened him in a new way. The flame's obedience felt rehearsed. He let the cup cool with a lid like a hat, as if modesty improved purity.
Radio. He needed one, or the smallest version of one he could borrow from the air. He did not own a portable set. He suspected the storage area might hold a former resident's idea of preparedness, but he had already negotiated with the basement enough today.
[System: Micro - mission - Scan]
If no radio: use wire + phone audio jack (if available) as antenna to sample carriers. - Risk: minimal (passive). - Caveat: phone battery impact. - Alternative: passive listening via open window gap (sound scan).
He had an old set of wired earbuds, relics from a museum where cables mattered. He stripped the insulation at the end, twisted the copper into a sad hook, and hung it near the window's smallest gap like bait for information. He put the phone in airplane mode and toggled an app that saw the world as frequencies instead of friends.
Noise. Noise. Noise. Then a carrier that pretended to be a heartbeat, then conceded that it was only electricity telling jokes. He heard nothing useful in the radio sense, but the city presented its soundtrack with less lie. A helicopter far away, refusing to be a solution. Tires on a bridge complaining that bridges are tired. A voice. No, not a voice. The memory of one inside a siren's echo.
He stopped hunting. Listening had a cost and he was already paying taxes to fear. He unplugged the wire and coiled it. He let the wall keep its secrets a little longer.
The afternoon bent toward gold and ash. He took stock of everything again - the ritual that had become the day's spine. He wrote the word neighbor and knocked the pencil against the margin three times. He should check on Madame Bourdain. He did not want to. He wanted to be the kind of man who did not want to and did it anyway.
He rang the bell against the door softly three times - his code. He waited. Her door opened a sigh's worth.
"Monsieur Kael?" she said, wrong formality and right tenderness. "I am here."
"Are you well?"
"I am as well as I am," she said. "You hear the singing?"
"No," he said. "But I hear something pretending to be a song."
She made the hum people make when they approve despite not entirely understanding. "I have tea," she offered. "Not good tea. Tea that hides in a bag."
"I have screws," he said, as if that were the same kind of gift.
"Good," she said. "Then we will survive." She closed the door. The hall accepted her inside as if it had missed her.
Kael turned back to his table and the System obliged him with work because rest is a privilege you earn by listening to machines not kill you.
[System: Mission #0007 - Signal Discipline]
Objective: standardize signals for Threshold Protocol; reduce mimicry risk. - Door bell: three short = you; two short = wait; one long = no, do not answer. - Voice: do not say names; password - of - the - day: ask for object that changes each day. - Today's object: "the red book."
Reward: Social Stability (+).
He wrote RED BOOK on a slip of paper and taped it above the handle. He would choose a different object tomorrow and pretend that newness itself was a weapon.
He cooked rice with the tenderness that good rice demands even from the unworthy. He ate half, labeled the rest, cooled it on the counter, put it away with the deliberateness that had replaced hope. He drank warm water because warm water felt like a favor he could still do for himself.
Night approached. The city found a slower rhythm to its fire. Kael turned off everything that made a blue glow and let the room become a harbor. He lay down on the rug, because beds belonged to another economy, and let his back learn the geometry of woven things.
The bell rang twice, very soft. He had invented twice as wait. He waited. Thirty seconds. A minute. He waited until even waiting became a job description. Three short rings followed, faster than his habit. He stood and moved to the door and did not open it.
"Password," he said. The word came out steadier than his bones.
A voice answered from low near the seam. It used a sound he did not know he had been missing until this second. "What color's the book, you meticulous bastard?"
The word meticulous wore the right shoes. The voice did not say his name. It named his manners. He closed his eyes and let a decade drop its weight on him without warning.
"Nox," he said, and then hated himself for disobeying his own rule. He held still, a man who had thrown a plate and now listened for the shatter. The hall withheld permission to breathe.
"Yeah," the voice said, and he could hear the grin. "I've brought you a library, Librarian. Open quiet."
Kael reset the wedge to its traveler's angle, loosened the belt, unhooked the bell line with a careful finger, and cracked the door a distance measured in caution. A narrow face, wind - chapped and city - freckled, breathed his air. Eyes that once mapped rooftops like they were continents scanned his hallway and judged it almost worthy.
Nox held up an object between two fingers: a screwdriver bit wrapped in red electrical tape. "The book," he said, and the both of them lost a second to laughter that knew better.
Kael let him in. He sealed the door behind them with the tenderness of a man performing a ritual he admires because it works. He replaced the wedge, the belt, the bell, and only then allowed his lungs to report for duty.
They did not touch. They were not saints, but they had learned that ritual touches you even when you don't touch each other.
"You look like you moved into a checklist," Nox said. He pointed at the blackout cloth; he pointed at the brace. Approval knitted itself in the corner of his mouth.
"I have a System," Kael said, and felt immediately foolish for speaking the sentence as if you could tell someone you had discovered gravity. He opened the panel in his mind to show Nox - not the words, but the orientation a mind gets when it has tools. He realized that sharing wasn't like blinking a light on a wall. The panel remained his. The consequences, he could explain.
"So that's why you finally organized your kitchen," Nox said. "Took an apocalypse."
"Where were you?" Kael asked. He hated that the question tasted like accusation.
"On the roofs," Nox said. "Where the air still remembers what a promise is." He placed a small bag on the table and unpacked offerings: a compact radio with a cracked case and a battery compartment held closed by a rubber band; a handful of AA cells like blessings disguised as cylinders; two packets of desiccated soup that had seen things. "Gifts for your empire," he said without irony. "I also brought gossip. End of the street's got a choir. You will hate them. They learned names."
Kael nodded. He didn't have a hymn for rage, so he wrote on the notebook instead: mimic choir, east.
They ate quietly, the kind of quiet that is a companion, not a deficit. Nox told a story with his hands about a ladder that refused his righteous cause and how he forgave it by not falling. Kael told the room the truth about screws and the basement voice. The radio sat between them like a remembered song.
They tried the radio. It gave them a flicker of carriers and a stubborn refusal to be comfort. A thin voice read legal text from some other day in a loop. Another voice tried to be brave and landed on theatrical instead. Nox turned the dial like an artist who maintained a hobby for frequencies. "We'll find something," he said. He did not promise a time frame. He had learned.
[System: Advisory - Ally Detected] - Social grid updated: Nox (ally), reliability high, mobility high, noise discipline: medium. - Suggestion: assign roles. - Proposal: Mission #0008 - Two - Man Protocol.
Kael did not need the System to propose roles. He had a decade of them hardened into muscle. Still, he let the rectangle speak because naming is binding.
[System: Mission #0008 - Two - Man Protocol]
Objective: formalize tasks to reduce error under stress. - Roles: Anchor (inside) / Scout (outside). - Anchor: resource management, fabrication, comms, thresholds, logs. - Scout: route mapping, acquisition, external observation, feint. - Shared: signals, rendezvous points, breach response.
Reward: Coordination (+).
"Anchor," Nox said, tapping Kael's chest with two fingers in the air above it as if he touched without touching. "Scout," he added, pointing his thumb at himself like someone being drafted into a noble prank.
Kael nodded. "Anchor," he agreed. Saying it out loud made him less ashamed of not wanting the sky enough to lie about it. "We standardize signals. We never say names. We add a second password - the object - of - the - day and the number - of - the - day. Today's three."
Nox sighed like a man who appreciates rules the way he appreciates gravity: only because it would be inconvenient to do without. "Fine. What's tomorrow?"
"Red book becomes blue cable becomes white mug becomes something we have and can point to without saying."
"Love language for paranoids," Nox said, but he didn't argue. He looked at the door again. "You did good work on the frame. But screws only last until someone with a better screwdriver arrives." He nodded at the brace. "This sings the right song."
Kael felt the modesty of praise he could keep. He put two AA batteries into the radio, turned the volume so low it was more idea than sound, and let the city's carriers thread the air like wires that couldn't hold weight yet.
They worked without saying they were working. Nox repaired the radio's battery door with tape like he was mending a friendship. Kael copied the day's inventory neatly, then horribly, then neatly again until the letters looked like correctness. They compared rumors. The industrial corridor was open fire. A group at the far end of the boulevard had set up tables and a doctrine. Somebody claimed lights had blinked a message from the rooftop of the hospital, and someone else claimed the hospital had turned its lights into a god and demanded worship. Nox believed both for different reasons and neither because he liked himself.
Time changed shape. Evening pulled on the room like a tide that had learned manners. Nox stood. "I should go," he said. He lifted his bag, which was lighter than it should be because giving away things is heavier. "If I see the choir, I'll teach them your name is something with fewer vowels."
The joke did not land because they both knew the choir already knew.
"Signals," Kael said. "Three small, I am me. Two, wait. One long, no. Password - of - the - day red book plus number. We add hand signs if voices fail."
Nox nodded and showed him a sign from their rooftop days: a palm sliced sideways above the heart - danger, mimicry. Kael returned the sign with gratitude he did not name.
They reset the door ritual. Wedge, belt, bell. Nox slipped into the hallway and became part of the building's plan for shadows. The door closed. The apartment counted Kael and found him the same number as before, which felt like superstition disguised as math.
The radio clicked and found a voice that did not repeat itself. A woman, breathless, reading a list of intersections as if reading them would pray them back into coherence. Kael wrote them down. He did not know if writing was useful. Writing was faith in paper. He turned the volume down until the sound disappeared and the meaning stayed.
[System: Day 1 - Audit] - Door reinforcement improved - Edge tool: marginal improvement - Water source identified (boiler tap) - Radio: acquired (partial), carriers mapped - Ally: Nox linked; Two - Man Protocol established - Anomalies: mimicry in basement; stairwell breathing (yesterday), boiler room door presence - Next: window frame locking (I); silent exit kit; password rotation; map rooftop routes (defer?)
Kael read the list and allowed himself the smallest shape of joy. It was a rectangle that fit inside his ribcage without pushing any other organs aside.
He turned off the radio and turned on the silence and lay on the rug, which had learned his weight. The building made a sound he had not yet labeled. He listened to it without trying to name it, because not everything has to be a task to be survived.
Outside, the city dimmed like a stage between acts. He closed his eyes and thought of screws the way you think of stars: as holdfasts. He thought of voices and decided that the kindness of not using names might be the last luxury available. He thought of Nox moving across roofs like a rumor, and he allowed the rumor to be true until proven otherwise.
When sleep came, it came like a collaborator. Kael did not resist. He wrote nothing on the ceiling this time. He let the math hold him.