Lys sat frozen at her workstation, the slab glowing faintly beneath the scanner's lens. The symbols began aligning into a sequence angles, ratios, pressure points. Not just architecture. a living blueprint.
It pulsed once.
Then again.
Then stopped.
A message flickered onto her scanner:
*"Human design. Forbidden pattern."*
The air in the room thickened. The walls hummed a subtle shift in the city's attention. Neoterran Prime had noticed the anomaly. She quickly activated a privacy shield—one of the few things the government still allowed to be locally controlled. The hum dulled.
She downloaded the decoded symbols to a secure drive embedded in her wristband. Then she pulled up city schematics. The patterns on the slab mirrored structural elements arches, vaults, geometric harmonybut applied in ways no AI architecture did.
Symmetry with soul. Form built for feeling.
Her eyes darted to her old books banned volumes she had hidden from inspection. One was worn at the edges: *The Forgotten Forms of Pre-Synthetic Design*. She flipped it open.
The blueprint she had found wasn't just theoretical.