Welcome to Viridian—a city of perfect scripts and silent rebellions. You are about to witness the moment Arthur stops being a character and starts becoming an Author. This journey is 30 chapters long, and it is already complete. Buckle up, the ink is about to bleed.
I am not a thief. At least, I wasn't until 2:14 AM on a Tuesday.
In the city of Viridian, theft is a redundant concept. Why steal when every need is anticipated, every hunger satisfied, and every desire pre-programmed before it even crosses your mind? But today, I committed the ultimate felony: I found the truth. And in Viridian, truth is the only contraband that carries a death sentence.
It started with a throb in my wrist. The "Script" band—that sleek, silver shackle we all wear—was pulsing a rhythmic, soothing blue glow against my skin. Relax, Arthur, it whispered directly into my neural pathways, bypassing my ears. Do not go into the basement. Return to your white-walled unit. Fall into a dreamless, efficient sleep. But for the first time in thirty years, there was a glitch. Not in the system, but in me. A frantic, itching curiosity that no dose of synthesized dopamine could suppress.
I was navigating the maintenance tunnels, where the air tastes of burnt oil and frozen metal. Here, in the bowels of the city, the Script stutters. The thick concrete walls act as a shield, creating pockets of dead air where the constant broadcast of "The Author" cannot reach. I was supposed to be archiving corrupted data files from the ruins of the Old Public Library, but what I stumbled upon wasn't digital.
It was a wooden box. Real wood, not the bio-printed plastic made to look like oak. It felt rough, warm, and ancient. When I pried the lid open, I didn't find jewels or gold. I found something far more dangerous: a short, stubby pencil and a notebook with yellowing, brittle pages.
My breath hitched. The pencil looked like a primitive dagger, a relic from a time when men owned their thoughts. I picked it up, and a sudden jolt shot from my fingertips to my spine. It wasn't cold; it was searing, as if the pencil were absorbing my body heat to jump-start its own internal engine.
I opened the notebook. The first page was terrifyingly blank. In Viridian, we touch the air, we swipe through holograms, but we never leave a mark. Writing is an act of permanence. An act of rebellion.
I pressed the tip of the graphite onto the paper. My hand shook. I felt the resistance of the fibers, the faint scratching sound as the lead bit into the surface. I wrote the first word that came to my mind—a word no one had dared to speak with sincerity in decades: FREE.
The moment I finished the letter 'E', something impossible happened. My hand didn't lift. Instead, it was yanked across the paper by a force that didn't belong to me. My forearm muscles cramped as the pencil dragged my fingers along, carving words beneath mine in a slanted, aggressive script:
"Freedom is not a word you write, Arthur. It is a price you aren't brave enough to pay yet."
I recoiled, dropping the pencil. It hit the concrete floor with a metallic ring that shouldn't have been there. My heart was a frantic drum against my ribs. I stared at my hand; the palm was red, as if I'd touched a hot stove.
"Who's there?" I croaked, my voice swallowed by the shadows.
I picked the pencil up again. I was terrified, but I was also starving. This was the first real interaction I'd had in my entire life—an interaction that didn't follow the polite, hollow protocols of the Script. I wrote back, my handwriting jagged and frantic: "Are you alive? How are you doing this?"
My hand moved again, faster this time. I felt the lead digging deep into the paper, almost tearing it:
"I am not alive in the way you understand. I am the echo of the thoughts you tried to bury. I am the part of you the Script cannot read. Look at me, Arthur. Look at what you are doing to me."
I looked at the pencil. A cold shiver washed over me. The pencil, which had been roughly four inches long when I found it, was visibly shorter. The wood and graphite had worn down just to produce that single response. It was committing suicide just to speak to me.
"Every word has a cost," the pencil wrote, seemingly reading my mind. "In your digital world, words are free because they are worthless. Here, every letter is a piece of this wood's soul. Think carefully before you ask again. My life is measured in sentences."
A wave of nausea hit me. This wasn't a tool; it was a parasite. It was the catalyst that would drag me into the abyss. The Script in my head began to scream now. My wristband turned a violent, bleeding red, and I felt the sting of needles; the system was trying to inject high-velocity sedatives to bring me back to "Normal."
"I have to go," I whispered. "I have to burn this thing."
But the pencil wrote one last line, with a frantic energy that felt like a silent scream:
"Don't leave. She is behind the door. She followed the scent of your fear."
The blood turned to ice in my veins. I heard it then—the sound of footsteps. Not the heavy, rhythmic thud of the Enforcers, but light, melodic steps I knew all too well.
The heavy iron door of the vault creaked open. Her shadow stretched across the concrete floor first, followed by the woman herself. Clara Vance.
She was dressed in her crisp blue technician's suit, her blonde hair pulled back so tightly not a single strand dared to rebel. She looked like an AI-generated portrait—perfect, symmetrical, and utterly cold. In her hand, she held a handheld scanner, but the light emitting from it wasn't the usual diagnostic blue. It was a searing, searching violet.
"Arthur?" she said. Her voice was the same gentle tone I had always found comforting, but now it sounded like a whetted blade. "The system is worried about you. Your heart rate is skyrocketing, and your vitals suggest a severe acute stress response. Director Vane is requesting you return to the Central Spire immediately for an emergency 'Update'."
I tried to hide the notebook and pencil behind my back, but I knew I was a terrible liar. "I'm... I'm fine, Clara. Just got turned around in these old tunnels. The air is thin down here."
Clara took a step into the room. She wasn't looking at me; her eyes were scanning the environment with a predatory precision. "The air isn't thin, Arthur. The air is stagnant. There's a smell in here... do you smell it? It's the scent of something burning. Something ancient."
She moved closer. I could feel the heat radiating from her scanner. "Give me what's in your hand, Arthur. The Script doesn't like secrets. Secrets are the seeds of chaos, and you don't want to be the reason the city suffers, do you?"
The pencil throbbed in my hand. I felt the tip press into my palm, forcing me to write. I couldn't see the paper behind my back, but I felt the violent, rapid movements of the lead against the page. When I stole a quick glance down, I saw what it had written in bold, terrifying strokes:
"She is lying. Look at her left hand. That isn't a scanner. It's an Eraser. If she touches you, you won't even remember your own name."
I looked at her left hand, which she was partially obscuring in the shadow of her hip. There it was—a small, black device that made no sound, but pulsed with a faint, purple ultraviolet light. An Eraser. The tool the authorities used to "factory reset" the minds of dissidents, turning them into blank slates.
"Clara," I said, my voice cracking. "Why are you carrying that?"
Clara stopped smiling. The mask of the friendly colleague vanished, replaced by a terrifying, hollow authority. "Arthur, you're sick. You're seeing things that aren't there. That pencil... that notebook... they are hallucinations triggered by a dopamine deficiency. Give them to me, and let me help you."
"Hallucinations?" I shouted, holding the pencil up in front of her face. "This pencil is more real than your fake smile! This pencil talks! It writes! It feels!"
Clara let out a short, dry laugh. "Inanimate objects don't talk, Arthur. You're talking to your own shadows. Director Vane was right. You are a very special case."
At that moment, the pencil wrote one final sentence at the bottom of the page, a declaration of war:
"Write the word [DARKNESS] now... or this is the last time you will ever see the light."
I looked at the pencil, which was now barely two inches long. I looked at Clara, who began to raise the Eraser toward my forehead. She was one second away from reaching me.
I slammed the pencil onto the paper with every ounce of strength I had left and wrote in massive, desperate letters: DARKNESS.
Suddenly, the lights didn't just go out. It felt as if the world had been swallowed by a black hole. The light vanished, Clara's voice vanished, and even the feeling of the floor beneath my feet seemed to evaporate. There was nothing but me, the scent of burnt graphite, and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
But the real shock wasn't the dark. It was the voice that whispered directly into my ear—and it wasn't the pencil's voice. It was my own voice, but older, haggard, and weary:
"Welcome to the beginning, Arthur. I hope you're ready, because we wrote this chapter together a hundred years ago... and you've already killed me in it once."