They still called her a visionary.
Dr. Seren Ivelle sat alone in her observation chamber, high above the Citadel's core, watching the city pulse below like a living circuit board. Vast districts blinked and dimmed in patterns of regulated energy. Transit streams moved like veins through rusted arteries. And far beneath them all, deep in the Vault, time flowed in reverse—stolen years hoarded like blood behind steel.
She didn't feel like a visionary anymore.
Her hands rested on the glass rail, palms scarred from years of surgical interface. The nanofiber in her bloodstream still whispered with data—biofeedback from over thirty thousand time accounts. She could see everything. The births. The deaths. The subtle arithmetic of suffering.
+3.1 YRS: PARENTAL LOAN REPAYMENT
-6.0 YRS: UNINSURED MEDICAL CLAIM
+0.7 YRS: DAILY PRODUCTIVITY INCENTIVE
-12.3 YRS: SENTENCE CREDIT - RESISTANCE CRIME
People sold their futures for toothpaste. For breathable air. For hope they wouldn't live long enough to feel regret.
She had built this system to solve a crisis. A global population collapse. ChronoCorp was just a tool. A way to stabilize the chaos—assign value to what had once been random: time.
But something had gone wrong.
The elite never spent. Only stored. A permanent underclass began to form, not by race or language, but by countdown. Every year they "borrowed" from the poor went somewhere.
Into the Vault.
A construct Seren designed to ensure temporal parity. But now, it was a fortress of frozen futures. And the device—the one she had hidden, disassembled, and scattered across the rogue shells of the old city—was a skeleton key to the truth.
And someone had found it.
She'd seen the energy spike. The vault flickered for 1.3 seconds. A breach. Tiny, but unmistakable.
She tapped her comms line.
"Unit Theta. Dispatch surveillance drones to Sector 19. I want full chrono-mapping. Any irregular pulse decay or unauthorized node activation."
A pause.
Then: "Already done, Doctor. We have a target ID. Elian Voss."
The name echoed. Faintly familiar. She blinked, searching memory.
Then she remembered.
Five years ago, Voss had donated twelve years to a Class-IV patient—terminal. Illegal transfer, but she had flagged it for override. Compassion, she thought. Just once. It hadn't saved the patient.
But it had saved him.
He wasn't supposed to still be alive.
Seren closed the file, leaned back, and looked at her own wrist display: 68.9 YRS. Artificially extended. She would outlive most of the world if she chose to. But she wouldn't. Not unless she fixed this.
Not unless she burned it all down.
She opened a sealed line—one only she could access.
TO: K.TRAN
SUBJECT: THE DEVICE IS ACTIVE. HE HAS IT.
DO WHAT I COULDN'T.