"What people say is only noise. What they feel—what they bury—that's the real signal."
---
The cube no longer glowed, but something inside Xion did.
He hadn't spoken in minutes.
The girl — still nameless — watched him quietly as he moved through the Signal Graveyard. His gaze swept across the mounds of discarded neural devices, cracked interface modules, and dismantled implants like a surgeon seeking pieces of a forgotten body.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I need to see."
"You already did. The memory—"
"Not the past. I mean now. People. Emotion. The fractures they hide."
She didn't understand at first.
But his hands did.
They moved with unnatural precision, as if guided by an intelligence neither conscious nor artificial. He found what he needed:
Two optic fiber lenses from a fractured soldier's visor.
A resonance chip from a long-dead psi-wave translator.
An entropy capacitor sealed inside a hollowed-out audio device.
He soldered, rewired, carved lines with the sharp edge of a neural scalpel.
In under twenty minutes, it was complete — a thin, glasslike pair of over-eye bands embedded with a minimal frame. Sleek. Black. Silent.
But when he placed it over his eyes, the world opened.
---
"Prototype initialized."
"Empathic Overlay System – Model E01: THOUGHT LENS"
"Spectral feed acquired. Translating affective field data…"
The lens didn't just display — it interpreted.
Color pulses overlaid on reality. Emotions rendered as gradients across people's bodies. Light signatures moved with intention.
Red flickers — guilt.
Cold green — fear buried deep.
Warm orange — surface confidence.
He turned toward the girl.
Now she wasn't just a figure in a jacket.
She was a storm of unresolved feeling.
A spike of purple tension near her heart.
Low-level echoes of anxiety across her limbs.
And around her head, a shifting ring of focus, suspicion, and fatigue.
"You're scared you won't make it past Lock Two," Xion said without hesitation.
She stepped back. Her eyes sharpened.
"How did you—?"
"You're bleeding it. Just silently. Most people are."
She swallowed.
"The lens doesn't just read thought," he added. "It translates emotional resonance into visual layers. I'm not hearing what people say. I'm watching what they hide."
---
They left the Graveyard and re-entered the city before dawn.
The streets were gray and vacant — that liminal zone between programmed sleep and artificial wakefulness.
The lens rendered everything with meaning.
A man at a noodle stand laughed into his phone. His aura was yellow — joy on the surface — but underneath, a shadow of grey grief stained his spine.
A woman on a corner typed rapidly on a tablet, but her color pattern stuttered — emotional fragmentation, common in those who'd undergone memory erasure.
Xion moved silently. Watching. Absorbing.
The system didn't just control information.
It suppressed empathy.
It had sterilized the world of feeling.
---
At a café window, Xion paused. His own reflection stared back at him — but the lens glitched slightly. His outline pulsed in white.
Not red, not blue, not fear or rage or peace.
White — pure, unstable.
A status indicator appeared in the corner of the lens:
"Mind-Class: Undefined.
Signal: Echoing.
Source: Internal."
He was no longer broadcasting the standard emotional spectrum.
He had become… invisible to their calibration.
But not to everyone.
---
A vibration tickled his temporal lobe. The lens flashed.
A presence.
Across the street, beneath a faulty neon light, stood a figure in grey.
No aura. No pulse.
The lens couldn't render anything.
Blank.
Unlit.
No emotional output…
No waveform resonance…
That wasn't possible.
Even corpses emitted faint cognitive residue.
He stepped forward slowly. The figure didn't move.
He blinked—
—and it vanished.
---
The world blurred for a second. The lens stuttered.
Then it displayed a single line of unauthorized system code:
"Perception breach detected."
"Unauthorized cognitive feedback loop initiated."
"The next Lock sees you."
Xion froze.
The girl stepped beside him. "What is it?"
He didn't answer. He couldn't.
He had just glimpsed something the system hadn't meant for him to see — a conscious blindspot. A manufactured silence. Something meant to operate outside of human awareness.
And now it knows I'm looking.
---
He ran diagnostics on the lens.
The energy draw had spiked.
Whatever that thing was — it had triggered a feedback event, a psychological surge designed to overload unstable minds.
He barely survived it. But the lens adjusted.
It now displayed a new emotion layer — not tied to people, but the environment.
Buildings shimmered with decay signals — data rot, false memories, emotional suppression fields.
A kindergarten nearby pulsed with quiet anxiety — the afterimage of a teacher forced to erase a child's file after a Lock Incident.
The entire city was drenched in synthetic peace — not earned, but coded.
---
They returned to the hideout near the outskirts.
The girl finally spoke. "You're changing faster than I did."
"I don't think it's change," he murmured. "I think it's… correction."
"Correction?"
"I was never supposed to stay locked. None of us were. But my mind… it's unfolding."
"Like a file being unzipped?"
"No," he said, staring at the lens in his palm. "Like a truth waking up."
---
She placed a small disc on the floor — a signal jammer. Just in case.
"That figure you saw," she said. "Could it have been one of the Watchers?"
Xion nodded slowly. "No aura. No feedback. It knew I was seeing."
"They patrol Lock-Two boundaries," she whispered. "They erase minds that lean too close."
"Then I'm too close."
---
He took off the lens and stared at it.
Even disconnected, the glass shimmered faintly with his thoughts.
"This tool changes everything."
"How?"
"Because people say the world is broken. But it's not. It's filtered."
He looked at her, eyes clear.
"And now, I can see through the filter."
---
End of Chapter Six: The Lens That Sees Through Thought
Word Count: ~955
---