Neo-Lagos was alive, yet lifeless.
It glittered with neon markets and solar rooftops, AI-police drones zipped through the humid air, and massive sky-trams hummed across steel bridges that stretched like glowing veins. On the surface, it looked like progress. But beneath the dazzling lights was a suffocating truth: no sound.
No bird sang in the trees—if you could call the engineered shrubs "trees." No hawkers shouted over the clamor of a busy market. The chatter of human voices was gone. Mouths moved, deals were struck, jokes were told—but nothing carried beyond a whisper. A world stripped of echoes.
They called it peace.
The government, the Council of Order, sold silence as civilization's cure to chaos. They said noise was a virus, sound a poison that corrupted the human spirit. Rebels called it the Silence. But the truth was simpler: sound had been erased. Erased so completely that most no longer even remembered what it meant to hear.
Those who did remember never dared to say.
---
At the heart of the city, rising above chrome towers and electric billboards, stood the Adeola Estate, a palace rebuilt for a modern throne. It was a world wrapped in wealth and control, guarded by drones that hummed in harmony with the silence.
Inside, Ireti Adeola stirred awake.
The air around her was thick with control: soundproof walls, surveillance vents, and holographic windows projecting a sunrise that never truly broke the smog outside. Technology pressed down on her from every corner—reminding her she was the daughter of the most powerful man in Neo-Lagos, King Adeola, head of the Council of Order.
She sat up, her silk sheets sliding noiselessly to the floor. Even fabric had been engineered not to rustle. The silence wasn't just a law. It was stitched into every fiber of their lives.
Her father's voice broke into her thoughts.
Synthetic. Mechanical. Hollow.
Leaders of the Council were forbidden from using their real voices; they communicated through digitized speech—a symbol of their devotion to the Silence Law.
> "Good morning, daughter," the voice-box embedded in the estate's walls intoned.
"The Council convenes at midday. Prepare yourself."
Ireti closed her eyes. She hated it. That fake voice that echoed her father's commands. He was alive, he had a real voice—she had heard it once as a child—but for years now, even he bowed to the silence.
She whispered, so softly even the walls would not catch it:
"Good morning, Baba."
---
"Iva."
The name slipped from her lips, clear and low.
At once, the air shimmered. A holographic figure flickered into existence beside her bed: Iva, her personal AI assistant. Shaped like a young woman draped in shimmering light, Iva bowed.
> "Yes, Princess Ireti. You called?"
"Prepare me," Ireti said, running her fingers across her silk nightgown. "I have to face the Council today."
"As you wish." Iva's hologram pulsed gently. "Would you like the Silent Gown or the Ceremonial Mantle?"
"Whichever doesn't make me look like I'm suffocating."
"That option," Iva replied with a tilt of her head, "does not exist."
Ireti chuckled, a small slip of humanity, but even that laugh came out hushed, pressed down as though the air itself didn't want her joy to spread.
---
By the time she stepped into the mirrored corridor, she was dressed in a gown of woven smart-fabric, its patterns shifting like liquid glass. At her side, drones floated, adjusting the folds of her clothes.
She walked past servants humans and androids alike. Their lips moved, whispering greetings too low to truly hear. Her title weighed heavily in those half-bows and lowered eyes: Princess of Silence. Daughter of the King who had signed away sound.
And yet, today was different.
As she entered the grand hall, preparing to join her father at the council chamber, her eyes caught something unusual.
A boy one of the servants was on his knees by the fountain. He was supposed to be scrubbing tiles, but instead, his shoulders were trembling. His lips moved frantically, words pouring out but there was no sound. His fists pounded against the silent marble, desperate.
And then it happened.
The smallest of sounds.
Barely there. Fragile. Like a gasp breaking through years of suffocation.
It was gone almost instantly snatched away by the sound sensors embedded in the walls. A shrill alarm blinked red overhead. Drones swooped in like hawks, their beams pinning him down. His mouth was still moving, still crying out.
Ireti froze.
Her chest tightened. Her father's laws, her family's control—it was happening right before her. The boy was dragged away, swallowed by the silence, his rebellion erased before it could even begin.
And yet Ireti's ears still rang with what she had almost heard.
A sound.
Not a whisper. Not a machine. Not an empty echo. Something real."Princess."She turned sharply. A guard bowed to her, his voice carefully modulated. "The Council awaits. This way."Ireti nodded, her face calm, but her mind wasn't.
Something inside her had cracked open.
She didn't know what the boy had tried to scream. She didn't know why it mattered so much. But it did. For the first time, the silence didn't feel like peace.
It felt like prison walls closing in.That morning, as she walked into the glowing chamber of the Council her father's shadow towering over them all Ireti knew only one thing for certain.
The world had forgotten something.
And she was going to remember it.
Even if it destroyed her.