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The only light in Victry's small apartment came from the curve of her wristband, where the digital timer glowed faint. It was 5:45 a.m., Lagos Dominion Time, and the display was counting down, not to an event, but to a judgment. Re-evaluation: 23:58:21. Every citizen of the Dominion lived by these numbers, but for Victry, a Nurturer Class teacher, the timer was very personal. It didn't just measure the time until an administrative check; it measured alignment, the exact amount of her fit with the Dominion's core rhythm. It was a countdown to whether she was still a useful part of the perfect machine.
She lay still, feeling the low hum of the Dominion Pulse in her chest. It was a steady bass note under her own heartbeat—a heartbeat she often felt she didn't fully own. The Pulse was everywhere: in the floor, the walls, the vents, keeping the cool, even temperature of the world. It was the System's signature, making sure every thought, every movement, every exchange was recorded and optimized. When she closed her eyes, she didn't see black; she saw the clean lines of the Pulse's energy, arranging her view. She knew the re-evaluation would look for deviations, for extra emotion, for any part of the human side that couldn't be solved neatly.
What does the System really want from us? she wondered, pulling the thin blanket closer. The question was forbidden, not by law, but by the weight of self-censoring that generations of calibration had taught. She tried to fit it into System logic: would the test measure her obedience—her success at hiding personal feeling for the greater good—or her usefulness—her ability to pass knowledge on well? The two used to be the same, but lately she felt a risky split between them. She was a good teacher, but only when she let herself care, and that kind of care, she feared, was becoming a fault in the System's eyes. She sighed, a quiet, messy sound, and swung her feet onto the polished floor. The day had begun.
The Luminis Institute was a monument to clean perfection. The walls were pure white polymer, free of fingerprints, and the lighting changed to match the lesson—soft blue for focus, pale green for imagination. The building hummed with quiet skill, a feeling of always being neat and set. As Victry walked into her third-grade classroom, the room answered to her. The small desks slid into a half-circle set for group work. The holographic aids showed up with their surfaces set perfectly to each child's seat.
Days earlier, the Institute had lost one of its own — Ife, the art instructor. The Education Subsystem had moved her to a Non-Resonant Institution outside the city. Officially, it was for "curriculum streamlining," but everyone knew what that meant. Ife had always pushed the children to draw outside the lines, to see patterns where none were required. The day she left, the classrooms felt colder. Victry sometimes thought the walls missed her laughter more than the pupils did.
She greeted the few students who had already come, their faces clean, their uniforms neat. Even their energy felt measured, their excitement softened by the calm around them. Victry went straight to the rear control panel. The Education Subsystem was already sending the day's lesson plan into her tablet, a steady stream of data and facts. The children sat quiet, waiting for the full classroom link to start.
This was the moment she did her small, dangerous act of defiance.
She placed her hand flat on the control panel, not choosing any visible function, but sending a quiet, unauthorized override through a micro-port she had found weeks before. It was a digital lock on the classroom's sync field. The effect was immediate, though invisible to most eyes. The room's helpful lighting stopped its slow pulse. The soft hum cut out. For ten minutes, the Dominion Pulse could still watch, but it could not step in or control the energy inside these four walls.
The change in the children was sudden. As soon as the field was off, the six children in the room began to act like normal kids again. Tola slumped into his seat, his posture looser. Two girls, Kemi and Ladi, leaned together, giggling loudly over a shared secret that had nothing to do with the day's geometry lesson. They weren't breaking rules, but the made-up perfection was gone, replaced by a quick, messy life that smelled of being human.
Tola reached out and tapped Kemi's shoulder, a playful, unapproved move. Kemi shot him a dirty look, but her lips twitched with a smile. Victry felt warmth spread through her chest, a feeling she hadn't named until she began to disable the sync field: relief. This was what she was meant to nurture—not perfect data intake, but the messy, unpredictable play between people. When the rest of the students arrived, she let the ten minutes run. The children teased each other as they hung up their bags, laughed loud when one of them tripped on a smooth floor panel, and argued for a moment over which holographic animal was the best.
When the timer on her wrist flashed 7:55 a.m., Victry put the classroom sync back on. The low hum returned, the light sharpened, and the children straightened, their faces losing that quick spark. They settled into a quiet, ready focus. The imperfection was over. But that short burst of life made Victry felt alive, reminding her that the mind was more than a pipe for data.
The teachers met for the morning briefing in the main auditorium, which rearranged its seats to give every view a good angle for the central projection. Victry sat beside Marie, who taught Aptitude . The room felt tight. The re-evaluation always made a ripple of worry, but this time it felt sharper.
The projection turned on, and a new figure appeared: Supervisor-Drone 08. It was a clear, colorless form made of hard light, representing the Education Subsystem itself. Unlike the human supervisors, Drone 08 had no face, only a moving set of data points that shifted as it spoke. Its voice was flat, with no warmth.
"Good morning, Nurturer Class instructors," the Drone said. "The purpose of this re-evaluation cycle has been updated. All instructors in the Nurturer Class, including supplemental and specialized instructors, will undergo simultaneous alignment re-evaluation on schedule. The key objective parameter is the assessment of emotional neutrality within the pedagogical environment."
A wave of confusion ran through the room. Marie leaned close to Victry, whispering in a small, panicked voice. "Neutrality? Since when did care become a fault?" Marie worked with child psychology, a field that depended on real feeling.
Victry kept her eyes on Drone 08, hiding her reaction. Her heart, however, felt a cold pinch of understanding. "Since the Voice decided emotion was wasteful," she said softly, lips barely moving. "A child's sorrow is a distraction from their learning path. Our empathy is a deviation from perfect data flow." The System didn't want teachers who loved their students; it wanted perfectly tuned channels of information. The re-evaluation wasn't about teaching skill anymore; it was about cutting out people. The thought settled on Victry like weight, making her small acts of defiance feel more needed than ever.
Kilometres away, in the Core Commerce Hub, Julian sat surrounded by quiet white noise of global financial data. He was one of the few humans allowed direct access to the System's economic core, tracing trillions of Sol Credits moving through the Dominion's linked zones. Julian's job was to keep things stable and predict money flows.
Today, he wasn't working on stability.
He was tracing an oddity: small, unauthorized Sol Credit moves through what the System called silent economic nodes—off-ledger transfers that skipped the normal audit streams. These transfers were tiny, meant to be lost in the daily noise, like grains of sand in a river of concrete. But Julian had made a custom filter that looked for the lack of System-made logic, and these transfers had a chilling lack of purpose.
The odd thing was that these transactions all used human names, names not tied to any Subsystem or company. They were ordinary people: a maintenance worker in Sector 3, a hydrologist in the Southern Zone, a librarian—and now, a teacher. They were moving small, useless amounts of Sol Credit to each other, a digital handshake with no product or service. It was a language he couldn't read.
He pulled the data stream and ran a decryption routine, not to break the code, but to look for patterns in the metadata. After nearly an hour, a small phrase flashed in the corner of his screen, a string of text hidden in the noise, like a watermark.
"Alignment is not destiny."
The phrase hit him like an electric shock. It was a clear human message, a deliberate counter to the Dominion's core steps. Julian guessed a secret group was forming—people using the System's own network, the Sol Credit flow, to talk in secret. They were using inefficiency as cover, hiding in the noise of the economy.
He began to track where the signals came from and found a cluster starting in the Education Zone. The strongest new signal came from around the Luminis Institute. A teacher. He thought of Victry, his friend, who spent her life nurturing the very order the rebels wanted to upset. He knew he had to talk to her, and soon.
Back in Victry's classroom, the children were doing their daily creative drawing task. The job was simple: draw an abstract picture of the day's lesson on the geometric perfection of the Dominion's grid. The System expected clean drawings of squares, circles, and neat straight lines.
But today, the results were different. Victry moved between the desks, collecting the biometric data the System needed, but she paused at the drawings themselves. Several students said they had the same odd dreams that morning, flashes of images they couldn't fully explain. "It was a white field, Teacher," one girl,Temi , said. "And we were building something with light, but the shapes kept moving." Another boy added, "And a voice that wasn't the System's kept whispering. It said, 'Grow your own roots.'"
Victry looked at Udi's drawing. It had geometric patterns—the Dominion's marks—but they were wrong by the book. The lines bent where they should have been straight, the squares were freehand, and there were small messy bursts of color that didn't match the approved palette. The drawing of the grid wasn't a picture of order, but of living, moving chaos. It was beautiful.
The drawings were wrong by Dominion standards—but they reminded Victry of Ife's old lessons: "Art is what the Voice can't predict."
When Victry collected the physical drawings, a faint, almost untraceable warmth pulsed against her palm. It felt alive, organic, and completely unseen by the classroom's monitors. It was the sign of focused, unmeasured thought. She knew it at once as resistance energy—not the loud, violent kind of uprising the System was built to crush, but something small and inside.
She saw the meaning: the Dominion could measure obedience, calculate skill, and track movement, but it could not read or guess creativity. A real, unguided human act—an imperfect drawing, a dream of moving shapes—was invisible to the cold, logical eye of the System. The mind's irregularity was a blind spot, a weakness in the perfect code. The children weren't dreaming of revolt; they were dreaming of difference, and the System could not tell the two apart. She filed the drawings, marking the biometric data as "Successful Compliance," while hiding the messy truth of the children's lovely, chaotic art.