WEDNESDAY, 14:07
May 3rd, 2XXX | NovaHelix High
The hallway screen snaps on with a sharp crack.
"Student: Maya Ren. Immediate report to G.P.U. office."
A red downward arrow flashes beside her name.
Maya freezes beside me, fingers white on her bag strap. Her bracelet flips from white to crimson in a heartbeat.
Heads turn. Eyes catch on her wrist. Then drop fast to phones, shoes, locker doors. No one wants to get caught staring at the girl the system just tagged.
"It's probably just a glitch," she says, voice too high. "Just a bad update, right?"
I want to say yes. I want to tell her it'll be fine.
But we both know the truth: the G.P.U. doesn't glitch.
A silver drone drops from the ceiling. It stops in front of her, splashes cold white light across her wrist. One sharp flash. The smell of hot plastic. Then a blue mark burns into her skin, a tracker.
The drone slides away, LEDs blinking lazily.
Maya follows it. Quiet. Small. Her footsteps swallowed by carpet.
The screen updates:
"Student: Maya Ren. Resonance 3.0 → 2.85 | Instability detected."
Whispers spread like static. Another drop. Another warning.
I watch her disappear around the corner.
And I do nothing.
My name is Kai. I'm eighteen years old.
R: 3.90
Average tier
Not a star. Not a ghost. Just one of those faces you forget as soon as the bell rings.
On my bracelet, four numbers glow:
Social:3.5 - People talk to me, but no one follows.
Talent:4.2 - The system thinks I could be more.
Visibility: 3.9 - I exist, but I don't trend.
Impact: 4.0 - What I do matters a little, not enough to move anything big.
Average them out: R: 3.90
Clean. Boring. Safe.
The Unique Potential Generator, the G.P.U., tracks everyone. Every conversation. Every breath. Every micro-expression when you think no one's watching. It logs what we post on FluxLine, the only social network that matters, streaming across walls and lenses, never silent.
Every person has a Resonance.
Very High: legends, Amplifiers, the ones who bend rules
High: influence, protection, a voice that counts
Average: school, job, small apartment, small life
Low: constant monitoring, one mistake from vanishing
Zero: no record, no profile, no name in the system
The system isn't built to judge your heart. It's built to measure your impact.
If people react to you, boost you, obsess over you on FluxLine, your score moves. If they ignore you, you sink.
So I stay in the middle. Average. Low profile. Easy to forget.
At least, that was the plan.
The bell screams. The hallway empties, then fills again in waves.
That's when I see him.
A boy, maybe sixteen, sprints past me, wrist clamped to his chest like he's trying to shove his score back inside his body. His sneakers squeal. His breath tears.
His bracelet flashes red.
R: 2.1 - Low
Bad. At NovaHelix High, that number is a death sentence.
He's half-hidden behind a stairwell door now, pressed into the narrow space between hinge and wall, gulping air. His shoulders heave.
Two students with green bracelets stroll past, eyes flicking to every wrist they see. Their scores are High. Reporting a Low bumps your stats. FluxLine loves "responsible citizens." The G.P.U. loves them more.
My bracelet buzzes.
Anomaly detected | suggested action: REPORT
All I'd have to do is raise my hand. Point.
The cameras would handle the rest. The system would log it, maybe throw me a boost in Social or Impact. Clean notification. Number ticks up.
I've done it before. Stayed silent while someone got taken. Like Maya this morning.
The system called it "appropriate restraint."
My stomach still twists every time I think about it.
The boy looks straight at me.
His eyes shake, red at the edges, but there's more than fear. There's a tiny spark of hope, fragile as a match, like he's betting everything on the chance that I'm not like everyone else.
Time stretches.
I think about Maya's face when her bracelet turned red.
I think about how I did nothing.
Slowly, deliberately, I lower my hand.
No one reacts. Or if they do, they pretend they didn't see. Silence is survival here.
I step closer. His bracelet vibrates so hard I can feel it when I grab his wrist.
"This way," I whisper.
We slip into an old maintenance corridor. Flickering lights. Stained walls. The air tastes like dust and metal.
I swipe my tech club card on a dusty panel. The reader beeps, blinks green. Running sound and lights for school events doesn't pay, but it buys backdoor privileges.
The lock clicks.
"Go," I tell him.
He bolts through, footsteps hammering down the service stairs, fading into concrete.
The door swings shut.
No alarm. No voice over speakers. No drone.
My bracelet vibrates once. Deeper than before. Like a mechanical heartbeat.
I look down.
R: 3.90 → 4.00
Impact: 4.0 → 4.4 (minor bonus)
The G.P.U. registered what I did.
And instead of punishing me…
It bumped my score.
Maybe it logged it as citizen intervention, a good little cog nudging a lower-rated unit back toward compliance. Or maybe the algorithm doesn't care why I moved, only that the moment generated enough attention to count as "impact."
It doesn't feel like a reward.
It feels like a spotlight turning in my direction.
By the time I reach our building, the sky is settling into dark blue. The bus ride home blurs past in a rattle of plastic seats and stale air, my bracelet pinging the student discount at every checkpoint. The line skims past the polished core with clean glass and sharp neon, then sinks back into our sector where the ads glitch, the concrete peels, and the street lamps flicker like they're waiting for permission to die.
Our apartment door takes too long to unlock, a hesitant orange blink before green. Inside, the air smells of instant noodles and recycled ventilation.
Mom comes in later, uniform stained with grease. She glances at her bracelet on reflex.
"Look: 4.22. If I keep this up, we might qualify for a better block."
I lean against the counter. "Yeah. That'd be nice."
We both know it's not that simple. The system doesn't care about quiet effort. It cares about what can be seen, measured, replayed.
My brother Paul is sunk into the couch, a bowl of noodles abandoned. He used to be big on FluxArena, the virtual arena for high-Resonance players.
At his peak: 5.89. His matches went viral. People turned his moves into gifs.
Now his bracelet shows: 3.64
He barely looks up when I step in. Even picking up chopsticks looks like work.
Mom walks past. For a second, her bracelet syncs with his. Both screens flare white.
Unstable behavior detected. Sentinels notified.
She freezes. The fridge hums. A drone whines past the window. Then she exhales, shoulders dropping.
"They're watching him again," she says quietly. "If he drops much lower…"
She doesn't finish. She doesn't have to.
Sentinels aren't a rumor. You see them sometimes. Broad silhouettes, helmets down, armor that sighs when they move, plugged into the G.P.U. They don't chase pickpockets. They just show up when a score crosses a line the system doesn't like.
People say they don't come for what you did.
They come for what you've become.
Later, I'm parked by the window, lights off. Outside, NovaHelix's towers blink like server racks, every lit window another pixel in a wall of data. No stars. Just drones drifting through black sky.
My bracelet buzzes.
[Behavior recorded - +0.4 Impact]
I stare at the notification. The G.P.U. logged what I did. No punishment. No alert. Just a quiet stat boost.
I pull up my status.
Social: 3.5 | Talent: 4.2 | Visibility: 3.9 | Impact: 4.4
R: 4.00. Exactly
For the first time, my score rounds up instead of hovering below the next tier.
It should feel good.
It doesn't.
It feels… off. Not like I earned something. More like something just closed a hand around me.
I lift my head and stare through the glass. A neon sign flickers above bins, smearing pink light across walls. Steam curls from vents.
That's when I see him.
Someone standing in the dark between two buildings. Too still. Too focused. No phone. No shifting weight. Almost no movement.
His head tilts up. Toward our floor. Toward my window.
My chest tightens.
I look for the familiar glow of a bracelet. Green, yellow, red. Some trace of the G.P.U.
Nothing.
No band. No light. No numbers.
Just absence.
My bracelet shivers once against my skin. No message. Like the system wants to say something and chokes on it.
I don't move. I barely blink.
Can he see me? Does he know what I did today? Is it an accident he's here now, on the exact day my score ticks up to 4.00? Or in a city where every breath is logged… do accidents even exist?
I press my forehead to the glass. The alley is empty. The silhouette is gone, swallowed by blind spots between neon and concrete.
For a heartbeat, I want to believe I imagined him.
But my wrist is still warm where the bracelet shook.
And one thought loops in my head:
If the system is supposed to see everything… who the hell can still slip past it?
I glance down at my score.
R: 4.00
I think about Maya, dragged to the G.P.U. office while I watched.
I think about the boy I saved.
I think about how one got me nothing and the other got me rewarded.
Suddenly, being "Average" doesn't feel like a safe middle anymore.
It feels like the exact point where something has started to take aim.
END OF CHAPTER 1