The walk home from school was usually a slow, rhythmic transition. I'd watch the laborers lifting steel girders as if they were made of balsa wood, my mind drifting in the same "Harmony" the teachers preached.
Then, my phone vibrated.
I pulled it from my pocket. A single, anonymous message sat on the screen: Emergency. Come home.
The "Harmony" shattered. A sudden, cold pressure spiked in my chest—not the slow ache I was used to, but a jagged, electric panic. I didn't think. I ran.
I arrived to a house that was too white, too clean, and far too quiet.
The door was open. Inside, a Doctor stood in the center of our living room. He didn't look like a man who had just lost a patient; he looked like a technician who had just finished a routine inspection.
"It was a sudden heart failure," the Doctor said. His voice was smooth, devoid of any jagged edges of grief. "Rare, but possible in a system as complex as ours."
My father merely nodded. He stood like a statue, his face a mask of calm acceptance that made my skin crawl. Beside him, my sister was a wreck of sobbing gasps, clutching at the air as if she could pull our mother back into the room.
I walked past them.
She was lying on the sofa. She looked peaceful—too peaceful. Her skin was pale, her hands folded over her chest in a way that looked curated. It didn't look like she had fought for life. It looked like she had simply... switched off.
Almost like she expected this, I thought. The idea was a poison, seeping into my mind.
Night fell, but the darkness brought no rest. The house felt hollow, the warmth of her humming replaced by a silence that roared in my ears. I sat alone in the living room, the shadows stretching long and distorted across the floor.
I looked at the wall—solid concrete, reinforced to withstand strong forces like ours
I pressed my palm against it. I didn't use my shoulder or my weight. I just pushed.
Crr-ack.
Spiderweb fractures bloomed from under my hand, the stone groaning as it yielded to my touch. I pulled back. My hand was uninjured. Not a scratch. Not a bruise.
I stared at my palm in the moonlight. I felt no pride in the strength. I felt only emptiness.
I went to my room and tried to sleep, but the moment my eyes closed, the world vanished. My body tensed, my muscles locking like gears grinding against metal. Sweat poured down my face as I fought an invisible war in the dark, mumbling words I didn't recognize, my face twisting in a panic I couldn't explain.
I jolted awake, gasping for air that felt too thin to breathe. I stumbled back into the living room, the silence finally becoming too much to bear.
"WHY?!" I screamed. The word tore from my throat, raw and jagged, shattering the mandated peace of the house. "WHY?!"
No one answered. The walls didn't echo. The house just swallowed the sound.
I looked out the window. Outside, the city was a graveyard of sleeping, happy people. High above the street, a surveillance light rotated with a slow, mechanical hum.
It stopped.
The beam of light tilted, cutting through the darkness of the night, and pointed directly at our house.
I didn't move. I realized then that in a world of perfect harmony, a scream is a target.
The morning light was offensive. It hit the floor of the living room in the same perfect, golden rectangles as every other morning, as if the screaming and the surveillance beam from the night before had never happened.
I sat at the breakfast table. My Father didn't look up from his tablet. My Sister ate her cereal with a mechanical rhythm, her eyes red-rimmed but her expression otherwise blank.
"You'll be late," my Father said.
His voice wasn't harsh. It wasn't caring. It was a flat line of dialogue in a play he had performed a thousand times.
"Okay," I replied.
I looked at my hands. They were steady, but the "pressure" in my chest felt like a coiled snake. I grabbed my bag and left.
The walk to school was a fever dream of "Harmony." I saw a man lift a steel beam that should have crushed him, and for the first time, I didn't see strength. I saw a puppet show.
"All students are reminded that routine health evaluations will be conducted this week. Attendance is mandatory."
The intercom crackled. The sound made my skin crawl. When it was my turn, I walked into a room that was too white, too clean—a precursor to the nightmares I didn't yet know were coming.
The Technician was a woman with a smile that felt like it had been painted on with a brush. She didn't look at my eyes; she looked at the sensors as she attached them to my arm.
"Relax," she said. Her voice was too quick, too practiced.
As the machine began to hum, the sensation was intrusive. It wasn't just checking my pulse; the vibration felt like it was searching for something deep inside my marrow. The hum grew louder, a buzzing that vibrated my teeth.
Suddenly, the machine hesitated.
The screen flickered. For a heartbeat, the smooth green line turned into a jagged, violent purple. The Technician's smile didn't drop, but it stiffened. Her fingers twitched over the tablet.
"It stopped," I whispered.
"It recalibrated," she snapped, her voice losing its sweetness for a split second. She tapped the screen, and the green line returned, lying to us both. "You're fine. Move along."
As I stepped away, I caught a glimpse of her face in the reflection of the glass. The smile was gone. She was typing a code into her tablet with a frantic, trembling speed.
I wasn't "fine." I was a variable they couldn't solve.