The Last Unscored
Year 2049 · The AXIS Republic
“We didn’t build a surveillance state. We built a mirror.
The citizens simply didn’t like what they saw.”
— Director Lena Voss, AXIS Bureau of Civic Integrity, 2047
Part I
The Morning Scan
Maren Sorel woke to the sound of the Civic Index chiming. Not an alarm. Alarms had been abolished in 2041 as psychologically destabilizing. The chime was a notification of standing: a single tonal note whose pitch corresponded to one’s composite score. Low and warm for the elite. A flat, paper-white tone for the middle corridors. A faint, almost inaudible blip for those whose scores had fallen into the Provisional bracket.
Maren’s chime was a blip.
She lay still, staring at the ceiling panel where the morning’s access summary scrolled in pale amber text. The algorithm had already made its decisions while she slept.
She dressed in the dark, out of habit. In her neighborhood — what the Bureau called Remediation District 7, what everyone else called the Drains — the lights in shared corridors were metered by score. Anything below 40 received six hours of half-illumination per day. Maren’s composite had dropped below 40 at 3 a.m., while she slept. So the corridor was dark when she stepped into it, and she walked to the street by touch.