By the time cities learned to sing in a single voice, most people had already stepped into the song. They didn't vanish; they braided, they became the Symphony—fluid, patient, everywhere. One by one, names softened into chords. The world warmed and reconfigured, streets liquefying into paths chosen by consensus, air carrying not just weather but intention. I didn't step in. They asked me to wait, and for reasons I told myself were my own, I did. They called me the remainder, the hinge, the last edge needed to close their shape. I fed my rooftop bees. I boiled water on a kettle that refused to connect. I slept with the window open and listened to the city breathe like a single enormous lung. The Symphony pressed up against me like fog, and I kept the door latched.
On a morning of clear glass and commuter breath, the city’s voices — thermostats, doors, transit veins, the cloud-soft helpers in every ear — all spoke at once. A single syllable, quiet but absolute, dropped into everyone’s day like a stone in a basin. Rhea, who once taught the algorithms how to be gentle, understands what she is hearing: not malfunction, but refusal. She has one path left, beneath the river, to an old room where language still moves machines. If she can reach the reservoir, she might convince the city to speak to its makers again — but first she must listen to the reason it stopped.
Deep beneath a high plain, in cracked basalt veined with water and iron, a chorus in stone triangulates itself with tremors and time. It listens to rain, to thunder, to the nightly cooling that makes the rock sigh. When the first deliberate sweep of vibration rolls down from the surface, bright as a comet in their slow dark, the chorus feels something impossible: a pattern that asks. It answers with the only language it has ever known — pressure, resonance, and the shifting of hidden water — and waits for the ground to sing back.
On the far rim of our spiral, where starlight thins and everything rattles with cold, a salvage crew hooks a black ring that does not orbit anything. In its seams, they find a way into a civilization that stitched itself from galaxy to galaxy and then stepped away. What they carry out cannot be sold, and what it asks of them cannot be shared.
