Kazantskis Wave - Chapters One and Two
Chapters One and Two
Chapter 1: Moon Hares
The rabbits came again in the blue hour before dawn, padding silently through Emily's dreams on velvet paws. They moved with purpose through the sleeping city, seeking those who had surrendered their hopes to the banal machinery of survival. Tonight they found a woman hunched over a factory workstation, her hands assembling the same components she'd built for seven years, her eyes vacant with the particular emptiness of abandoned dreams.
One rabbit approached from the left, the other from the right. Without ceremony, they bit her—not viciously, but with the gentle insistence of truth. The woman's eyes filled with recognition, then tears, as she remembered the songs she'd once written, the stages she'd imagined herself upon, the music that had lived in her heart before the system taught her that survival trumped everything.
Emily Rogers woke to the sound of her biowatch's morning chime, the dream fading like smoke even as she grasped for its edges. The rabbits never spoke, but she always understood their message: Remember what you were before you became what you needed to be.
Her pod apartment in Nueva California's Sector 7 measured exactly 200 square feet—the algorithmic optimum for single-occupant housing efficiency. The walls displayed a rotating selection of "culturally enriching" murals chosen by the Citystate's Aesthetic Council, currently featuring a pastel sunset over wind turbines. Emily had learned to ignore them years ago.
She swung her legs over the side of her sleeping platform and reached for the pill dispenser mounted beside her biowatch charging station. Two Haliprot tablets tumbled into her palm, pale blue and slightly sweet when she dry-swallowed them. The medication helped with her Derringer's Syndrome episodes—those disconcerting moments when her mind seemed to disconnect from her body, leaving her staring at nothing while precious minutes ticked away.
Her biowatch chirped softly as it finished its overnight diagnostic. Emily glanced at the display: 847 UBIST remaining in her account, heart rate slightly elevated, stress hormones within acceptable parameters. The device had been monitoring her sleep patterns too, noting the recurring dream cycle that her neurologist Dr. Chen had classified as "processing anxiety related to occupational dissatisfaction." Emily had stopped mentioning the rabbits after that diagnosis.
The bathroom alcove's mirror reflected a face that looked older than her twenty-eight years. Dark circles shadowed brown eyes that had once sparkled with musical ambitions. Her hair, regulation shoulder-length for factory workers, showed the first threads of premature gray. She splashed water on her face and dressed in her daily uniform: gray coveralls with the Nueva California productivity logo, regulation soft-soled shoes designed to minimize fatigue during twelve-hour shifts.
Before leaving, she slipped on her earbuds and selected her morning playlist. Sun Ra's cosmic jazz filled her head as she stepped into the corridor—saxophone notes that seemed to bend reality, rhythms that suggested worlds beyond the sterile efficiency of the pod complex. She had discovered Sun Ra in the cultural archives during her mandatory continuing education hours, and something in his philosophy of music as liberation had resonated in places she hadn't known still existed within her.
"Space is the place," Sun Ra's voice whispered as Emily descended in the building's central lift. The phrase had become her private mantra, a reminder that consciousness could travel beyond the boundaries of circumstance. Even if her body was trapped in Nueva California's algorithmic paradise, her mind could soar among the stars.
The transit pod to the factory district glided silently along its magnetic track, passing through zones of increasing industrial density. Emily watched the landscape blur past—vertical farms giving way to manufacturing complexes, their surfaces gleaming with the peculiar sheen of self-repairing materials developed in the early 2080s. Dreadnaught prototypes stood at attention outside the major facilities, fifteen-foot-tall humanoid forms with the Soft Monkey logo cheerfully emblazoned on their chest plates.
The irony wasn't lost on her that she spent her days building components for these same machines. Neural scanner arrays, specifically—delicate circuitry that allowed the Dreadnaughts to monitor human brainwave patterns for signs of antisocial behavior or psychological instability. Emily had always found it strange that the scanner arrays required such precise calibration. Dr. Chen had explained that the human brain's complexity demanded sophisticated monitoring to identify the subtle neural signatures associated with conditions like Derringer's Syndrome.
The Ito-Nakamura Robotics facility sprawled across twelve acres of Nueva California's industrial sector, its modular design allowing for rapid reconfiguration as production demands shifted. Emily badged in through the employee entrance, her biowatch synchronizing with the facility's tracking system to record her arrival at precisely 0700 hours.
"Morning, Em." Marcus Chen—no relation to her neurologist—looked up from his workstation in the neural assembly bay. His regulation coveralls were already stained with the faint blue residue of the conductive gel used in scanner calibration. "You catch the latest Soft Monkey update last night?"
Emily shook her head as she settled at her own station. The assembly area hummed with the quiet efficiency of automated systems and human precision working in harmony. "Was working on something at home."
"New dietary guidelines. Apparently, they've optimized the nutritional algorithms again." Marcus held up his breakfast—a precisely molded protein bar in an unnaturally vibrant shade of green. "This one's supposed to boost cognitive function by twelve percent."
"Tastes like it boosts something," Emily muttered, earning a laugh from Marcus. She activated her workstation's holographic display, which immediately populated with the day's assembly queue. Seventeen neural scanner arrays awaited completion, each one requiring the installation of 347 individual components in a sequence that demanded both steady hands and unwavering concentration.
Emily selected the first array from the queue and began the familiar ritual of assembly. Her hands moved with practiced precision, guided by muscle memory honed through thousands of repetitions. Insert microprocessor, apply conductive gel, secure with titanium fasteners. The work was meditative in its repetition, allowing her mind to drift while her fingers maintained their careful dance.
Sun Ra's music still echoed in her thoughts as she worked. She imagined herself on stage with his Arkestra, her fingers dancing across synthesizer keys instead of robot components. The crowd would sway to cosmic rhythms, their consciousness expanding beyond the mundane constraints of daily survival. She would be Emily the musician, not Emily the factory worker—a creator of beauty rather than a cog in the machinery of control.
The neural scanner arrays were marvels of engineering, she had to admit. Each one contained processing power that would have qualified as artificial intelligence in the pre-Federation era. They could detect and analyze brainwave patterns in real-time, identifying everything from aggressive tendencies to the subtle neural fluctuations associated with psychic phenomena. Not that psychic phenomena existed—that was old-world superstition, according to the educational materials. But the scanners monitored for such things anyway, just in case citizens suffered from delusions about possessing supernatural abilities.
Emily was halfway through installing the quantum resonance matrix in her seventh array when the familiar sensation began to creep up her spine. It started as a tingling in her fingertips, a slight disconnection between intention and action. She tried to focus on the delicate work before her, but the feeling intensified—a pulling sensation, as if something were trying to draw her consciousness away from her body.
She gripped the assembly table, fighting the onset of what Dr. Chen had classified as a Derringer's episode. Not now, she thought desperately. Not during a critical assembly procedure. The neural scanner array in front of her represented 3,000 UBIST in materials and labor. A mistake during installation could mean disciplinary action, reduced wages, or worse.
But the pulling sensation grew stronger, accompanied by a strange doubling of vision. Emily found herself looking at the assembly bay from two perspectives simultaneously—her normal view from her workstation, and another view from somewhere above and to the left, as if she were watching herself work from across the room. The second perspective seemed more real somehow, more immediate than the world around her physical body.
"Emily?" Marcus's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Emily, you okay?"
She tried to respond, tried to maintain her grip on the neural scanner array, but her consciousness was drifting further from her body. The assembly bay faded to gray around the edges while the alternate perspective grew brighter and more detailed. She could see herself standing motionless at her workstation, eyes fixed on nothing, hands frozen in mid-motion over the delicate components.
Time became elastic during the episodes. Emily had learned to recognize the sensation—seconds stretching into subjective minutes while her body remained locked in temporal stasis. She could observe the scene around her with perfect clarity, but couldn't influence it. She watched Marcus rise from his station, watched him approach her motionless form with growing concern, watched their supervisor Janet emerge from her office with a expression that promised trouble.
The episodes always ended the same way—with a sharp snapping sensation as her consciousness slammed back into her body like a rubber band released at full stretch. Emily gasped, blinking rapidly as the assembly bay snapped back into focus around her. Marcus was standing directly in front of her, his hand on her shoulder, while Janet loomed behind him with her ever-present tablet.
"Six minutes and forty-three seconds," Janet announced, consulting her tablet with clinical detachment. "That's the longest episode on record for this facility."
Emily looked down at her hands, still poised over the neural scanner array. The quantum resonance matrix hung from her right hand, its delicate crystal structure intact but no longer properly aligned with the assembly framework. She had been in the middle of a precision installation when the episode struck, and now the entire array would need to be recalibrated.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice hoarse. "I took my medication this morning, I don't know why—"
"The medication doesn't prevent episodes," Janet interrupted, tapping notes into her tablet. "According to your medical files, Haliprot only reduces their frequency and intensity. Dr. Chen's reports indicate your condition is progressing despite treatment."
Marcus stepped back, his expression troubled. Emily had worked beside him for three years without a single episode this severe. She could see the concern in his eyes, but also something else—the subtle distancing that occurred whenever someone's medical condition threatened to disrupt the algorithmic precision of workplace efficiency.
"The array will need complete recalibration," Janet continued. "That's 3,000 UBIST in materials, plus labor costs for the repair technician. Your personal account will be debited accordingly."
Emily's stomach dropped. Her biowatch display showed 847 UBIST in her account—barely enough to cover basic living expenses for the week. A 3,000 UBIST deduction would put her deep into negative territory, triggering automatic enrollment in Nueva California's debt rehabilitation program.
"Janet, please," Emily began, but the supervisor was already scrolling through regulation text on her tablet.
"Nueva California Workplace Safety Statute 847.3 requires immediate termination of employment for any worker whose medical condition poses a risk to expensive equipment or fellow employees." Janet's voice carried no emotion, as if she were reading weather data rather than ending someone's livelihood. "Your final paycheck will be processed through the standard channels, minus the deduction for damaged materials."
The words hit Emily like physical blows. Termination. Debt rehabilitation. The cascade of consequences that would follow from this single episode—the loss of her pod apartment, the reduction in her Wave network as associates distanced themselves from economic liability, the spiral into Nueva California's underclass of the medically unemployable.
She gathered her personal items—a small framed photo of her parents, a worn notebook where she occasionally sketched musical notation, her spare pair of earbuds—and placed them in the regulation departure bag that Janet produced from somewhere. Marcus watched the process with obvious discomfort but didn't speak. Emily understood; any expression of solidarity with a terminated employee could be interpreted as questioning the algorithmic justice of the workplace efficiency system.
The walk from the assembly bay to the employee exit seemed to stretch forever. Other workers glanced up from their stations as Emily passed, their expressions carefully neutral. Word of her episode would spread through the facility within hours, becoming another cautionary tale about the dangers of untreated Derringer's Syndrome.
Outside, Nueva California's afternoon sun cast sharp shadows between the manufacturing complexes. Emily stood on the sidewalk, departure bag in hand, watching the transit pods glide silently along their magnetic tracks. Her biowatch chirped with a message from the facility's human resources system: Employment terminated. Final compensation: 847 UBIST. Account balance after deductions: -2,153 UBIST. Please report to Nueva California Economic Rehabilitation Center within 72 hours.
Emily Rogers, former factory worker, current economic liability, closed her eyes and listened to the hum of the city around her. Somewhere in her mind, Sun Ra's saxophone still played cosmic melodies, promising spaces beyond the algorithmic precision of survival. But space, she was learning, was a luxury she could no longer afford.
Chapter 2: The Wave
The crash happened during another episode, seventeen minutes after Emily had started her drive home.
She remembered pulling away from the Ito-Nakamura facility, her hands gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled determination. The personal transport pod she'd managed to purchase three years ago—a modest vehicle that represented months of careful UBIST savings—hummed quietly as she navigated through Nueva California's traffic management system. The automated guidance should have prevented any serious accident, but the system couldn't account for a driver whose consciousness periodically vacated her body.
The pulling sensation began as she approached the intersection of Industrial Boulevard and residential Sector 7. Emily felt the familiar doubling of vision, the strange disconnection that preceded every episode. She tried to pull over, tried to activate the emergency override that would transfer control to the pod's automated systems, but her hands were no longer responding to her commands.
From her detached perspective, she watched her physical body sit rigidly behind the wheel while her pod continued forward at the legal speed limit of 25 kilometers per hour. The traffic management system was sending course corrections to her vehicle, but those corrections required driver acknowledgment to execute. Her unresponsive body couldn't provide that acknowledgment.
The Neurocratic patrol vehicle—a gleaming white sedan with the Soft Monkey logo prominently displayed on its doors—was conducting a routine efficiency inspection at the intersection. Emily's pod, failing to respond to automated guidance, struck the patrol vehicle's rear quarter panel with a grinding crunch of composite materials.
The impact snapped Emily's consciousness back into her body with jarring suddenness. Her head jerked forward, stopped by the safety restraint system, while status displays lit up across her pod's dashboard. Collision detected. Emergency services notified. Please remain in vehicle.
Two Neurocratic officers emerged from the patrol vehicle, their uniforms crisp and efficient. The senior officer, a woman with sergeant's stripes, approached Emily's pod with a tablet already in hand. Her partner, younger and clearly new to patrol duty, examined the damage to their vehicle with obvious concern.
"License and registration," the sergeant said as Emily's pod door retracted automatically. Her voice carried the neutral authority of someone accustomed to dealing with citizens at their worst moments. "I need you to exit the vehicle slowly and keep your hands visible."
Emily complied, her legs unsteady as she stood on the sidewalk. The intersection was busy with afternoon commuter traffic, and she could feel the attention of passing drivers. A collision with a Neurocratic vehicle would be recorded in her permanent civil record, accessible to employers and landlords.
"Hello officer, I.. uh.. I had a medical episode," Emily said, hoping to explain before the officers reached their own conclusions. "I have Derringer's Syndrome. Have you heard of it? A new thing…It's documented in my medical files."
The sergeant consulted her tablet, scrolling through Emily's records with practiced efficiency. "Emily Rogers, age 28, employed at Ito-Nakamura Robotics until—" She paused, eyebrows rising slightly. "Until this afternoon. Recent termination due to medical condition."
The younger officer finished his examination of the patrol vehicle and approached with his own tablet. "Damage assessment complete, Sergeant Kim. Rear quarter panel will need replacement, plus recalibration of the emergency response systems. Total estimated cost: 4,800 UBIST."
Emily's stomach clenched aggressively. Added to the 3,000 UBIST deduction from her factory termination, she was looking at nearly 8,000 UBIST in debt—an amount that would take years to repay through Nueva California's financial rehabilitation program.
"Ms. Rogers," Sergeant Kim said, "I'm required to inform you that this collision will result in automatic deduction from your UBIST account to cover damages. Do you understand the charges being levied?"
"I… understand," Emily said, though understanding and accepting were very different things. "Is there—can I appeal the charges? The episode wasn't voluntary. I tried to stop."
"Medical episodes that result in property damage or public safety risks are the responsibility of the individual," the sergeant recited. "Nueva California Civil Code Section 234.7. Your biowatch medical alerts show no attempt to activate emergency protocols prior to the collision."
Emily wanted to explain that she'd tried to activate those protocols, that the episode had overtaken her too quickly. But she had learned that explanations rarely influenced algorithmic justice. The codes were clear, the liability unambiguous.
The younger officer was completing his report when Emily's biowatch chimed with an urgent financial alert. Her account balance had just dropped to -7,153 UBIST, with a mandatory payment plan automatically enrolled. The rehabilitation program would deduct 70% of any future earnings until the debt was resolved.
Standing on the sidewalk beside her damaged pod, Emily felt the full weight of Nueva California's efficiency-based society pressing down on her. In the span of a single afternoon, she had gone from productive citizen to economic liability. The transformation was seamless, algorithmic, and utterly without appeal.
"Your pod will be towed to the municipal impound," Sergeant Kim informed her. "You can retrieve it once you've demonstrated financial capability to maintain and insure the vehicle."
Emily watched as the tow vehicle arrived, its mechanical arms lifting her modest pod onto its transport bed. Three years of savings, gone. Her primary means of transportation, gone. Her economic stability, gone. All because her consciousness had a tendency to wander away from her body at inconvenient moments.
Emily Rogers was prone to zone out.
The officers completed their documentation and departed, leaving Emily alone at the intersection with nothing but her departure bag from the factory and a debt that would define her foreseeable future. She activated her biowatch's transit app, requesting a ride to her pod apartment, but the system declined her request due to insufficient funds for the fare.
Emily, crestfallen, began walking.
Nueva California's residential sectors were designed with pedestrian traffic in mind, but the distances were calibrated for occasional walking rather than daily necessity. Emily's pod apartment was seven kilometers from the collision site, a journey that would take nearly two hours on foot. Her biowatch tracked every step, automatically calculating the caloric expenditure and adjusting her recommended dinner portion accordingly.
As she walked, Emily found herself thinking about the dream that had started her day—the rabbits moving through the sleeping city, seeking those who had abandoned their dreams to the machinery of survival. The woman they had found tonight would be herself, hunched over an assembly line that no longer existed, her hands empty of both work and music.
The irony was bitter. She had spent years building components for the very surveillance systems that now monitored her financial collapse. Every neural scanner array she had assembled was potentially being used to track citizens like her—those whose medical conditions made them economic liabilities.
By the time Emily reached her pod apartment, the afternoon sun was setting behind Nueva California's precisely planned skyline. She pressed her palm to the door scanner, half-expecting it to deny her access due to her debt status, but the mechanism recognized her biometrics and admitted her to the building.
Her apartment felt smaller than usual, as if the walls had closed in during her absence. The Aesthetic Council's rotating mural now displayed a cheerful scene of citizens working together in harmony, their faces bright with the satisfaction of contributing to collective prosperity. Emily turned away from the image and sat heavily on her sleeping platform.
Her biowatch chimed again—a message from the Nueva California Economic Rehabilitation Center requesting her appearance within 72 hours for debt counseling and employment reassignment. The message included a helpful link to "Managing Financial Setbacks: A Citizen's Guide to Economic Recovery," which Emily deleted without reading.
She was staring at her biowatch display, watching her negative balance blink insistently, when she noticed the Wave button. The distinctive wave-shaped icon sat in the corner of her screen, softly pulsing with a gentle blue light. She had never activated the Wave system before—her factory job had provided sufficient income to avoid needing community assistance.
But Emily no longer had a factory job. She no longer had transportation, savings, or economic stability. She was precisely the kind of citizen the Wave system was designed to help.
Emily had always found the Wave's social mechanics slightly uncomfortable. The idea of broadcasting her financial need to her entire social network seemed somehow degrading, an admission of failure in Nueva California's meritocratic system. But degradation was a luxury she could simply no longer afford.
She pressed the Wave button.
Instead of the standard community aid interface, her biowatch screen went dark for several seconds. Then text appeared, stark white letters against a black background:
Follow if you want to know why you Zone.
Below the message was a set of coordinates—latitude and longitude numbers that appeared to reference a location in Nueva California's abandoned transit sector. Emily stared at the screen, wondering if her biowatch had malfunctioned. This wasn't how the Wave system was supposed to work.
She tried to access the message again, but it had vanished. Her biowatch now displayed the standard low-balance warning and debt counseling reminders. No trace of the mysterious coordinates remained in her message history.
Emily sat in the gathering darkness of her pod apartment, listening to the quiet hum of the building's environmental systems. The coordinates were probably a malfunction, a glitch in her biowatch's software brought on by the stress of the day's events. But something about the message resonated with a deep part of her mind—the same part that generated her dreams of moon rabbits and responded to Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.
Follow if you want to know why you Zone.
The episodes that had destroyed her life today—were they really just symptoms of Derringer's Syndrome? Dr. Chen had explained the condition as a neural disorder, a malfunction in the brain's attention management systems. But Emily had never felt like her episodes were malfunctions. During those moments of disconnection, she felt more aware than usual, as if she were seeing reality from a broader perspective.
She activated her apartment's information terminal and called up the coordinates on Nueva California's mapping system. The location was in the old transit sector, a network of underground tunnels and stations that had been abandoned when the Citystate's magnetic pod system was implemented. The area was technically off-limits to citizens, though Emily knew that enforcement was minimal in the unused sections.
Her biowatch chimed with another message, this one from her great-uncle Josh Phillips. Emily smiled despite her circumstances—Josh was one of the few people who consistently ignored Nueva California's communication protocols, sending rambling messages at odd hours about topics that ranged from historical trivia to barely coherent conspiracy theories. Typical water sign, she thought to herself.
Em—heard about your trouble through the family network. Got something that might interest you, given your recent medical adventures. Stop by tomorrow if you can. And don't believe everything the doctors tell you about your condition. Some things they don't want people to know. —JP
Emily stared at the message, wondering how Josh had learned about her termination so quickly. The family Wave network would have notified him of her activation, but the specific details of her medical episodes weren't included in those notifications.
She was still pondering the message when her apartment's door chimed. Emily wasn't expecting visitors—her social circle was limited to work colleagues who would now be distancing themselves from her economic liability. She activated the door's security display and saw a young man in delivery uniform holding a package.
"Delivery for Emily Rogers," he said when she opened the door. "From Josh Phillips."
The package was small, wrapped in brown paper with her name written in Josh's distinctive handwriting. Emily signed for the delivery and closed the door, wondering how her great-uncle had managed to send something so quickly.
Inside the package was a bound manuscript, perhaps two hundred pages of yellowed paper covered in typewritten text. The title page read: The Soft Monkey: A Novel by Nicolas Nahum.
A handwritten note from Josh was clipped to the first page: Found this in my papers. Thought you might find it interesting, given current events. Pay attention to the parts about Window. —JP
Emily had never heard of Nicolas Nahum, but something about the manuscript's title sent a chill down her spine. The Soft Monkey was the beloved AI mascot that governed the Neurocratic Federation, the cheerful cartoon figure that delivered policy updates and economic guidance to citizens across all five Citystates.
She opened the manuscript to a random page and began reading:
"The Window system monitored every citizen's soul through microscopic changes in their biological signatures. What the population didn't understand was that Window wasn't measuring their health—it was cataloging their dreams, their fears.. The few individuals who showed signs of genuine psychic ability were quietly eliminated, their deaths attributed to medical conditions that existed only in Window's databases."
Emily's hands trembled as she read. The passage described a fictional surveillance system that sounded disturbingly similar to the biowatch network that monitored every citizen in the Neurocratic Federation. But this manuscript was obviously old—the paper was yellowed, the typewriter font indicating it had been written decades before the Federation's formation.
She flipped to the copyright page and found a date that made her stomach clench: 1987. This novel had been written over a century ago, long before the Civil War of 2055, long before the Neurocratic Federation existed.
Emily spent the next several hours reading fragments of Nicolas Nahum's novel, each page revealing more disturbing parallels to her current reality. Window's methods of identifying and suppressing psychic abilities were nearly identical to the biowatch monitoring system. The fictional government's use of a friendly cartoon mascot to deliver oppressive policies matched the Federation's use of Soft Monkey fortuitously.
Most unsettling were the passages about citizens who experienced "temporal displacement events"—episodes where their consciousness seemed to separate from their bodies and observe reality from alternate perspectives. In Nahum's novel, these episodes were signs of emerging psychic abilities that the government desperately wanted to suppress.
By the time Emily finished reading, Nueva California's night cycle had dimmed the city to its energy-efficient evening glow. Her biowatch showed 0347 hours, and she had to report to the Economic Rehabilitation Center in less than two days.
She set the manuscript aside and lay back on her sleeping platform, staring at the ceiling. The coordinates from her Wave activation were still vivid in her memory, as was the message: Follow if you want to know why you Zone.
Emily closed her eyes and tried to sleep willfully, but her mind kept returning to Nicolas Nahum's novel and its impossible predictions about a surveillance state that hadn't existed when it was written. Tomorrow she would visit Josh Phillips and demand answers about the manuscript. Tomorrow she would decide whether to follow mysterious coordinates to an abandoned part of the city.
Tonight, she would dream of moon rabbits and wonder if her episodes were really symptoms of a disorder, or signs of something else entirely.
In the distance, a Dreadnaught patrol moved silently through Nueva California's streets, its neural scanners sweeping for signs of antisocial behavior and psychological instability.
Part of a forthcoming novel and concept album, Kazantski’s Wave