Forbidden Code

Chapter One Year: 2045 The sun rose like it always did—perfect and artificial, filtered through the synthetic climate dome that kept Cape City at a tidy 22 degrees while everything outside the city was in a snow filled winter. I stood at my window, watching it glow against glass towers, knowing full well I should feel grateful. But I didn't. Not really. My apartment adjusted itself to me before I'd even spoken. The lights shifted, the air purifiers whispered to life, the walls changed color to "soothing ocean" because, apparently, my biometric scan read me as "mildly distressed." Again. Everything in my life worked flawlessly. My hydration pod dispensed the exact mineral balance I needed. My protein strip tasted like banana bread this week—all from my own randomized setting. We could take the satisfier pills, but they made me a bit nauseous, and I still wanted to feel like I was eating. The smartweave suit wrapped around my body with clinical precision, the selected peach suit complimented my olive skin tone. It was all so efficient, so curated... so empty. I moved through the motions like I always did. Get ready. Smile. Engage. Crush metrics. Be a good citizen. A good product of the Unified Dominion. I always thought that to be a completely cliché name for what society is now. One government, one world. I hardly remember a time when it wasn't this way. Every day felt like a rerun of a life I didn't remember choosing. The transit pod slid along its track without a bump. Outside, the world looked like a utopian simulation. Drones zipped around delivering people's comforts. Dogs walked obediently beside robotic handlers. Couples smiled at each other while linked into neural-sync visors—blissfully unaware of anything beyond their shared data stream. The visors weren't just for watching movies or playing games anymore—they'd evolved into something more invasive, more seductive. They allowed people to sync their minds in real time, sharing curated thoughts, filtered emotions, even synthetic memories. Two people could sit in complete silence, yet believe they were having the most romantic evening of their lives—complete with imagined candlelight, laughter, and a perfectly matched emotional exchange. Everything was polished, optimized, safe. And completely fake. No tension. No misunderstandings. Just chemically-balanced affection, piped in like background music. A love story scripted by algorithms. I stared out the window, jaw clenched. Was I broken for wanting more? I had the corporate job. The penthouse apartment. The security. I even had a laughably high social credit score. But when the lights dimmed at night and the system lulled me toward sleep with its dreamwave playlist, I stayed wide awake. Longing. I missed mess. I missed pancakes in mismatched pajamas. I missed conversation that wasn't filtered through tone-analysis AI. I missed touch—real touch. Not the kind sold as a wellness package. I refused to partake in technology more than I had to out of convenience. I remember a time when we made our own food, where we would play outside in trees as children while my mother cooked a Sunday roast. The whole idea of that time just seemed ludicrous now. Sometimes, I unplugged just to feel something. I'd sit in the quiet and let the silence settle over me like a weighted blanket. No feed. No projection walls. Just me. And the longing. I didn't know yet what I was searching for. I just knew this wasn't it. Cape City was a marvel to most. Designed to be the pinnacle of human achievement—climate-controlled, crime-free, socially engineered perfection. The Unified Dominion liked their order. They liked their numbers, their compliance charts, their feedback loops of curated bliss. But sometimes it just kind of felt like people weren't people anymore. I walked through the lobby of my building and gave a curt nod to the concierge drone, a hovering orb named Vale. It scanned me with a quick pulse of soft blue light and said, "Productivity metrics holding steady. Emotional balance within optimal range. Have a fulfilling day, Miss Moolman." "Sure," I muttered, brushing past it. I could almost feel the artificial optimism trying to stick to me like static. It never did. I had mastered how to calm and dull my emotions. I spent most of my workday inside a virtual sales engagement pod—a sleek capsule outfitted with neuro-reactive input fields and seamless HUD overlays. All I needed to do was place the two tiny buttons on either side of my temple and I was within our client relationship management system. I was good at what I did. Too good. I could tailor interactions before a client even knew what they wanted. Anticipation was currency, and I traded it in spades. But none of it meant anything. It was data. It was precision. It was... hollow. On break, I watched coworkers plug into shared meditation cycles or flirt through visual overlays that added glowing hearts and blushing cheeks to their faces. It was all artificial intimacy. I never joined. I couldn't pretend. Something about watching them all just sit there in a room talking and interacting but not with one another, still creeped me out. I'm not one to talk though. I barely interact with other humans myself, I have two close friends, and one family member left. Instead, I walked to the observation deck, high above the city. I liked it there—the silence, the fake wind, the illusion of freedom. Sometimes I wondered what it would feel like to run. Just run. Past the edge of the city, beyond the domes, to where the old world still existed in cracked cold soil and unfiltered skies. But no one left Cape City. Not really. Not without permission. Not without a reason. And wanting something more than perfect wasn't considered a valid one. Once you made it into Cape City, it wasn't as easy as just leaving, but besides this, there isn't much left on the outside that wouldn't kill you. The air is not as pure anymore, it won't kill you but the radiation in certain regions from World War 3 might over time. I placed my palm on the rail and stared into the distance, thinking about what else life could have to offer. "You're always up here deep in thought" A calm voice pulled me from my thoughts with a fright. "Oh" I started, not sure why I should justify where I am. "I enjoy the scenery" "mmhmm" Killian nodded, his eyes scanning the dome horizon, "When are you going to let me come back?" "We have been through this Killian" I sighed, tired from this very small human interaction already, making me question why I even crave it at all. "No, we haven't really" Killian's green eyes searched my face, "You broke it off, saying you weren't feeling it and told me to leave, I hardly think that constitutes as us having been through this" I knew he was right but I just didn't know how to say it. I didn't know how to tell him that things felt bland without hurting his feelings. The downside of having minimal human contact on a day to day in a world filled with technology is that actual human conflict handling skills were basically non existent, so I do what I do best with these uncomfortable emotions. I walk away and forget them. "I have to get back, I have clients waiting" I half smile awkwardly, knowing I owe him more than this. He was good to me. "This isn't over Maddie" He runs his hand through is light brown hair, clearly frustrated with my lack of answers. I walked as quick as I could back to my pod. When I finally settled back into the neural capsule, the system re-scanned me. "Elevated emotional variance detected." Of course. Too bad I couldn't tell the machine that I felt bad for not wanting to be with someone anymore. No , these machines don't even understand emotions, they are cold. The system offered me a guided recalibration. I declined. Instead, I sat there in the silence of my pod, fingers tapping on the side of my armrest, replaying Killian's voice in my head. His disappointment. The ache beneath his casual words. I wasn't cold. I was just... disconnected from him. He wasn't it for me. Or was I just to accustomed to this way of life? Had AI made me cold and unable to just be happy in a relationship? What was that emptiness I felt every day even whilst with him? I didn't want to reconnect with the system. I wanted to feel something Real. Something unscripted. I wanted the ache to mean something. I wanted it to lead somewhere. But it didn't and that was the problem. The sky outside darkened into its artificial dusk, and the city's lights bloomed to life in coordinated waves. Beautiful. Choreographed. Soulless. And I sat there, still. Later that night, I walked back into my apartment—the lights automatically shifting to a warm, amber glow that was supposed to ease me into rest mode. I didn't want ease. I wanted something raw, something real. The system asked if I wanted my usual evening protocol: dreamwave music, ambient scent release, newsfeed recap. I denied all of it. Instead, I walked barefoot into the kitchen—not because I needed to, but because I wanted to do something. Something pointless. Something mine. I boiled water manually, even though the hydration pod could dispense it at perfect temperature. I poured it into an old ceramic mug I'd found at a vintage market—one of the few items in my life that wasn't scanned, tracked, or replicated. The chipped edge and uneven glaze made it perfect. I put in a teabag that I had no idea what flavour it was since we had long stopped using teabags. I sat on the floor by the window, knees pulled to my chest, sipping bitter peppermint tea in silence. The city outside looked surreal—its glow artificial, pulsing like a sleeping giant under a sky of manufactured stars. There was no wind. No sound. Just the hum of a world controlled. For a moment, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a different life. One where connection didn't come with programming. One where someone might look into my eyes and see me—not my productivity rating, not my compliance stats, not my emotional variance report. Me. But that life didn't exist here. Not in Cape City. I whispered, barely aloud, "Is anyone else out there... tired of pretending?" The city didn't answer.