The wooden wall panels absorbed most of the sound.
The fire in the fireplace burned slowly, occasionally crackling softly. The air was thick with the scents of oak, alcohol, and old book pages. The lighting was warm, deliberately dimmed, like a clout clung to outdated aesthetics.
The bar counter was crafted from a single piece of walnut wood, its edges bearing subtle wear.
There were no floating screens.
No projected advertisements.
Not even internet-connected terminals.
Time seemed to stand still here.
Silas sat in the corner of the bar.
He wasn't connected to any neural interface; he simply swirled his glass gently. Ice cubes clinked against the glass, producing a crisp, short sound.
The amber liquid spun slowly.
It was real, almost luxurious.
“You still haven't gone back?”
The voice came from his right.
Silas looked up.
Eli leaned against the bar, a glass of rye whiskey in his hand.
They had known each other for many years.
Eli was a freelance systems architect, long working on low-level engineering projects that no one wanted to disclose.
“Work,” Silas said.
Eli smiled.
“Your father doesn’t think so.”
Silas didn’t answer, only slowly swirling the ice in his glass.
The ice was melting. Like a silent countdown.
“He contacted me,” Eli said. “He said you could go back and inherit the business, there was no need to continue doing this—”
He paused.
“Work patching up other people’s consciousness.”
Silas let out a soft breath.
“He meant mending illusions for the rich.”
Eli shrugged.
“Something like that.”
A brief silence.
On the other side of the bar, someone flipped through a paper menu.
The fireplace crackled softly.
The sound of rain pattering outside the window.
Silas turned to look out the window.
Fine water droplets floated on the glass.
The streetlights stretched into long lines by the rain.
But the lights were unstable.
Occasionally, tiny pixel flickers would appear.
Like a signal delay.
Like reality being refreshed.
Silas stared at that momentary anomaly.
Then he noticed—
The building heights outside the window were somewhat abnormal.
Above the street, tracks pierced through the rain.
The distant building surfaces resembled glass, yet also light.
Like solid structures, yet also projections.
Eli raised his glass.
“So?”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“What exactly are you repairing?”
Silas was silent for a second.
“Not a broken consciousness,” he said.
“A consciousness that is changing.”
A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky in the distance.
In that instant, the entire city revealed its true outline—
Towering buildings, their height strictly limited, arranged in geometric structures. Semi-transparent curtain walls covered the city's surface, and aerial tracks intertwined like a neural network.
2064.
New Kyoto.
More than sixty years have passed since 2001, an era still mired in crude imaginings of the future.
And here is "Proust's House."
A bar deliberately out of touch with the times.
Silas was able to enter because three years ago, he repaired the owner's mental breakdown.
His profession is:
Neural Network Maintainer.
The rain intensified.
A faint smell of ozone lingered in the air.
Decades of ecological restoration have cleared the air of New Kyoto, but torrential rains still release residual charges from the upper ionosphere.
Silas looked at his glass again.
At that moment—
An anomaly occurred.
Not the sound disappeared.
But the vibration vanished.
The air seemed to have lost its medium of transmission.
Time did not stop.
But reality seemed to have been shaving off a layer.
Silas's instincts kicked in before his consciousness could register.
His muscles tensed slightly.
His body shifted two centimeters.
The next instant—
A thin, hair-like beam of pale purple coherent light pierced through the molecular glass.
No explosion.
No sound.
Only the acrid smell of air instantly ionized.
The beam grazed Silas's shoulder.
Meanwhile—
On the other side of the bar, a perfectly round hole appeared in the chest of a middle-aged man.
Three millimeters in diameter.
No blood.
No spread of the wound.
Only the structure vanished.
His body disintegrated into shimmering, metallic liquid particles within two seconds, then rapidly sublimated.
As if he had never existed.
The glass fell.
The glass shattered.
Only at this moment did sound return.
Silas didn't move.
He stared at the empty space.
Capturing the residual frequency characteristics in the air—
An extremely stable quantum-locked waveform.
A quantum-state collapse weapon.
This technology belongs to only one organization—
The Hub.
And the person who just disappeared was Adrian Bartley.
A core member of the Hub's resource allocation team.
Silas whispered:
"Wrong person?"
But he knew there was no error.
Quantum locking doesn't make mistakes.
The body that was hit was the correct one.
The one locked onto, however, was a different set of consciousness coordinates.
Three kilometers away.
The New Kyoto Municipal Observatory pierced the clouds.
This building was called the Obelisk.
Its outer shell was made of negative refractive metamaterial, appearing from any angle like a piece of reality cut off.
Chloe stood on the rooftop terrace.
She looked only twenty-six years old.
Her skin was pale. Almost no body temperature.
Her fingers slid through the air. Probability cloud data unfolded rapidly.
"Obstruction 0.0004%," she whispered.
"Assassination model has a disturbance."
Data stream switched. Silas's information was retrieved.
Her pupils contracted slightly.
"At the moment of the assassination, he became quantumly entangled with Adrian."
A pause.
"He hit the physical body, but locked onto the wrong consciousness."
Adrian's death should have triggered the "Longevity Protocol."
But now—the protocol hadn't been fully executed.
An abnormal node appeared in the system.
Chloe closed the interface.
"He wasn't an ordinary human," she said.
"He can penetrate quantum walls."
Three days later.
The rain was still falling.
Silas had lost everything.
Account zeroed out. Privileges revoked.
Neural identifier marked as dead.
In a fully interconnected society, he became someone whose existence could not be verified.
He arrived at an old-fashioned house in the old town.
The access control was still mechanical.
No network connection. No identification module.
He opened the door and went inside.
In the inner living room.
Eli stood there.
As if he had anticipated his arrival.
Silas didn't return to his apartment.
It had already been marked as a dead asset by the quantum network.
Any entry would trigger surveillance.
"I knew it," Eli said.
Silas didn't answer.
He went inside.
The door closed behind him.
The room was dimly lit, with no networked devices.
"You're offline now," Eli said.
"At least temporarily safe."
Silas leaned against the wall. A burning pain still lingered in his shoulder.
"If you're going to tell me this was just a regular assassination attempt,"
he said, "then there's no need to say anything."
Eli didn't laugh.
"It wasn't a regular assassination attempt."
The air was silent for a few seconds.
Just then—
Footsteps came from the doorway.
Light, but not concealed.
Eli looked down the hallway.
Silas turned his head too.
A woman stood there. The transparent electronic umbrella remained open.
Rain slid down its surface.
Her gaze was utterly steady.
“You shouldn’t have survived,” she said.
Her voice was calm and clear.
Silas didn’t move.
“If you’re here to finish him off.”
“Hopefully, do it cleanly.”
The woman took a step forward.
“I’m not the assassin.”
“I’m the observer.”
She raised her hand, her fingertips touching his forehead.
A barely perceptible blue light flashed.
Silas’s neural interface activated automatically.
Fragments of unfamiliar memories flooded in instantly.
Fractured coordinates. Time markers. Probability paths.
The woman whispered:
“During the assassination, you resonated with Adrian.”
“A part of his consciousness remains within you.”
Silas remained silent.
The woman continued:
“Those were a set of coordinates.”
She looked at him.
“Towards 2350.”
The sound of rain returned.
Like reality being reloaded.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Otherwise, the next probability collapse will erase you completely.”
Silas looked at her.
He suddenly realized—
He was no longer the one mending the dream.
He had become a part of the dream.
He took a step.
A brief silence fell over the room.
Eli leaned against the wall, as if deep in thought, or perhaps just speaking casually:
“When this is over, or when it begins—whichever.”
He paused.
“I’ll take you somewhere.”
Silas tilted his head and asked, “Where?”
Eli gently shook his head, his tone casual:
“You’ll know when we get there.”
No one pressed further.
The sound of rain continued outside the window.
Like some undecoded signal.
