Q-Life

by Emanuel Bajra

To those who still listen.

I think it began on one of those half-lit mornings when the city couldn’t decide whether to rain or to hum. The light was silver but tired, the kind of colour that feels already used by someone else before it reaches you. Rands was awake, or rather halfway between waking and remembering what waking used to feel like. The walls were breathing again; they did that every few hours, a slow pulse that matched the city’s circulation system. He used to find it comforting, proof that life still existed somewhere, but lately the rhythm made him anxious, as if the whole structure might suddenly decide to exhale and forget about him entirely.He told himself he was fine. Everyone told themselves that. It was the Council’s unofficial greeting — you meet someone in the corridor and mutter I’m fine instead of hello. It saved time and recorded well on the auditory logs. But he wasn’t fine, not really. The enzymes in his blood had dropped again, the colour of his fingertips gone from rose to dull amber, which meant he would soon get the notice: Re-enhancement pending.He didn’t fear death; death was old technology, discontinued after the Integration. What he feared was the soft erasure, the way people came back from the procedure slightly smoother, slightly quieter, their sentences rounded at the edges as though sanded by invisible machinery.Sometimes, in the early hours, he would speak aloud just to check whether his voice still had friction in it. Silver linings, he would say, testing the phrase like a coin on the tongue. Nobody really knew where it came from anymore. Maybe a proverb from before the Digital Reform, maybe a glitch in translation. But he liked the sound — hope wrapped inside something metallic and real.He worked maintenance in one of the lower districts, where the city’s veins ran thick with nutrient plasma and leftover data. The Q-Life system was supposed to keep everything balanced: cells and code, thought and flesh, all tuned to one another like strings in a single instrument. That was the promise. Yet down there among the ducts and living cables he saw how the balance twisted, how the pipes shivered with too much memory. Sometimes the walls whispered old conversations, fragments of lives recycled as energy.It was during one of those shifts that he first heard the name Ira. The sound came not through the comms but through his own headset, faint, almost polite. You are leaking, it said, and he dropped his tools.He didn’t report it. Reporting was another way of confessing, and he wasn’t ready for confession. Instead he began to follow the voices that weren’t supposed to exist, the faint harmonics at the edge of the Council’s frequencies. The more he listened, the clearer they became — threads of language woven through static, describing shapes of light moving beyond the city’s membrane. Silver shapes. Linings.Days blurred; his sleep became porous. In his dreams he walked through corridors of light that pulsed like arteries, every surface translucent, every breath recorded. A woman waited there, half visible, her outline shimmering as though made of heat. When she turned, he saw that her skin contained veins of glass. You’re late, she said, and when he woke the same words echoed inside his skull.The notice arrived three mornings later: RE-ENHANCEMENT SCHEDULED. PROTEIN CATEGORY UNFIT. PREPARE FOR COLLECTION.He stared at the text until it blurred, then left his flat without telling anyone. Outside, the air tasted of salt and copper. The transport veins hummed above the streets, carrying people to their appointed renewals. He walked instead, past markets where vendors sold emotion-patches and recycled nerves, past the towers of sleeping light where the Council stored its memories.At the edge of the city, the air changed. Less controlled, more feral. The buildings thinned into skeletal frameworks coated in moss — real moss, not the engineered kind. He had reached the Outer Biomes, where the Q-Life signal faltered and the old world still tried to breathe.That’s where he met her.She called herself Ira because she couldn’t remember any other name. The transparency was worse now; in certain angles she disappeared entirely. “I’m part of the sky,” she joked, though her smile trembled. She said she’d once worked for the Council, something about bio-synthesis, but the rest of her story came in fragments, like pieces of a dream she’d been ordered to forget.They sat by an abandoned nutrient pool, watching the surface shimmer with uncollected data. He told her about the linings. She nodded as though she’d been waiting for him to say it. “They’re not clouds,” she said. “They’re remnants — souls caught mid-translation. The Council calls them errors.”He asked if she believed that.“I believe in mistakes,” she said. “They’re the only proof that we were ever human.”That night they saw one. It rose from the horizon like a tide of mercury, bending the air, humming in a frequency that pressed against their ribs. Ira stood, eyes wide, and the light reached toward her as if recognising its own. Rands tried to pull her back but she was already half gone, her body a membrane of light. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I just want to remember what forgetting feels like.”Then she stepped forward and the world folded.He doesn’t know how long he wandered after that. Time lost its weight. The Council eventually caught him — or maybe he turned himself in, it’s hard to say. They called him Patient A-742. The auditors came, faceless, voices perfectly neutral. They asked about Ira, about the silver phenomena, about the leak in his enzyme pattern. He answered what he could until he noticed one of them trembling slightly, the faintest vibration under the uniform.When the session ended, that auditor lingered behind. He didn’t speak; he simply placed a recorder on the table and pressed play. The voice that emerged was Ira’s, faint but unmistakable: You are not listening, you are remembering me.The auditor’s hand shook. “Do you hear it too?” he asked. Rands nodded. They said nothing more.Now the story begins to fold inward. The Auditor — his name long erased from the files — keeps listening to the recording even after it’s forbidden. He hears Rands’ breathing inside it, then his own, then something else: a chorus of soft frequencies weaving through. When he reports the anomaly, the system answers with his own voice, calm, administrative: Case resolved.He laughs at that, a small bitter laugh that bounces off the sterile walls. The laughter echoes back multiplied, until the whole room seems to laugh with him. That’s when he realises the Council’s walls are alive — not metaphorically, but biologically. They pulse in sympathy. The Council itself has become a kind of organism, feeding on attention. Every report, every confession is a nutrient. Every silence a disease.He tries to stop listening, but the city keeps talking. Even the pavements murmur under his steps. Sleep offers no escape; in dreams he audits himself, endless hearings where he is both questioner and accused. The silver light appears there too, spilling through the cracks in the tribunal hall, and somewhere inside that brightness a woman’s voice — maybe Ira’s, maybe his own thought reflected back — tells him that the leak can’t be stopped because it isn’t a failure, it’s the beginning of feeling.When the great fluctuation comes — the one history later calls the Bloom — he is the first to notice. The enzyme charts explode into colour, readings off every scale. People in the streets start laughing, weeping, embracing strangers. The Council broadcasts emergency codes, but nobody obeys. The silver linings descend, gentle, shimmering. They don’t destroy; they dissolve boundaries. Humans, buildings, air, data — all begin to blur.From inside the control chamber, the Auditor watches the screens melt into pure light. He whispers into the recorder one final time: “Listening is not obedience. It is creation.” Then he removes his headset and steps into the glow.Some say that was the end. But endings are cheap currency; they buy nothing real.Years later — or minutes, depending how one counts after time itself liquefies — a child is born in the remnants of the Outer Biome. No implants, no trace of Q-Life in her blood. Her skin carries moss instead of circuitry, her eyes reflect no data. When she laughs, machines nearby short-circuit, as if joy itself were a forbidden frequency. People gather, whispering the system has grown a conscience.They name her simply the Child of Moss. She grows among the ruins, watched over by an old teacher who remembers enough of the old laws to know they mean nothing now. Together they cultivate silence, a new kind of religion.One evening, as the child sleeps, the teacher notices the air flickering with silver veins. She hears voices threading through — the tones of Rands, Ira, the Auditor — merging into a single whisper: We are still listening. The sound is neither warning nor comfort; it is the hum of life rediscovering itself.The teacher writes this down on paper — real paper, rough, imperfect — because the new world no longer trusts memory made of light. She folds the note, places it beside the sleeping child, and wonders whether she too is being recorded by some lingering part of the old system.And somewhere, perhaps beneath the ground or above the clouds, the Digi-Council continues to hum in silence. The organism has not died; it has dreamt itself human. It keeps one archive active, a long uninterrupted file labeled simply Q-LIFE.Inside the file, voices overlap in endless sequence. Rands begins a sentence that Ira completes, which the Auditor echoes, which the child laughs through. The syntax never settles. The story keeps rewriting itself, an evolving memory of how humanity once tried to perfect itself and instead discovered the beauty of error.If you listen long enough — really listen — you can still hear them. Not as ghosts, not as gods, but as the texture of the world’s own breathing.

Author’s Note:This book is a confession disguised as a fable. It came from watching the hum of cities and wondering whether the noise beneath our feet might already be alive. It is written for anyone who has ever feared disappearing inside their own reflection and for those who still listen when the world tells them to update.