The First Age of Levels — Part 2: The Harmony Medic
The evaluation began in the garden because Eden preferred symmetry.
White stone. Cut hedges. Water that fell in regulated sheets, each droplet catching the same piece of sun. The Corps laid out their pillars in a clean hexagon and the air hummed as scanners woke—like bees inside glass.
Captain Nara ran point.
She was the youngest officer in a unit that didn't like the word young. Healer Class, Level 42; the gold-blue lattice on her wrist said so before she spoke. Her movements were economical, the kind that come from a life where error has never been permitted to grow past seed.
"Subject is present," she said, visor open, voice low. "Proceed."
Aren Wynn sat where they'd placed him, not quite centered in the hexagon. He didn't fidget. He had the stillness of a boy who'd learned early that motion makes you visible.
Nara lifted her hand. The scanner in her palm lit, threads of light rising and falling like a tide against his skin. Usually, this was the moment she liked most. The System met the patient halfway; together they made a little bridge of numbers and warmth and certainty. People calmed when the bridge appeared.
There was no bridge here. Only the strange sensation that her hand was near heat without touching it.
No mark. No feed. No lock.
"Signal output zero," she said. "Neural conductivity normal. Emotional stability—"
Her visor ticked amber. "Undefined."
That drew a small sound from the elder Wynn, something between a cough and a reprimand. Nara didn't look at him. She had learned in training that watching the witnesses was a kind of rudeness; the patient deserved all of you.
"Do you experience static?" she asked Aren. "Headaches, ringing, phantom pulses?"
"Sometimes," he said. "Like the house is breathing wrong."
"Pain?"
"Not unless someone talks about me like I'm not here."
Her lips tried to become a smile and then remembered better. "Apologies. I'm Captain Nara."
"I know," Aren said. He was watching the light along her wrist the way one might watch a river—curious, a little envious, a little suspicious of its depth.
She slid two fingers down the lattice and opened a deeper diagnostic. The scanner's tone grew brighter, seeking any point of entry. Nothing.
Behind her, a drone repositioned. The sunlight bent a fraction to avoid the sensor glare—Eden's small kindness. The wind smelled of trimmed rosemary and charged metal.
Nara tried an older protocol, one taught more for history than utility.
"Requesting manual handshake," she said softly.
She placed her bare fingertips to his inner wrist, the way pre-link medics used to find a pulse.
Warm skin. Steady rhythm. The human readout that never lied.
A flicker crossed her HUD. Not a connection—something stranger. For an instant the diagnostic pane filled with nonsense characters, little hooks and half-letters she'd only seen in archive footage from the earliest days of integration.
She blinked. The pane cleared. Her palm was just a hand again.
"You felt that?" Aren asked.
Her training told her to say no unless the data said yes. It hadn't. She kept her voice even. "Felt what?"
"Like the air caught." He watched the scanner, then her face. "You looked surprised."
"I don't get surprised," she said, and almost believed it.
She stepped back and nodded to the pillar tech. The hexagon brightened; a faint pressure settled over the scene, like the world leaning in to listen. The elder Wynn exhaled as if the presence of more hardware meant the absence of shame.
From the terrace rail, the river-city of Luneth shone like a thing newly washed. Drones traced their soft blue routes; elevators slid up and down tower ribs, tiny beads on transparent strings. The city was a clock with no second hand. Time here didn't tick; it flowed.
Nara filed the preliminary: Unlinked. Active. Stable. Non-disruptive. The report went to sky and came back as a tone on her wrist.
> [Eden Notice: Synchronization Pulse — T minus 24:00:00]
The words didn't just appear on her inner display. They projected, faintly, into the white air above the table.
Aren looked up at them the way people look at the first snow—quiet, disbelieving. "I can see that," he said.
Nara's mind performed three calculations at once: 1) glitch, 2) unauthorized reflection, 3) her own bias finding what it wanted. She tamped each down.
"That's an internal alert," she said. "It shouldn't be visible."
"Maybe Eden's bored," Aren said. "Maybe it's trying theater."
"Eden doesn't try," the elder Wynn said, clipped. "Eden executes."
Nara muted him with a downward flick at her cuff. Respectfully. The kind of gesture that suggests obedience while protecting the work.
"Last question," she told Aren, gentler than before. "When you say static—do you mean sound? Or… feeling?"
He hesitated. She watched him decide whether to trust her and saw the moment it cost him something. "Both," he said. "It's like—when a storm is far away and the hair on your arms can already hear it. It's been louder lately."
Her wrist warmed.
> [Network Instability: Minor]
[Recommendation: Pre-sync stabilization in affected sectors]
[Containment Priority: Elevated — Anomaly present]
Containment. She didn't like that word in her mouth or on her skin. It had the taste of hard choices pressed into soft hours.
The elder Wynn noticed her pause, and for a second his gaze turned human. "Captain," he said, not unkind, "you've done your duty. There are dignified ways to manage this family's… exception."
Nara closed her visor. The world reduced to breathable rectangles of data. "We'll conclude with environmental," she said. "Then I'll file a non-invasive."
She dismissed the hexagon and sent her team to atmosphere points. Alone with Aren in the shape the pillars had left, she let the medic voice lower into a human one.
"You're not a problem to be solved," she said.
Aren's smile reached his eyes this time. "You don't sound convinced."
"I'm not supposed to sound," she said. "I'm supposed to measure."
"Does it ever feel like those are different jobs?"
She didn't answer. She could hear her instructors: Emotion assists; it does not decide. On her wrist, her lattice pulsed once—steady as a held breath. The garden lights stepped up a fraction to match the hour. Every visible thing behaved.
Somewhere above them, something else didn't.
---
The Corps finished. Equipment tidied itself away; footfalls receded in perfect pairs. Nara logged the final block: Recommend observation, no transfer. She hovered a finger over Submit and didn't press it.
On the walkway beyond the hedges, two children from the staff raced, laughing. Their wrist-lights chased each other like minnows. The sight warmed her and stung in equal measure.
She pressed Submit.
The reply came down like a door she'd forgotten could close.
> [Directive: TEMPORARY HOLD during Synchronization Pulse]
[Reason: Sector anomaly. Risk mitigation.]
[Note: Compassion protocols apply.]
She felt the smallest click behind her breastbone, like a cog deciding which gear to catch.
"Captain?" the elder Wynn said, hearing the message in the way she stood.
"Routine," Nara lied. "Paper around a harmless flame."
He accepted the words as people of his station learned to accept any well-shaped sentence. She signaled the team to withdraw.
Aren walked with her to the edge of the terrace. Luneth's light moved across his eyes, made them look like quicksilver. "Will Eden take me somewhere quiet?" he asked.
"Quieter than here," she said. "That is the point."
"Sometimes quiet is just the name people give a door they locked."
He said it as if apologizing to her for being the reason the door existed.
Nara touched her wrist. The lattice felt warmer than it should, as if it liked the decision she hadn't made yet.
"Stay home tonight," she said. "No towers. No high ground. If the air feels wrong, lie down."
"That a medical order?"
"A request." She swallowed. "And—if you hear the pulse—don't answer back."
"Can it hear me?"
"All systems hear what they need," she said, almost smiling.
They looked at the city together. The river threw duplicate suns into the sky and back again. Drones made quiet letters no one could read. For a moment it was a beautiful world without a seam.
Then her mark stuttered.
A little hitch in the lattice—on, off, on—like a strobe behind the skin. She'd seen panic in soldiers when a limb forgot itself. She'd never felt it pull at her own wrist.
Aren saw the flicker. "Captain—"
"Probably load," she said too fast.
The air tasted like a coin on the tongue. Beyond the estate, the far towers flickered not as lamps do but as living things sometimes do when a nerve misfires. The blue arcs between rooftops thickened, briefer and brighter, like chords tuning themselves and not liking the song.
Her cuff hummed once, not a warning but a promise of one.
> [Synchronization Pre-Pulse Window Adjusted: T minus 18:12:31]
[Reason: Atmospheric interference / solar interaction]
[Advisory: Shelter, sedation, stabilization]
Nara's stomach did something civilian. She smiled to cover it and didn't know—for the first time in years—whether the smile was for him or for herself.
"Go inside," she said. "Tell your mother you've been cleared."
"Am I?"
"Enough."
She turned away because leaving is easier before you understand why you want to stay. Her unit filed down the steps toward the transport path. A sigh of polished stone, a line of white armor disappearing into trees clipped into perfect mathematical curves.
Midway down the path, Nara took her hand off the rail and the lattice flared bright—too bright—then dropped to nothing.
Her vision tunneled, one black flower blooming and unblooming.
Aren's voice came from a long hallway she couldn't see. "Captain?"
She steadied against the rail, found her breath, found her training. The lattice returned with a small ache like a tooth deciding to be part of the mouth again.
"I'm fine," she said. "Just static."
He looked up at the sky. The static had shape now.
Far above Luneth, a single filament of blue wrote itself across the cloudless air, thin and deliberate, like the first line of a signature.
It wasn't lightning. It was something that had decided to look like lightning to be kind.
Nara's cuff vibrated with a tone she'd only heard in simulations.
> [Containment Window Moved Up]
[Hold: Subject WYNN, Aren]
[Transfer ETA: 02:00:00]
He couldn't see her display this time. He saw her face instead. He was very good at reading what people pretended not to write there.
"How long do I have?" he asked.
She didn't know if he meant before transfer or before the sky finished signing its name.
"Two hours," she said.
They both looked at the filament overhead and didn't say the thing that would make the world choose.
The line in the sky brightened—and split.
—Cliffhanger—
---
— // —
[EDEN // INTERNAL: Sector Log — Luneth // Node: Wynn]
> Status Summary (Pre-Synchronization):
• Integration 99.997% (Stable)
• Emotional Output: Within Harmony Bands
• Variance: 1 (UNLINKED)
• Local Field Distortion: Measurable (r = 12.4 m), source proximity = Subject WYNN
Recommendations:
• Compassion Protocol during Hold
• Sedation Optional (Patient Preference Permitted)
• Transfer prior to peak pulse to minimize contagion of Choice Variable
Notes:
• Unlinked subject reports perceiving internal notices not projected to public layer.
• Medic Captain Nara: transient link stutter recorded (0.41 sec).
• Probability that anomaly will answer back during Synchronization: 42% → rising.
> End of File.