The year was 2085. The city of Orbitera was a metallic crypt, an inverted sky where monumental, brutalist spires shouldered the constant, weeping rain. Neon reflections bled across the wet ferroconcrete, staining the slick, black-clad crowd below with toxic blues and sickly greens. Every alley, every arterial street, was a vector for the Authority's Aegis-Cams. Their rotating lenses followed every flicker of movement, their silent sweep an omnipresent, mechanical judgment. Above it all, vast advertising screens flared with the city's single, ubiquitous commandment: ORBITERA PROTECTS YOU. OBEDIENCE IS FREEDOM.
Einar, thirty-five, a man whose former life as an abstract artist had etched a permanent, brittle tension into his slender frame, moved through the populace like a phantom in flight. His eyes, sunken and bearing the haunted look of chronic insomnia, reflected a deep, corrosive anxiety. He pulled the hood of his tattered, utilitarian coat lower, attempting to dissolve into the density of the black-clad commuters.
Obedience is freedom. Another lie they sell us, polished and packaged, delivered on a billion screens. It's the axiom that built the prison. They didn't just constrain the body; they codified the soul.
He ducked abruptly into a narrow, refuse-strewn gap between two silent warehouses. The electronic shriek of a distant police siren was the city's bassline, a cold promise of retribution. A nearby Aegis-Cam hesitated, its optical focus trying to lock onto Einar's receding form, before the deep shadows swallowed him whole.