18:10
The Southern Administrative Ring of Britain entered its civilian energy-conservation period.
On the outskirts of Old London, in the Fourth Tier residential belt, rows of concrete tower blocks stood like shipwrecks sunk beneath a black sea. One window after another went dark.
The last thing left shining was the white emblem at the top of the Rationing Bureau tower: an open eye, with three carved lines beneath it, symbolising surveillance, distribution, and order.
The broadcast seeped out from streetlamp posts, access gates, wall seams, and every public terminal still permitted the courtesy of electricity.
“Thank you, citizens, for observing this week’s energy discipline. Lighting in low-quota zones will be reduced to three per cent at 18:15.
Medical, educational, and family communications are to be used only during approved periods. Unauthorised power storage, quota resale, or tampering with civilian power locks shall be treated as a Crime Against World Stability.”
Crime Against World Stability.
Every time Zorina heard those words, she thought of the surveillance cameras on the streets of old Hong Kong, their lenses hidden beneath black cloth.
She had understood it since adolescence: regimes loved nothing more than renaming their own fear as order. Britain, in particular, had always possessed a refined national talent for hiding knives inside politeness and writing commands as suggestions.
By the year 3911, that art had evolved to near perfection.
Hunger was no longer called hunger.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpqCl5tqjGU
It was called precision nutritional management.
Poverty was no longer called poverty.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfgIFE9RUxm
It was called low-consumption adaptation.
Darkness was no longer called darkness.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsKxLIHAaLb
It was called energy discipline.
Zorina stood before the floor-to-ceiling window on the thirty-ninth floor of the British National Energy Quota Authority, watching the city outside pass from light into shadow.
Behind her, the entire floor remained bright.
The Authority stood within the Third Tier technical district. White light poured gently from the ceiling, cold as a disinfected moon. The walls were touch-responsive data panels. The air was kept at an exact temperature. Beside the drinking station, mineral fluid replenished itself automatically. The office chairs adjusted themselves according to the pressure of each user’s spine.
These negligible comforts would have passed for miracles in the eyes of the Fourth Tier.
Li Xinglan — Zorina Li — was thirty-three years old. Her official title was National Energy Quota Analyst. Her clearance level was upper Third Tier.
Every day, her work consisted of reviewing energy applications submitted by cities, corporations, medical stations, academies, security bureaus, and private families, then calculating whether each request complied with Social Continuity Efficiency.
Those four words were cleaner than any weapon.
They could deprive a lower-tier clinic of the power required for night surgery.
They could also allow a private greenhouse owned by a plutocratic family to simulate spring until dawn.
On her main screen floated the day’s pending approvals.
[British International Humanitarian Display Residence: full-day heating application for foreign asylum families. Reason: maintenance of civilised image and cross-regime trust. Recommendation: Approve.]
[Northern District Fifth Tier Domestic Rationing Station: night-time children’s respiratory pod power application. Reason: increased winter mortality. Recommendation: Defer.]
Zorina stared at them for a long while, then asked Atlas Wong, “So, if they are both children, the only real difference is which one looks better on camera?”
Atlas replied, “No. One must also consider whether there are international journalists behind them.”
She ignored him and swept her fingers toward more applications.
[Second Tier Private Logistics Consortium: expansion of high-speed air corridor. Reason: delays in premium medical components. Recommendation: Approve.]
[Fifth Tier Rationing Zone E-204: request to restart public water purification station. Reason: abnormal child infection rate. Recommendation: Defer.]
[First Tier World Administrative Joint Council: full-day power supply for closed-door meeting defence field. Reason: security of order. Recommendation: Automatically Approved.]
Her fingertip stopped over the Fifth Tier water purification request.
A Fifth Tier rationing zone.
In official language, the Fifth Tier was not a people. It was a low recovery-value population.
They lived in old industrial belts, seawater-intrusion districts, unrepaired underground cities, and former war buffer zones. Ration vehicles visited once every ten days. Sometimes every fifteen.
The people there still had names, mothers, toothaches, dreams, and love. But in the quota model, they were merely units of heat consumption with no investment return.
Zorina opened the application.
A trembling video appeared.
A woman stood before a sewage station, holding a child whose face could not be seen. Behind her were more than twenty people, all clutching old plastic buckets. There were no lights above them. Only a little white glow reflected from the distant government dome, like snow leaking in from another universe.
In the video, the woman said, “We are not asking for full-day power. Only twenty minutes each night. Just enough to start the purification station once. The children have already—”
The footage cut off.
System tag: excessive emotional content. Edited.
Zorina gave a small cold laugh.
It was so quiet it was almost inaudible. People in the office assumed she had always been distant, that even her anger was frozen behind glass.
Only Atlas knew better.
It was not indifference.
It was that she had learnt far too early not to let power see where she bled.
“You’re looking at Fifth Tier applications again?” Atlas asked, approaching with two cups of synthetic coffee.
Atlas Wong was thirty-six, a data analyst, and like Zorina, belonged to the Third Tier technical class. Compared with her beauty — sharp as a blade kept deliberately in its sheath — he was quieter, his eyes clear, his speech never wasteful. He, too, was a descendant of Hong Kong migrants. In the British data system, both of them were classified as descendants of historical political migration populations.
It was a position that sounded better than refugee and meant rather less than citizen.
“Do you think twenty minutes of clean water would collapse the world?” Zorina asked.
Atlas glanced at the screen but did not answer immediately. Instead, he tapped twice against the edge of her desk and called up the hidden energy-flow layer.
The main display changed.
The British administrative region appeared like a dissected beast, its blood-vessel energy lines pulsing between cities. The thickest veins of light led to the northern government dome, the plutocratic medical complexes, private air harbours, artificial climate gardens, and the residences of World Administrators.
Fourth Tier cities received threads of light no thicker than hair.
The Fifth Tier did not even receive light.
Only grey shadow.
“No,” Atlas said. “But the system would ask: why start?”
“Because people need to drink water.”
“The model doesn’t understand that sentence.”
Zorina said nothing.
She knew he was right.
In the world of 3911, every regime was built upon five tiers.
The First Tier was the World Administrative class. The major regimes still kept their flags, languages, parliaments, and leaders, because symbols were useful and the public enjoyed familiar decoration. But the true master switch of energy belonged to the trans-regime World Administrative Network.
They decided which cities were repaired, which technologies were maintained, which medical services remained open, and which regions were deferred.
They did not call themselves rulers.
They called themselves managers.
The Second Tier consisted of plutocrats and quota-holding families. Energy was no longer merely a resource. It was hereditary right. Whoever held quotas held time, medicine, transport, education, lifespan, and dignity.
Robin Shen’s family belonged to this tier.
When Zorina had known him as a child, he was still the boy in a Hong Kong kindergarten playground who shared his sweets with her. Later, the world taught him to wear the mask of a frivolous heir — to look like a truly useless rich man’s son — because that was the only way to survive at the centre of power.
The Third Tier consisted of people like Zorina and Atlas: analysts, researchers, engineers, data specialists, licensed knowledge workers. They had light. They had networks. They had controlled AI. They had permission to access restricted material.
They were not masters.
Only better-fed tools.
The Fourth Tier was the majority. Residents of low-energy cities. Limited electricity, limited network access, limited healthcare, limited mobility. They still went to work. They still queued. They still had children in the gloom. They still repaired broken old technology again and again.
Civilisation had not disappeared for them. It had merely retreated into a half-primitive state: manual lifts, pedal generators, black-market batteries, paper travel permits, and homes that became caves after six every evening.
The Fifth Tier was made up of those the world had chosen to defer.
Officials never said abandoned.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9IOv5VPfSC
Abandoned was such an ugly word.
They said deferred.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjKiGGKd0aK
They said waiting.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3caNerTxdB
They said quota insufficiency.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1ZgMqYSoND
They said recovery value pending assessment.
Deferral was the quietest death sentence of 3911.
“It isn’t that they don’t want the world to progress,” Atlas said suddenly.
Zorina looked at him.
He pointed at the energy model.
“The World Administrative Network isn’t anti-intelligence. Quite the opposite. They need intelligence growth very badly. Without technology, Quota Civilisation can’t sustain itself. The problem is that all growth requires energy. Education requires power. Experiments require power. Networks require power. Transport requires power. Medical life-extension requires power. Civilisation isn’t brainless. It is simply trapped inside an engine with no fuel.”
Zorina lowered her eyes.
That was precisely what she hated most.
Humanity had not stopped thinking.
In the Fourth Tier, people still built generators in the dark.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡC6wIP0P8uL
In the Fifth Tier, people still repaired water pumps with scrap metal.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiyssU53IJt
In the Third Tier, scientists still sat beneath cold white lights trying to break through the energy bottleneck.
The world was not stupid.
It was being strangled by energy.
The regimes had not forbidden everyone from becoming intelligent.
They had merely turned intelligence into privilege.
Education into quota.
Experimentation into permission.
The network into a reward.
Light into a cage.
Zorina pressed Approve.
A warning appeared in red.
[Warning: application does not comply with Social Continuity Efficiency. Please enter reason for manual override.]
She typed:
[Reason for approval: maintenance of basic life conditions.]
Atlas looked at the sentence, his brow shifting almost imperceptibly.
“That wording is dangerous.”
“Then let it be dangerous.”
The red text flickered for three seconds, then turned white.
[Temporary power supply approved: twenty minutes per day, duration seven days. Reviewing officer: Zorina Li.]
Outside the window, somewhere in the darkness far away, a tiny point of blue light appeared.
It was distant. Weak.
Like a star that had no official permission to exist.
Zorina looked at that little light and suddenly felt a coldness at the back of her neck.
It was not the first time.
For as long as she could remember, she had dreamed the same dream. Over the past three months, it had become clearer, sharper, and increasingly full of extensions.
There was no Britain in the dream. No Quota Authority. No human city.
She stood before a wall of black rock. Within the stone, fine golden threads flowed slowly, like cooling veins of molten fire deep inside a volcano, or some form of writing buried alive in stone.
Someone called to her from a very distant place.
The voice was not heard through her ears.
It grew out of her bones.
It was very soft.
It had no name.
No command.
Only a waiting so sorrowful it was almost unbearable.
Every time she woke, she remembered the path of every golden line in the dream.
Hyperthymesia made it impossible for her to forget anything. The smell of rain in Hong Kong on a particular day of a particular month of a particular childhood year. The sound of her father, Li Jianyu, coughing in the stairwell of an old public housing block. Her mother, Lin Chongyu, wrapping a neighbour child’s scraped knee beneath a dim lamp. The evasive look in her elder brother Li Jie’s eyes the first time he said, The world is not as fair as you imagine.
She remembered all of it.
So she also remembered, with perfect certainty, that she had never seen the patterns on that stone wall in reality.
And yet it did not feel like something foreign.
It felt like something she had once placed down with her own hands.
Then deliberately forgotten.
“You look unwell,” Atlas said.
“I dreamed of the stone again last night.”
His eyes changed slightly, but he did not ask whether she was simply tired. Atlas was not the sort of man who used cheap rationality to invalidate someone else’s pain.
He only asked quietly, “The same wall?”
“The same wall.”
“Was there a voice?”
Zorina thought for a moment.
“No. Or perhaps there was. I couldn’t hear it clearly.”
What she did not say was that she had always felt the voice was not calling her towards somewhere.
It was reminding her that she had once left it.
Elsewhere, Holden — a Third Tier inspector born from the Second Tier — saw Zorina’s abnormal approval report.
“Interesting. Interesting… Good job, Miss Li. Good job, Miss Li…”
After placing a call to the Deputy Director, the administrative terminal on Zorina’s desk lit up with a red alert.
[Temporary Field Assignment Order]
[Assigned personnel: Zorina Li, National Energy Quota Analyst.]
[Mission location: South African Energy Conversion Belt, Seventh Solar Tower Cluster.]
[Mission nature: abnormal energy quota review; resource redistribution model calibration.]
[Accompanying data support: Atlas Wong, Data Analyst.]
[Departure time: tomorrow, 06:10.]
Atlas frowned. “South Africa?”
Zorina looked at the assignment order, and her eyes went cold.
The South African Energy Conversion Belt had once been one of the largest solar tower clusters on the southern continent. By 3911, the equatorial and subtropical regions had been transformed by the major regimes into energy-harvesting belts. The towers tracked sunlight day and night, converting light and heat into electricity for the government districts and technical zones.
The lower-tier populations around them were responsible for maintenance, cleaning, transport, and replacing damaged reflector panels.
They lived in the shadows of the towers, yet had no freedom to use the light those towers produced.
Recently, there had been rumours of “quota loss” in the region.
But quotas did not get lost.
They were stolen, diverted, or deliberately miswritten by certain very tidy hands.
“This isn’t an ordinary field assignment,” Atlas said.
“I know.”
“You approved Fifth Tier power, and tomorrow they send you to South Africa.”
Zorina closed the terminal.
“Relocation. Warning. Or a test.”
“It could also be a trap.”
She looked out of the window.
The small blue light from the Fifth Tier was still there.
“Then let us see what the trap is trying to catch.”
Atlas watched her for a moment, then said in a low voice, “You don’t have to go alone.”
Zorina did not turn back.
She only answered softly.
Outside, the city was going dark by inches.
And in her dreams, the stone wall shone silently in the dark.
ns216.73.217.119da2
and then Add to home screen.