The Singing Algorithms
The Singing Algorithms Kai's fingers moved through the dark like a blind pianist, feeling for the dead zones in the concrete where the sensors couldn't reach. Thirty-seven steps to the drain pipe. Forty-two heartbeats to slip through the gap. Count everything. Count or die. The resistance cell met in the spaces between—in the architectural afterthoughts and urban accidents that the panopticon couldn't quite see. Eight souls breathing carefully in a storm drain beneath the towers where the Enhanced lived like gods in glass houses, their skulls crowned with neural halos that pulsed soft blue in the perpetual twilight. "They're expanding the monitoring grid again," Mira whispered, her scarred hands sketching invisible maps in the air. "Three more blocks went dark yesterday. Dark to us, I mean. Bright as hell to them." Kai nodded, but his mind was elsewhere, drifting back to childhood summers when the algorithms still sang. Before the Great Recession. ...