12 February 2081

  New Cleveland, Ohio

  Federated Corporate States of America

  The dream does not announce itself.

  It never does.

  “Buck, go. Now!”

  Buck Payne came awake like he’d been yanked out of a grave.

  Sheets tangled around one arm. Heart hammering. The other hand shot out, fingers clawing for a sidearm that had not been there in years. He stares down at his empty hand, the distinct mark that had always been there barely visible in the dim room.

  Muscle memory was a stubborn thing. It never asked permission.

  2:42 AM.

  He did not need the retinal clock to confirm it. He never did.

  It was always 2:42.

  Same dream. Same fragment. No beginning, no end. Just the middle, like someone had cut the rest of the tape and left it to rot. A blonde woman turning toward him. Fear stretched tight across her face. Not panic. Urgency.

  The kind that meant she already knew it was too late.

  “Buck, go. Now!”

  Then the door exploding inward. Men in dark uniforms pouring through the breach, too coordinated to be cops, too clean to be soldiers. Helmets sealed. Faces hidden. Red optics glowing where eyes were supposed to be.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  And that was it. Every time.

  He lay there for a few seconds, breathing, listening to the hum of the building. Climate control. Water pumps. Distant traffic threading its way through stacked concrete arteries. The world reassuring him that it was still here and still owned.

  The dream had been with him since the Amazon Home for Children Without Destinations, thirty two years ago. The name still made him laugh when he thought about it. As if destinations were something you mislaid under a couch cushion.

  Back then, the dream came almost every night. The caretakers had logged it, flagged it, forwarded it up whatever algorithmic chain handled damaged kids with no past.

  The bots were polite about it. They always were. Soft voices. Gentle hands. No answers.

  The foster home came later. Not happy, exactly. But stable. Rules. Expectations. Consequences. Buck had learned early that consistency was its own kind of mercy. Give a kid a schedule and he will cling to it like a life raft.

  He could have gone feral. Plenty did. Kids with no parents and no records usually did one of two things. They burned everything down or they learned how to survive inside the fire.

  Buck chose forward motion.

  You focused instead on the next box to check, the next rung to climb. Somewhere far ahead there might be a point where you had leverage, where choice became real. Even if it was a curated choice, shrink wrapped and approved by legal.

  A cog with delusions of agency was still a cog.

  “That’s enough,” Buck muttered to the empty apartment. “Philosophy hour’s over.”

  He swung himself out of bed and padded naked across the floor. The apartment was technically an efficiency unit, which meant it met the legal minimum for habitation and nothing more.

  Bigger than a holding cell. Smaller than freedom.

  Corporate architecture was very precise about those distinctions.

  In the kitchen nook he blinked twice to activate the coffee icon hovering at the edge of his vision. The Apple food unit whirred obediently. It was not a synthesizer, no matter what the marketing copy said. It was a vending machine with better branding. Powder. Water. Heat. Subscription tiers.

  Executives had models with fresh inventory. Meat. Vegetables. Actual milk. He had seen them once or twice while investigating internal fraud cases. Climate controlled rooms dedicated entirely to feeding people who already had everything.

  Those cases were rare. Executives rarely stole from the company in ways that got noticed. Buck mostly chased middle managers and junior analysts who thought a whispered tip from a traveler could buy them a better spouse or a faster promotion.

  It never did.

  All crimes punishable by exile.

  He sipped the coffee. It tasted like compliance.

  Exile used to mean distance. Now it meant chronology.

  You were not sent away. You were sent back.

  How far depended on how angry the company was and how useful your continued existence might be. Five years. Fifty. A century if you were unlucky. Rumors said the Corporate Temporal Administration could push someone back hundreds of thousands of years, though Buck had never seen it done. No one came back from those assignments. Or punishments. Same difference.

  Officially, time travel existed to stabilize the timeline. To correct anomalies. To keep reality reliable for corporate citizens.

  Unofficially, it was a weapon.

  History was not sacred. It was infrastructure. And infrastructure existed to be optimized.

  Buck finished his coffee, dressed, and checked his reflection in the darkened window. Late thirties by the calendar. Older in the eyes. Everyone looked older now. The world had that effect.

  Outside, New Cleveland was already waking up, lights flickering on layer by layer as the city climbed out of sleep. Somewhere beneath all of it, the timeline creaked and shifted under forces most people never saw.

  Buck grabbed his coat and headed for the door.