Signals for the Morning Market

The city woke with a program. Before the first vending carts unfolded and before sky-sweepers finished their gentle rinses of the boulevards, Etta Voss already had her palms on the console. The tuning bay smelled faintly of baked oil and solder—her apprentice used to joke that good calibration required both—and she liked that domestic tang more than she would admit. It was a useful lie to tell herself: that what she did was ordinary, a trade like baker or station-mender. It kept the cynicism from acquiring muscle.

Her fingers moved as if they remembered the shape of each knob. She coaxed a phase-lag into submission, nudged a mid-band down a hair, listened for the way the city inhaled and — crucially — did not cough. The morning program had three objectives: wake without panic, invite measured sociability, and keep the spontaneous peaks under the municipal threshold. There were official names for those targets, of course, printed on laminated inserts in the regulation folder; but in practice the work was tactile and occasionally a smudge of improvisation. She tightened a clamp with her teeth, tilted a scope, and threaded a micro-lumen through a parked emitter array.

On the status slate a new advisory chimed: installation notice for an anchor filter at Market District. Etta did not stiffen; she pinched the bridge of her nose and let the notification smear across her pupils. Anchors were a new breed of scrubbers, sleek and clever; they promised pristine mornings by surgically excising unregistered sound. As policy they were tidy. As practice they were blunt.

She knelt beneath the console to swap a silicone seal and the apprentice's radio—hardwired into the bench for training—blew a brief, comical puff of static, like a disgruntled pigeon. Etta snorted, a private laugh. “If the morning playlist had one more synth pad, it would probably file taxes for us,” she muttered, and the sound of her own joke was lighter than the numbers on her shift report.

When she rose, the bay's viewport revealed the Market strip: low stalls wrapped in pale canvas, steam from citrus fritters drifting in neat coils, and a child in a yellow scarf playing with a kite whose tail rattled small metal bells. Those bells were not part of her assignment; they belonged to the neighborhood. She made a mental note of the kettle-black sign over stall nine—Kai's breakfast cart—its painted eggs and a single crooked note that someone had chalked there the way people once wrote names on storefronts.