The Hours We Keep

Arin moved through the morning with the practiced absence of one who had learned to make the city's dullness bearable. The building that housed the Temporal Regulation Office rose like a cooled breath above the tramlines, its facade paneled in matte glass that reflected a sky always the color of tempered metal. Inside, the halls were quiet by design: soundscapes piped from the authority's speakers kept tones within a narrow band, smoothing the edges of impulse even before technicians touched a console. People in the corridors wore the same measured gait, a rhythm set by the hour's Pulse announced on thin displays—three minutes of warm frequencies to settle the day's affect, a short neutralizer to trim aberrant peaks.

Arin's hands remembered sequences. He had spent more years than he cared to count calibrating for clients of all ranks: elders who could not bear the sharpness of grief, laborers whose shifts required duller appetites, young parents petitioning to temper a child's flash of fear. He adjusted dials, read graphs, replaced capsules that fed the smoothing matrix with micro-resonances attuned to population indices. His job required a kind of clinical affection: to tidy the emotional weather for strangers, to ease away storms so that cities could sleep through thunder.

He kept his own questions flat and manageable. The authority had explanations in pamphlets and broadcasts: the smoothing system reduced suffering, mitigated radicalization, stabilized production. It was framed as mercy, as a civic medicine dispensed at regular intervals. For most, the arrangement was indistinguishable from the air they breathed. Arin told himself he agreed, because confession would be disruptive; he told himself the practice made sense because he had seen clients come back with steadier voices. Still, the office's routines had a silence at their center that sat poorly with him—an almost palpable exclusion, as if some part of human life had been deemed too costly to keep.