Mara woke to the low, ordered hum that had been stitched into the city’s dawn since before she was old enough to make sense of it. The wall module over her bed ticked its small confirmation pulse, a thin sound like a micro-siren softened by cloth and sleep. Outside the flat, the world synchronized: shutters rose with the morning wave, transit lines checked their schedules against the Pulse Grid, and the Registry’s intake shutters blinked open on time. It was a sound that promised coherence — that your days would be legible, your recollections fitted with the city's shape. People called it the morning protocol; officials called it the daily calibration. For Mara, it had the daily comfort of a clock that had somehow learned to contain every argument under one neat face. She dressed by its rhythm.
Mara's flat was small in a way that said everything had been designed to give less. Her shelf held a single potted plant, a stack of sanctioned printouts explaining memory hygiene, and a faded photograph stuck behind the meter: two small hands and a strand of a promise she couldn’t name. When she left, she passed the public noticeboard where citizens queued for permits; the holograph above it flickered a smiling face saying the standard phrase — Stability is the gift of order. She moved through the morning with registry-quiet steps because she worked at the Registry and the rhythm of honesty was part apprenticeship and part fear. She believed the system. Not with the kind of blind zeal that officials ascribed to zealots, but with a daily practicality: the city had laws, the city kept disorders at bay, and the Ministry supplied the terms by which private grief could fit publicly acceptable outlines.
At the Registry, the air had an antiseptic warmth. Walls of data pods lined the intake hall, soft lights showing the load of records to be processed. Mara’s station was near the central terminal, where she had learned to read omissions as quickly as entries. Clerks moved like trained librarians, hands folding around digital sleeves, fingers pressing the soft icons that declared some recollection obsolete and others legitimate. Most days it was nothing dramatic — calibrations that clipped a night of fear from a profile, a smoothing out of a decade with one careful mnemonic adjustment. On some days the paperwork felt like kindness; on others, like erasure masquerading as sanitation. They had taught her the difference between harmful rumination and destabilizing memory, and she took her training seriously.