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In a city governed by the Norm Protocol, human feelings are quantified and redistributed. Kira, a plant operator, discovers an anomalous memory resonant and risks everything to force the system to listen. The third chapter follows the attempted broadcast, the consequences of exposure, and the quiet, stubborn spread of reclaimed recollections.
Kira had learned to measure her life in hums and clicks. The plant breathed in calibrated pulses: a low, mechanical intake that ran the conveyors, a lighter staccato as scanners read the bottles and a patient, high note from the sealing presses. She watched them like a heart and timed her steps to the rhythm so she would not stumble, so her gloved hands would always be where the system expected them. Work was a sequence of small certainties — lift, align, press, stamp, release — and the certainty of the Norm Protocol wrapped everything in a veneer of safety. People liked safety because it sounded like stability; stability felt like a trade they were willing to make.
The room where she spent the long hours was stripped of color. Fluorescent tubes lined the ceiling in straight rows, casting light that flattened texture and softened edges. Panels on the walls displayed ratios and indexes, numbers that translated human states into distributions and quotas. Each index was a promise: sorrow allocated here, joy portioned there, anger throttled until its frequency matched the communal tolerance. Kira sorted the capsules as if she were sorting small glass fossils — each one labeled with a set of metrics and a routing stamp. In the old stories people had kept whole albums and trunks of memories; the Protocol had taught them to store feelings like provisions. It was efficient. It was clean.
Her station hummed with the echoes of other people’s measured lives. She had been taught to approach emotion with the same clinical detachment that the machines showed: record the spike, weigh it against the baseline, redirect if necessary. The training emphasized that memories could be contagious, that unmanaged surges endangered everyone. The motto flashed on a low screen above the belt: MAINTAIN THE BALANCE. Uphold the Norm. The phrase had the weight of law and the comfort of a lullaby, repeated until its edges dulled. Kira believed in the mechanics of it because she had to — belief made the noises less sharp and the nights easier to bear.