Etta Vale woke to the same programmed hum she had learned to take for granted: a low, steady vibration that rose through the maintenance grating beneath her cot and threaded the morning light into measured bands across the bare walls of her quarters. The city kept time in regulated pulses, and the pulses were a promise. They promised continuity. They promised that each morning would begin without the weight of the late hours that had gone before. They promised the peace of not carrying old wounds into new choices.
She dressed with the economy of someone who understood procedure the way others understood their names. Her uniform was the pale, service-gray of the Office of Continuity; her hands knew the sequence of clasps and seals by muscle memory. When she laced her boots she ran the procedure list in her head: check the interface coils, verify the sweep rods, confirm the register. Once the city had its rhythm, there was no room for improvisation. The Sweep did not forgive shortcuts.
On the way to the depot she passed citizens whose faces were the same shape of bland relief: small creases at the corners of eyes smoothed out by the Cycle’s clearing, voices that answered without a hesitation that might lead to argument. The removal of recent grief, grievance, the immediate past, had flattened the sharp edges of days into a tolerable plateau. People moved through their tasks with a certitude that was not exactly calm and not exactly blank. It was a texture the city administrators called stability, and it was sold as a trade-off—less history for less violence.
Etta had believed the trade-off for most of her adult life. She had signed the forms, trained on the instruments, filed her reports. As a maintenance analyst she entered the arteries of the Sweep and learned the machine’s small mercies. In the ducts and conduits beneath the inhabited blocks there were places where the apparatus was a mercy rather than a law: knotted wiring, a cup caught in a funnel, a stray shoelace. You could fix those things and move on. That was her work and it fit her like a second skin.
She found the artifact because she was attentive in the way her job required. A sensor flagged a minute irregularity: a thermal variance in a side-channel that should have been inert. The conduit was seldom inspected, a narrow crawlspace that carried nothing more than conditioned air and the faint hum of distant filters. Etta crawled in on her stomach with a lamp strapped to her forehead and the diagnostic wand in her free hand. The light skimmed over rivets, coal dust, a child's small scrawl scuffed out by repeated maintenance. Then her lamp found the paper—a small, folded rectangle, tucked flat against a maintenance hinge where no paper should survive long enough to lose its edges in the Flow.
It was a graphite sketch: delicate lines smudged into the fiber, a face suggested with a few precise strokes. No signature, no registry mark, simply a human drawing folded twice and placed where the Sweep’s passing current should have eroded it away. Etta’s first thought was professional: the object was an anomaly and her duty was to document and remove it. She set down her lamp and ran the scanner across the crease, watching the readout for contamination markers that indicated manufactured resistance. The reading quivered, then steadied. The composition read anomalous, but it did not register on the Sweep’s purge index the way organic memory pockets sometimes clued the instrument to a human attempt at concealment.