The Echo Loom

The morning arrived on Loomhaven like a sigh through an old fabric: warm, slow, threaded with smells. Marta Iversen opened her window and the city poured in — a low hum of trams on magnetic rails, the metallic-sweet tang of recycled rain, and somewhere above, the fine, constant tinkle of the Echo Loom. The Loom was a lattice of translucent filaments stretched across the habitat's dome, woven with resonant alloys and living cilia that stored more than signal: the city kept its history in pattern and pitch. Children learned lullabies from its pulses; elders read anniversaries in its shimmer. Marta had been a weft-technician once, fingers accustomed to coaxing memory into a neat braid. Now her hands smelled of basil and solder as she tended a rooftop garden where tomato vines climbed a shuttered solar mesh and a small drone sunbathed like a cat.

She was sixty-seven and moved with the particular economy of someone who had learned the long choreography of survival. Her apartment held tools from two lives: an old loom needle with a softened brass handle that had traced the first civic songs after the Arrival, and a rusting kettle that whistled with the same stubborn cheer as the ship's old boilers. On the windowsill a pot of memory-orchids — brittle leaves grafted with tiny resonance chips — pulsed faintly when she touched them. The orchids hummed with Hal's voice in minor keys sometimes, a private ghost she never turned off.

Across the corridor, a child named Theo pressed his forehead to the glass and tried to catch a filament's light. His laugh was raw and small and used to lace itself into the Loom's cadence. When Marta was younger she had taught Theo's mother how to stitch a lullaby; now Theo's mother worked nights as a medic in a floating clinic. Their world had always been a weave of trades and favors, and Marta liked it that way. She liked the leaning rhythm of neighboring lives stacked like ply-wood, each layer supporting the next.

On that morning the Loom's tone shivered oddly. Marta felt it like a wrong note under her fingernail: a filament pulsed out of sequence, its color leaning from the usual opal to a gray that tasted like static. Theo's laugh faltered, caught in the space between two pulses. Marta frowned and put a hand on the glass. Below, maintenance drones flashed amber; a ribbon of notification uncoiled along the tramline with the word UNTAGGED in blunt capitals. She had seen frays before — a power surge, a storm, a miscalibrated update. Those healed. This felt different, like a thread being cut from inside.