The city woke the way it always did: not with light but with layers. A low current of tram-bass that shivered under the pavements, a tilted chorus of building vents that answered each other in careful intervals, the hollow whine of delivery drones carrying clipped conversations stitched into their hulls. June Park could read the morning by pitch the way other people read clocks. She had spent twenty-eight years learning to listen like a worker reads a gauge—small differences, the subtlest tremor that meant a wire was loose or a memory file had begun to fray. That talent paid more reliably than a music degree ever did.
June's kettle announced itself the way all the city's small appliances did: not with heat but with a recorded trill, a borrowed snippet of a morning show wrapped into the small ceremonial act. It was, she thought as she packed her satchel, another part of the economy. People paid for sound the way they paid for water here. Voices, laughter, signatures of a singer's vibrato—those things were collected, quantified, and used as power and as comfort. The Pulse Authority licensed the collectors, regulated the meters, and told citizens the extraction was voluntary and efficient. The truth, she suspected, was always best understood in the margins.
Her brother's laugh, a high quick thing that used to puncture the apartment's mornings, was the first thing June missed when she stepped out. Rafi had paused at the door with a canvas messenger bag and a last-minute grin—he'd been trying to flatter an old credit, June thought—and the grin had stayed long enough for June to feel its absence like a bruise. He'd been short for weeks. A stack of bills rustled unread on the counter; he would have said, later, that some debts could be solved with quick favors and easy-sourced sound. The market taught certain trade rules: sell a phrase, buy rice; trade a chorus for the hospital co-pay. She had been careful, practical. Rafi, at sixteen, was soft with the kind of optimism that made debt into a dare.
June walked the route she always took to the exchange, the courier circuits stitched through back alleys and service corridors where sound packets could be handed without the city's big meters scraping a cut. She delivered archived lullabies to a nursery three blocks over—old human recordings that the city's younger children were taught to recognize as their ancestors' strands. In return, the nursery paid her with a handful of low-tier tones she could resell, and with gossip. Rumors traveled faster than sanctioned broadcasts; they were currency too, if you could render them into something useful. The rumor this morning was small and bitter: another local had “gone mute” after signing a micro-debt contract. June's hands tightened around the handle of the carrying case. A pattern had a way of expanding.
Outside, the city pressed in. Sidewalk speakers piped curated ambiance—calibrated laughter to reduce stress on crowded transit platforms, brief instrumental keys to keep children pacified while parents worked. The Pulse Authority's logo appeared on a billboard across the street: a concentric wave, sterile and bright, promising balance. Below, an advertisement offered a package deal: convert a lifetime of songs into immediate credit. The text read like a kindness. Beneath those lines June saw possibility and a pocket of danger. She felt it like static at the base of her skull: small, insistent, the kind of worry that could grow into a bruise if you left it unattended.