Forbidden Rules

From that day on, my gaze was involuntarily drawn to Asset 734. She became the sole variable in my monochrome world, a faint flicker of light that threatened to be extinguished at any moment.

A few days later, she deviated again. The White Chime had rung for the midday meal. All Assets were consuming the tasteless, white paste in their trays with identical speed and posture. But in the brief pause between swallows, Asset 734 used her index finger to trace a line in the condensation on the metal table.

It was an arc. A simple, almost clumsy curve, yet it was undeniably deliberate. It looked like the corner of a smile, or perhaps the sliver of a crescent moon.

My heart seized, nearly stopping in my chest. This wasn't a random twitch. This was creation. This was the most primitive artistic impulse, a behavior strictly forbidden by the rules. I stared, transfixed, at the delicate arc until it slowly evaporated into the sterile air, vanishing as if it had never existed. Asset 734, her face still a perfect blank, resumed her meal.

I did not report it. A war was raging within me. Logic, my training, my very survival instinct, screamed at me to follow the rules. But something deeper—perhaps my humanity, or the compassion I had inherited from my poet father and long despised as a weakness—held me back. I began to ponder a question I had actively avoided until now: Who were these "Assets"? Why were they here?

Curiosity, like a stubborn weed breaking through concrete, began to grow wildly, scorching my carefully constructed rationality. I decided to take a risk.

During the five-minute system reboot at the nightly shift change, I slipped away from the cameras and made my way to the records room. It was a dusty, cold chamber filled with the low hum of humming servers. Using a low-level access code I had memorized from a technical manual, I hacked into an old, unsecured database labeled "Pending Archival."

With a trembling hand, I opened a file. Asset 481. The file contained a pre-admission photograph of a man with a brilliant, sunny smile, standing in front of a bookstore. The "Reason for Correction" read: Severe Delusional Disorder. Chronic addiction to poetry composition. Social adaptability rated as "Dangerous."

I opened another. Asset 219. A woman, standing before an easel, her hands stained with paint, her eyes proud and bright. "Reason for Correction": Incorrigible Artistic Expressionism. Refusal to engage in standardized production work. Exhibits anti-social tendencies.

I clicked through file after file, a tide of horror rising to drown me. These were not madmen. They were not criminals. They were poets, painters, musicians, dreamers... They had been judged as "defective" and sent to this hell simply because their imaginations were too vivid, their personalities too strong, their emotions too vibrant. They were here to be ground down, to have their souls extracted, to be reshaped into mindless, productive machines.

Graystone wasn't correcting behavior. It was correcting humanity itself.

Finally, I found the file for Asset 734. The photo showed a young woman with long, dark hair sitting at a piano, a warm, serene smile on her face as sunlight graced her profile. Her name was Lina. "Reason for Correction": Composition and dissemination of "subversive, non-conformist melodies." Inability to integrate into the collectivist soundscape.

Attached to her file was a scanned image of a crumpled piece of paper, found in her pocket upon admission. It was a fragment of sheet music. There were only a few simple notes—Do, Re, Mi... No title, but they radiated a gentle, stubborn strength.

I burned the notes into my memory and fled back to my dormitory like a thief. I lay awake all night, staring into the darkness. My grandfather's words replayed in my mind. Lina, a living person who played the piano and smiled in the sun, had never lived a single day as herself in this place. And I—I was an accomplice in this process, a cold, unfeeling cog.

The Red Chime changed everything.

It was an ordinary afternoon, the echo of the Yellow Chime having just faded. I was conducting my routine observation when a shrill, soul-tearing siren erupted throughout the facility. Red lights began to flash frantically, bathing everything in a bloody crimson hue.

The Red Chime.

My body reacted before my brain could. Fear shot through my spine like an electric current. I scrambled toward the safety room in the corner of my observation booth, slammed the door, and locked it. I grabbed the acoustic earmuffs from the wall, clamped them over my ears, and curled into a ball, facing the cold, metal wall as I'd been instructed.

But the earmuffs couldn't block it all. A low, inhuman sound penetrated the barrier and drilled into my skull. It wasn't a scream or a wail. It was something far more terrifying: the thrum of high-voltage electricity, the grating sizzle of metal on bone, the wet, muffled sound of something being forcibly torn apart. The vibrations rattled my teeth and made me want to vomit.

Curiosity, that fatal flaw, gnawed at me like a venomous snake. I fought the urge to turn around, to peek through the seam of the door. But I didn't dare. Supervisor Evans's emotionless face materialized in my mind: Curiosity is the leading cause of death at Graystone.

Time lost all meaning. I don't know if it was minutes or hours, but eventually, the Red Chime stopped. The world fell silent again. I waited a full ten minutes before I dared to remove the earmuffs and open the door.

The corridor was empty, but the air was thick with the acrid smell of ozone and burnt protein.

I returned to my observation post and looked down. In Workroom Three, all the Assets were back at their stations, as if nothing had happened. They continued their work, their movements still precise, still mechanical.

But something was different.

There were several spots on the floor that were suspiciously clean, as if they had just been scrubbed with a powerful chemical agent. And then I noticed it. Five workstations were empty. I counted again and again. Five. The five "Assets," along with every trace of their existence, had simply vanished.

My gaze swept across the rows of gray figures, and my heart sank into a pit of ice.

Asset 734, Lina, was still there. But she was not okay. Her movements were slow and stiff, like a rusty automaton. To my horror, I saw a fresh, coin-sized circular brand on the back of her neck, near her spine. The skin was faintly red, as if recently seared by something hot. Her hands, resting on the workstation, were trembling uncontrollably.

I understood instantly. The Red Chime wasn't an alarm.

It was a "maintenance protocol." When "Atavistic Phenomena" accumulated to a certain threshold, when the suppressed sparks of humanity began to rekindle, the Red Chime would sound. Then, something—I didn't dare imagine what—would come in to perform a brutal "cleansing" and "reset." Those deemed beyond repair were "recycled." Those who could still be "salvaged" were subjected to a deeper form of conditioning, their nascent self-awareness seared back into ashes.

Lina had just endured it. The arc she had drawn, her silent hum—they had brought this calamity upon her.

And I—the one who should have reported her, the one who, out of a shred of pathetic pity, had remained silent—I had pushed her directly into the inferno of the Red Chime. If I had reported her earlier, perhaps she would have only received a minor "recalibration." Not this. Not this near-total destruction.

Guilt and terror seized my throat like two giant hands. I couldn't bear it anymore. I was not a cog. I was a man. And I could not stand by and watch a living soul be tortured into nothingness before my very eyes.

I had to do something. I had to make her remember who she was.

A desperate, insane plan began to form in my mind.