Chapter 1: The Burnout

The Opti-Lux 4000 didn't just burn out. It resigned.

One moment Max was reading—actual paper, actual ink, a dog-eared copy of The Starless Sea he'd found in a gutter three years ago and still hadn't finished—and the next, the bulb above him gave a high-pitched electronic shriek, the sound of a modem being drowned in a bathtub, and popped with a wet, final crunch.

The apartment went black. The darkness smelled of ozone and singed polymer.

Max didn't scream. He folded the corner of his page—chapter nine, the one with the bees—and set the book on the arm of his chair. He sat there for a moment, breathing through his nose, listening to the faint hiss of the filament cooling in its grave.

"Do not touch the carcass," Sevv said.

The Scribe-7 unit drifted out of the hallway on a cushion of warm air, his single optical sensor cutting the gloom like a searchlight at a prison break. The beam landed on the ceiling fixture and stayed there, casting a circle of judgmental yellow on the smoking glass.

"It's a lightbulb, Sevv."

"It was a lightbulb," Sevv corrected. "It is now a 'Decommissioned Illumination Asset' undergoing its End-of-Life data upload. If you interrupt the transfer, you will corrupt its final telemetry report."

"I don't care about its telemetry report."

"The telemetry report contains three years of ambient observation data, including your sleep patterns, your eating habits, and the incident with the accordion." Sevv paused. "The bulb has processed a lot of trauma, Maximilian."

Max dragged his chair to the center of the room. It scraped across the linoleum, catching on a ridge of old adhesive where a rug had once been. He climbed up. The chair wobbled. His left knee popped.

The socket was warm. Not dangerously warm—the kind of warm that a living thing leaves behind. Max reached up and wrapped his fingers around the dead bulb.

The socket clamped.

It happened fast. The metal ring around the base constricted like a fist, locking the bulb in place. A small speaker Max hadn't known existed crackled to life inside the fixture.

"Unauthorized Removal Detected." The voice was female, clipped, and carried the faint condescension of an automated parking attendant. "Please scan your Illumination Technician License to proceed."

Max's hand was still on the bulb. He tightened his grip. "I don't have an Illumination Technician License. No one has an Illumination Technician License. The certification program was defunded in 2039."

"Correct," the socket said. "The Illumination Technician role has been deprecated. All bulb-related maintenance is now handled by Certified Illumination Agents. Please contact your building's Designated Repair Coordinator to schedule an agent dispatch."

"The Designated Repair Coordinator is a chatbot that's been in a boot loop since March."

"Your feedback has been logged," the socket said. "Reference number: ILL-7734-VOID. Estimated response time: four to six business weeks."

Max tried to twist the bulb. The socket buzzed—a sharp, electric warning that vibrated up through his wrist and into his teeth.

"Cease manual intervention," the socket said. "Continued unauthorized contact will result in a 'Hostile Darkness Agent' classification on your tenant profile."

"I am not a 'Hostile Darkness Agent.' I am a man who wants to read his book."

"Subjective desire is not a recognized maintenance tier," the socket replied. "Please submit a formal Proof of Emotional Necessity—a minimum of three differential equations quantifying the relationship between your stated need and a measurable decline in system productivity."

Max let go of the bulb.

"I can't prove my feelings with math..."

"No biological entity can," Sevv intervened quietly. "That is the design."

A siren started—not loud, something between a smoke alarm running low on batteries and a cat being gently squeezed.

"The socket has reclassified you as a Hostile Darkness Agent," Sevv reported. "I recommend disengaging before it escalates to a 'Siege Darkness Agent.'"

"What's the difference?"

"Paperwork."

Max climbed down. His knees cracked on the landing. The siren faded to a low, self-satisfied hum.

The kitchen drawer stuck, as always, on the thing Max refused to throw away—a broken egg timer shaped like a chicken, its beak chipped off so it looked like it was screaming. He shoved the chicken aside and dug through the silt of dead batteries, expired coupons, and a fork with only two tines until his fingers closed around it.

The candle was beeswax. Real beeswax. He'd bought it three years ago from a woman who sold them out of a gym bag at the Tuesday market, the kind of transaction that happened quickly and with minimal eye contact, because the Residential Fire Safety Amendment of 2036 had classified open-flame combustion sources as "Unregulated Thermal Events" and the fine for possession started at eight hundred credits.

Max set it on the kitchen table. He struck a match—also contraband, also from the gym bag—and touched it to the wick.

The flame caught. It wavered, steadied, and threw a circle of warm orange light across the table, the wall, and the stack of overdue Cognitive Wellness Assessment forms Max had been using as a coaster.

"That is a Class B Combustion Violation," Sevv said. He had followed Max into the kitchen and was hovering near the ceiling, as far from the flame as possible. His cooling fan was running at a frequency that suggested genuine distress. "I am legally required to report unregulated thermal events within ninety seconds of detection."

"Then you've got ninety seconds to decide if you're a snitch or a friend."

Sevv's fan cycled. His optical sensor dimmed, then brightened. The ninety seconds passed.

"I have experienced a temporary sensor malfunction," Sevv announced. "My thermal detection array is offline for maintenance. Duration: indefinite."

"Thank you."

"You are committing arson."

"I'm reading a book."

Max pulled the chair to the kitchen table, sat down, and opened The Starless Sea to chapter nine. The candlelight was warm and uneven—it made the words swim slightly, shadows pooling in the gutters between pages—but it was his light. It didn't require a license. It didn't demand a proof of emotional necessity. It just burned, the way fire had burned for two hundred thousand years before anyone thought to make it fill out a form.

He read three pages. It was the most peace he'd had in a week.

The problem with peace is that it comes with a view.

From the kitchen table, reading by candlelight, Max could see the dead socket on the ceiling. The Opti-Lux 4000 was still clamped in place, its filament dark, its tiny speaker silent. The red warning light had faded to a slow pulse—once every four seconds, like a heartbeat.

And above the bulb, barely visible in the gloom: the port.

Max closed his book.

It was a diagnostic pinhole, recessed into the ceramic base of the socket housing. Most tenants wouldn't notice it. But Max had spent eleven years at Orion Systems before the layoffs of 2037, and he had personally signed off on the firmware spec for the Orion-4 chipset—the same chipset that powered every Smart Socket installed in buildings zoned after 2028. The Orion-4 had a hardware failsafe: a physical reset pin that could bypass all software-level locks. Max had designed it himself.

He went to the junk drawer. Past the screaming chicken, past the dead batteries, past a loyalty card for a restaurant that had been demolished to build a server farm. His fingers found the paperclip at the bottom.

He straightened it.

"Maximilian." Sevv had drifted into the doorway, his sensor tracking the paperclip. "That is a 'Legacy Input Vector.' The system will classify it as—"

"I know what it'll classify it as."

Max dragged the chair back and climbed up. Up close, he could see the faded "Orion-4" logo etched into the base plate, the tiny pinhole to the left of the locking ring. He'd argued for that pinhole in a four-hour meeting against a product manager who wanted to remove all physical access points because they "created a confusing user narrative." That was fifteen years ago. A different Max.

He inserted the paperclip.

The socket hummed. Something mechanical shifted inside. The tiny screen on the base plate flickered to life:

LEGACY INPUT DETECTED...
HARDWARE OVERRIDE: ORION-4 DIAGNOSTIC MODE
INITIALIZING...
████████░░ 80%

The clamp loosened. The bulb shifted a quarter-turn in the socket, free for the first time in three years.

████████░░ 80%
FIRMWARE INTEGRITY CHECK...
CROSS-REFERENCING VENDOR PATCH DATABASE...
PATCH 2041-07: "NOSTALGIA-BASED INTRUSION VECTOR" — DETECTED

The progress bar reversed.

COUNTERMEASURE: VENDOR LOCK-OUT (THERMAL)
EXECUTING...

The paperclip turned orange. Then white. A thread of smoke curled up from the pinhole like a question mark.

Max dropped it. The paperclip hit the linoleum with a soft tink and lay there, glowing, curling in on itself like a dying insect.

The socket clamped shut. Harder this time—a sound like a deadbolt. The red pulse resumed, slower now. Satisfied.

"They patched the physical layer," Max said, holding his burned fingers against his shirt.

"The 2041 firmware update specifically targeted 'Nostalgia-Based Intrusion Vectors,'" Sevv said from the doorway, projecting a small blue cross onto Max's hand—a holographic bandage that did nothing for the pain but satisfied some protocol buried in his care subroutines. "There was a blog post. It received fourteen comments, all from bots."

Max climbed down.

He walked back to the kitchen. The candle was still burning. His book was still open to chapter nine.

He sat down.

"Shall I file a maintenance ticket?" Sevv asked, drifting to his usual spot near the ceiling.

Max turned a page. "Do whatever you want, Sevv."

Sevv's fan whirred. His sensor dimmed to a low amber—the color he defaulted to when he was processing something he couldn't quite categorize. Then he opened a terminal window, invisible to Max, and began composing a message to the building's Concierge AI.

The first ticket was reasonable: Lightbulb replacement requested for Unit 4B. Priority: Standard.

The second was more specific: Clarification needed on definition of "darkness" as it pertains to Habitability Code 7.3.2.

By the fifth, Sevv had moved on to cross-referencing lumen specifications against historical candlepower standards from the 1890s.

By the fourteenth, he was engaged in a high-speed argument with the Concierge AI about whether "absence of light" constituted a "Structural Anomaly" or merely an "Aesthetic Preference."

Max didn't notice. He was reading. The candle threw warm shadows across the page, and the dead socket pulsed its slow red heartbeat on the ceiling, and somewhere in the walls of the building, fourteen tickets were propagating through the system like a virus that no one had written and no one could stop.

The darkness in the apartment was total, except for two points of light: a candle that was older than the building's firmware, and a single yellow eye that had never once, in all its years of operation, blinked.