An Unwritten Code
District 1 was a monument of perfection and control, where every light and shadow followed a rigid order, dictated by those unknown. From a distance, the city looked pristine, untouchable, far removed from the grime of certain other Districts. But inside the opulent corridors, beneath the grandeur of crystal chandeliers and scented air, there were fractures. Invisible to those who lived at the pinnacle of The Dome’s hierarchy, but undeniable to those who weren’t meant to belong.
Drayton had learned to walk unnoticed, for as a non pure blood he had no place in District 1, but his skillset granted him temporary rights. A high ranking cybernetic architect for Porter Industries, his designs shaped the neural framework of the city's artificial intelligence, dictating how its cybernetic infrastructure functioned. He understood every automated response, every surveillance bypass, every weak point buried beneath layers of polished perfection. But even he was careful, head down, steps measured. The wrong gaze, the wrong interaction, and the city would erase him from its records like an anomaly never meant to exist.
And yet, there was her.
Cassiel moved with an effortless grace. Unlike the rigidly practiced elegance of pure bloods, her presence was intoxicating in its natural, captivating allure. She was tall, her frame broad yet poised, exuding a calm confidence. Her long blonde hair cascaded in waves, framing a face that held a warmth which was impossible to ignore. When she smiled, it was unguarded, addictive, untouched by pretence. She wasn’t like the others, that’s why he noticed her.
She noticed him too, though she kept it guarded, giving him just enough to catch onto, yet never enough for anyone else to suspect. A glance stolen in passing, a hesitation so brief it could be dismissed as coincidence. It was subtle, careful, something only he would recognise and question at the same time.
It had started at the Lustral Gallery, an exhibition of curated relics from a world long past. Cassiel had been there out of obligation, a presence expected rather than wanted. Drayton was there overseeing the integration of security measures to protect the priceless exhibits. She wasn’t supposed to speak to him. But that didn’t stop her.
It happened by the observation deck, where the gallery’s enormous windows stretched to vaulted ceilings, offering a perfect view of the city beyond. He had been making adjustments to the security interface, his fingers flicking through transparent data panels hovering in the air, when her voice cut through the quiet.
“That looks complicated.”
Drayton didn’t turn immediately. He wasn’t sure if the resident was talking directly to him. When he finally glanced over, she was watching him with that unreadable expression, her posture casual, effortless.
“Depends on who’s looking at it,” he replied casually.
Cassiel took a slow step closer, tilting her head slightly. "And what do you see?"
Drayton hesitated. The answer should have been simple, lines of code, security overlays, efficiency protocols. But her presence made it feel like his whole life hinged on this question.
"Patterns," he said finally. "Some that work. Some that don’t."
She smiled, just a little. "Sounds like life."
He gave a little smirk. "A bit cleaner than life. Less room for mistakes. Less time to realise you made one."
Cassiel’s gaze didn’t waver. "Maybe mistakes make things more interesting."
He raised an eyebrow, his voice edged with curiosity. "Are you making one right now?"
Cassiel's smile turned playful, like she knew exactly what she was doing. "Probably. But some things are worth it."
They were just words exchanged between two people, nothing more than a polite interaction, almost inconsequential, but these few words would lead to one of the most pivotal love stories the Dome had ever envisioned.
Six months passed like a dream neither of them wanted to wake from, with each day pulling them deeper out of control. What started as an undeniable attraction became something neither of them could let go of. The world around them faded, every ordinary moment meaningless, irrelevant. Life had become only about secret meetings under the trees at midnight, heartfelt messages disguised as harmless data streams, stolen moments by the plaza fountain with whispered confessions becoming unbreakable vows.
The real twist? Cassiel was already taken. A partnership arranged long before she'd met Drayton. Her fiancé was everything District 1 expected, polite, kind, powerful, refined, the perfect match for a Prime. But every moment with Drayton made it clearer. She had chosen wrong. Or, more accurately, she had never chosen at all.
He tried to tell her it couldn’t last. That she should be with him, but every time he tried to pull away, she pulled him back with nothing more than a look, a whisper, a touch.
"Tell me you don't love me," she had murmured once in his dimly lit apartment, her fingers tracing the outline of his jaw.
Drayton swallowed hard, shaking his head. "I can't."
"Then stop pretending we have a choice."
But choices had consequences, and the first cracks started. It was small at first, a delayed message, a silence stretching longer than it should. Then, a change in her patterns. The quiet confidence she once carried in their stolen moments began to fade, her smiles slipping at the edges.
And then, one Wednesday she was gone.
No message, no explanation. No nothing. That was when the warning came.
A simple message followed, hidden in a line of code at work, left where only Drayton would find it. SEEK.
Drayton stood silent. His eyes locked on the word. Adrenaline suddenly surged through his veins. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t stand still. He had to find her.
He retraced all the steps, every place they’d been. Nothing.
Her home? Vacant. Not just empty, wiped clean, like the soul had been removed from it. He turned to what he knew best: systems architecture. It was his weapon of choice, the thing that made sense when nothing else did.
However hard he burrowed, no digital footprint, no security traces, no biometric pings, just an empty void where her data should have been.
He searched, hunted, ripped through every archive, every fragment of data the city had ever stored on residents. But every path collapsed before him. Every trace of Cassiel was missing.
The harder he fought, the more the black hole of depression was closing in on him.
There had to be a way to find her. He’d checked every archive, every entry. But there was still one connection he hadn’t searched. Himself.
His fingers hovered mid air over the virtual keyboard before he forced them to move. Slow, deliberate keystrokes: D, R, A, Y, T, O, N, M, A, R, T, I, N, I. The letters of his name.
The system blinked. Processing…
The wait dragged on, each second stretching unbearably long. His pulse pounded in his ears, drowning out everything. He needed something, anything, but the screen remained unchanged.
Then, it happened: SYSTEM QUERY COMPLETE… NOTHING FOUND.
The screen remained blank. There was nothing. No employment history. No clearance logs. No digital paper trail. He didn’t exist either.
His throat tightened. He ran it again. And again. Hands shaking, sweat pooling down his back. He dived deeper, overriding restrictions he had once built himself. Same result, again and again.
His fingers clenched into fists, his vision going blurry. He felt like the world was folding in on itself, suffocating him with the sheer weight of what was happening.
He staggered back, ran outside, desperate for the fresh air to help, but it didn't. His eyes darted around, whilst his brain tried to take in the information that just shattered his perception of everything. It was all too much.
A butterfly glided past, natural, effortless. Drayton focused on its motion, trying to lose himself in its beauty, if only for a second. Without warning, the butterfly stuttered mid flight, flickering like a corrupted frame in a broken movie. It flipped upside down for a second, then corrected itself as if nothing had happened. His mind tried to process it, but the information overload had disturbed his sense of reality. His eyes darted back, wanting the butterfly to glitch again, to confirm what he saw, but it flew on as if nothing had happened.
He scoured his surroundings further, searching for anomalies. A streetlamp on the corner flickered erratically, its glow pulsing out of sync with the others. Was it nothing or was it something? A child on the other side of the street dropped a toy. It clattered to the ground, but the sound of the toy connecting with the ground was ever so slightly delayed. Something definitely wasn’t right.
A resident walked past him, nodded as he passed. Drayton locked onto his extravagant wristwatch. The watch looked correct, but the seconds hand was moving in reverse. Not in a broken, jittery way, but smoothly, confidently, as if time itself was wrong.
His stomach flipped. He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, then re opened them, focusing his glare on the watch hand again. It was still running backwards.
A reflection in a shop window didn’t match. The pedestrians moved normally on the street, but in the glass, they lagged behind, half a second too slow, their movements out of sync.
Drayton was trying to put two and two together, and getting seven. This wasn’t exhaustion. It wasn’t paranoia. The city was fractured.
“Oh fuck,” he realised, “it’s all a fucking simulation!”
Why? Why had someone built this illusion? Why was he inside it? Was anything he had ever known real, or had his entire life been in this construct?
Drayton ran to the nearest core access terminal. He bypassed the standard security layers without thought, descending deeper, crawling through the raw foundation of the city’s code. Lines of unreadable script bled across the screen, ancient subroutines running in the background like echoes of something long forgotten. This wasn’t just a system. It was something ancient, something buried deep beneath the city’s digital skin. He spent hours tunnelling through subroutines, bypassing layers of encryption, tracing the remnants of forgotten processes. Then, in the lowest level of the code, he found it.
YMOSR-19731994
His fingers hovered over the file name, pulse hammering. He clicked it open.
The file listed out information at an unprecedented speed, scrolling faster than his eyes could track.
Drayton was in District 4. The Dome’s classified experimental sector, a place hidden even from The Dome’s elite, where simulated worlds were tested and rewritten. His entire life, his work, his memories, all fabricated data inside a controlled environment. But his emotions, his choices, those had been real, right? They had to be, otherwise, what was left of the real him?
The screen flickered. A message appeared.
DRAYTON.
His pulse couldn't take much more of this. Hesitant for the first time. He opened it.
The screen flickered again, and lines of text began to appear, one after the other.
Drayton… if you're reading this, it means I was right.
They tried to erase me, but I fought to leave this behind for you.
You see it now, don’t you? The truth hidden beneath the lies.
They built this to observe, to manipulate, to test the boundaries of fate itself.
They wanted to know if love was nothing more than chemical reactions and learned behaviours, or if something primal, cosmic could defy the very fabric of logic.
Could destiny override programming? Could an artificial construct make choices not dictated by code, but by an unseen force that keeps pulling the same two souls together across infinite iterations?
We are their greatest anomaly.
Every time they reset the world, every time they rewrote the rules, we still found each other. They threw every obstacle at us, class, power, distance, time. None of it mattered. We are destined to be together. We are the unwritten code that can never be written.
Find me, Drayton. I know you’ll come, you always do.
Find me… and FIGHT FOR ME!
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