The Pulse of Memory: Sound reclaims the lost

In the shadow of Veridia's silent spires, where the air hums with a rhythm imposed rather than felt, the past lingers like a ghost caught in the static. I was born into this quiet, a child of Harmony's design, my earliest memories not of laughter or cries but of a steady, soothing pulse that threaded through every street, every mind. They called it peace, a gift of the Unification, but to me, it was a cage—beautiful, unbreakable, and empty. My name is Lena Voss, and I once believed my hands were meant to mend sound, to polish the rough edges of history into something the Archive could approve. I restored voices from a time before silence, voices raw with life—vendors haggling, children shouting, a goat's stubborn bleat. I loved them not for their chaos, but for their truth. Yet every file came to me scrubbed, the "volatile" stripped away by Harmony's unseen hands. I never questioned what was lost—until the day a whisper slipped through. It came from a transit recording, a routine announcement from Sector 7, its waveform pristine until I heard it: a voice, faint and frayed, cutting through the digital polish. "They're lying about the reservoir." Those words ignited something in me, a spark buried beneath years of compliance. I chased it, peeling back layers of sound, risking everything to uncover a truth the city had buried. This is not just my story, but theirs—the voices silenced, the memories erased, the lost reclaiming their song. Now, as I stand on the edge of rebellion, the hum of Veridia feels different. It's no longer a lullaby, but a warning. And in the spaces between its notes, I hear them—echoes of a past demanding to be heard, a future waiting to be voiced.