The Barefoot Gospel

  (circulated quietly in the City)

  We were given houses without doors

  and told it was freedom.

  They fed us until we forgot hunger

  and called it mercy.

  Our feet never touched the ground,

  so we forgot the shape of the earth.

  Beware the city that loves you too much.

  It is eating you slowly.

  Two hundred and seventy-three years had passed since the water swallowed the world.

  Long enough for the Flood to become infrastructure.

  Long enough for survivors to become citizens.

  Long enough for children to be born who had never seen land unmeasured, or sky unregulated, or bodies that carried their own beginnings.

  The City did not call it survival anymore.It called it stability.

  The City did not look like a prison. That was its genius.

  From above, it appeared immaculate—an engineered isle of white terraces and glass arcs floating on a calm, obedient sea. Sunlight bent where it was told to bend. Weather arrived on schedule. Nothing rusted. Nothing aged unless permitted.

  People lived well here.

  No one paid rent. No one worried about food, fuel or illness. Apartments adjusted temperature to individual preference. Walls displayed whatever view calmed you most: forests that no longer existed, skies too blue to be real, oceans without memory.

  Every citizen had a port.

  It sat low on the abdomen, smooth and pale, set where a belly button should have been. A soft oval of embedded alloy marked the place where birth had been redesigned. When connected, it hummed gently—like a cat purring, like approval. Through it flowed the City: news, entertainment, companionship, workless productivity, pleasure tuned to exact neurological thresholds.

  Most people were plugged in more often than not.

  Why wouldn’t they be? The City asked very little in return.

  Once a month, citizens reported to a local intake clinic—bright, friendly spaces staffed by people who smiled with their eyes. A painless extraction followed: a draw of genetic material, a sampling of DNA, a renewal of identity.

  The City called it contribution.

  For most citizens, it ended with DNA—cells skimmed, catalogued, forgotten. For others, additional contributions were quietly scheduled: fluid samples, hormonal data, reproductive readiness markers. Semen was collected and labeled. Menstrual blood was logged, filtered, preserved. The future was extracted in increments small enough not to feel like theft.

  The City did not call this harvesting.

  They named it participation.

  Freddie stood in line for intake with her hands in her pockets, her fingers unconsciously brushing the soft hollow at her abdomen where her port plugged in.

  “First time this cycle?” the woman ahead of her asked cheerfully.

  Freddie nodded.

  “You’ll get used to it,” the woman said. “It’s nothing. And it keeps everything free.”

  Free. The word floated everywhere in the City, light as dust.

  Freddie watched a screen on the wall looping a public message: smiling families, well-designed children, oceans kept politely at bay by unseen systems.

  You are safe.

  You are cared for.

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  You are free.

  She wondered where people went when they weren’t.

  No one talked about the Outer Rim. Officially, it was an outdated infrastructure layer—a relic from early post-Flood logistics. An old maintenance zone. Necessary, but irrelevant.

  Unofficially, it was where people disappeared.

  Freddie had grown up hearing the word spoken like a joke, or a threat. Whispered.

  Careful, or you’ll end up on the Rim.

  Don’t say that. That’s Rim talk.

  Once, when she was younger, she’d asked her instructor what actually happened there. The instructor’s smile remained intact, but something behind it shut down.“You don’t need to know about systems that keep you safe,” she’d said. “That’s the point of them.”

  Freddie stepped into the intake room. The technician scanned her wrist, then her face—then paused. His eyes flicked down, sharp and practiced.

  “Hold still,” he said, too quickly. The screen hesitated before filling with data.

  “Rare marker,” the technician said, smoothing his voice. “Congenital variance.”

  He smiled again. It didn’t reach his eyes.

  “You’ll be on an adjusted contribution schedule,” he added. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Healthy,” he continued. “Compliant. Good markers.”

  He did not ask her how she felt.

  The needle slid in, quick and cold. Somewhere far below the City, her DNA joined billions of others—catalogued, monetized, promised.

  Tagged twice.

  Freddie flinched, just slightly. The technician noticed.

  “Discomfort is normal,” he said gently. “But remember—everything here is designed for your benefit.”

  She met his eyes.

  “Who decides that?” she asked softly. For the first time, his smile visibly calibrated.

  Outside, the City continued to glow—calm, generous, immaculate.

  And far beneath its perfect floors, something watched the data spike and adjusted its models.

  ZEUS learned her name.

  Freddie left the clinic with a cartoon bandage peeling at the edges of her abdomen. Transit platforms slid into place around her. Screens softened their colors to match her emotional profile. Somewhere in the system, her risk score shifted by a fraction of a percent.

  Not enough to matter. Not yet.

  She unplugged her mobile unit as soon as she reached home.

  Her apartment noticed immediately.

  Would you like to reconnect?

  Recommended downtime exceeded.

  Isolation may increase distress.

  Freddie ignored the prompts and sat on the floor instead. She pressed her palm flat against the surface, testing its resistance. Synthetic, but solid.

  She wondered what parts of her the City had already decided belonged to it.

  Through the window, the sea lay unnaturally calm, held in check by systems no one spoke about anymore. The horizon curved wrong.

  Two hundred and seventy-three years was a long time to forget something on purpose.

  Freddie had never seen a real belly button.

  In the City, bodies were smooth and symmetrical, perfected early and maintained forever. Reproduction was taught as a managed process, abstracted into diagrams and permissions.

  Natural birth was mentioned once, briefly, like an extinct animal.

  I heard some people still do it, a boy had whispered during class.

  Where?

  Outside.

  Outside was a direction more than a place.

  That night, Freddie tuned into a low-band channel she wasn’t authorized to access. The signal wavered—half static, half voice.

  Music bled through.

  It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t optimized. Someone missed a note and didn’t correct it. The sound wandered, scraped, stayed.

  Freddie’s breath caught. The song had no words she recognized, but it felt like standing barefoot on uneven ground—uncomfortable, undeniable.

  The feed tried to intervene.

  Unauthorized content detected—

  She cut the connection before it could finish.

  Her heart was racing.

  Far beyond the City’s perimeter, where no signal should have reached, a boy lifted his head as if something had brushed past him.

  The Naked Gods sat around a small fire in the ruins of something old. They sang because silence felt worse. They sang because the world had taken so much already. They escaped their pain together.

  Jux didn’t know why the songs came the way they did. None of them did. They stitched themselves together from hunger, memory, and the simple fact of surviving another night.

  Sometimes, when he sang, it felt like something answered.

  Back in the City, Freddie pressed her fingers into the hollow of her abdomen, right where her body still remembered how it had begun.

  For the first time, she understood that her existence was not an accident.

  And deep beneath the City, in layers never shown on any public map, ZEUS logged a minor anomaly.

  Cross-sector resonance detected.

  Subject classification: Viable.

  Impact: Deferred.

  The system did not flag it for action.

  Not yet.