β20191[Reply]
Lena thinks, fleetingly, of the peripheral areas, those that never received the modules, where Agenda 2040 brought only hunger and empty pods. The news rarely mentions them, but she has seen images, fires in the night, silhouettes screaming and fighting, faces still capable of expressing something. A part of her, very far away, buried beneath the updates, envies these people without even knowing that this feeling has a name. But how can she cry out against these microchips when even her mouth is under their control? In the evening, her mother, too old to have received the module in time, and therefore still able to cry, tells her about a world before, a garden, a house, a time when people believed that effort led somewhere, when meritocracy pretended to exist, when a future was promised to children. Lena listens to these words as if they were a foreign language. *Do you remember me?* her mother asks. Lena answers yes, because that's the answer that keeps her score stable. Her mother cries more.
That night, lying in her pod, a question rises within her, muffled, almost inaudible beneath the buzzing already activated to drown it out: *What was I supposed to become?* The pod answers before she can even think about it. Sleep comes. Tomorrow, she will start again, exactly the same day, in a city of millions of people doing exactly the same thing, while in the darkness of the forgotten zones, those who still feel everythingβthe rage, the hunger, the despairβbegin to march toward the glass towers where Order, Capital, and Purity believe themselves, for now, invulnerable.