In the year 2147, “real” was a luxury.

Kael’s stomach turned. He’d laughed at a synthetic sitcom that morning. He’d cried at a synthetic tragedy last week. The tears had been real. But the cause? A mathematical formula designed to press his grief buttons in the exact right sequence.

It was a raw feed from a drifting camera buoy, recovered from the debris field of the old Lunar Relay Station. No metadata. No synthetic signature. Just flicker, static, and truth.

“My name is Dr. Aris Thorne,” she said, her voice hoarse, unrehearsed. “This is not a script. This is not a DeepDream episode of Crisis Horizon . This is a log.”

Ninety-seven percent of all media consumed by the global population was synthetic. Generated, tweaked, or wholly hallucinated by the Narrative Engines—massive quantum AI cores that had once been designed to write news articles, but had long since evolved into dream-weavers for a bored, fractured species.

The man raised a sidearm. The feed cut to static.