101: The Hundred and the Unmarked

The star within the Dyson sphere was small—a red dwarf, steady and dim, but still, it burned. And the structure that held it, turning slowly in the dark, was vast beyond reason. Layer upon layer of framework, circling inward, held fast by gravity and velocity both. From core to skin, it was dense with tiers—thousands upon thousands stacked one atop the next, the inner shell insulated and alive, the outer shell cold and dead, like bark shielding sap.

From the outside, no light escaped—only faint golden veins, like fractures in obsidian, where the radiance pressed against its cage.

Even now, construction continued. Asteroids crashed against the hull like rain on iron, tearing deep wounds across the surface. Machines moved in waves, swarming over the damage, harvesting raw stone and metal, sealing the breach until the skin shone smooth again.

Iori walked home through the fields.

The landscape stretched in layers. Plantations grew in tiers, anchored to the ceiling of the vast structure. Sunlight rose from below, carefully channeled: light without heat, gold without flame. It bathed the hanging leaves trailing down from the overhead soil.

Wooden houses dotted the fields—small, rough structures nailed together by hand. Steel walls loomed in the distance, softened with planks and makeshift fences. Trees had been planted inside the chamber, their branches reaching down from the ceiling, trailing leaves like inverted rivers.

The workers moved slowly, methodically. Some wore old straw hats. Others bore marks of repair—an iron leg polished smooth, a copper-alloy arm, a shoulder joint that hissed softly when they turned. They moved with purpose, not precision. Here, machine and soil lived side by side without apology.

Somewhere in this quiet biomechanical cradle, Iori reached his home.

Mother was already there, sitting on the low veranda, scraping mud from her boots with a piece of flat iron.

Kira arrived just after him, the usual dust on her hands, hair damp with mist. When she saw him, she gave a crooked smile.

“Ah, the golden boy’s already home. Must be hungry from all that studying and training,” she said, tossing her tools into the old metal box with a clatter. Teenagers, it seemed, were always the same, no matter the century.

Iori didn’t respond. He stepped out of his boots quietly and set them by the wall.

“Kira,” Mother said, not looking up, “don’t act stupid, please. You know there’s still work that has to be done by hand. Tomorrow, you can work with the machines.”

Kira didn’t look at her. She gave a sharp exhale, then muttered, “Ah, the machines. Great. And if I want to study and train like he does, I just have to do it after the work, right?”

Mother set down her boot, opened her arms as if to invite her closer.

“Hey. Come here. You know as much as I do, why he does not work.”

But Kira only kicked off her muddy boots and rushed inside.

Outside, the sphere turned in complete silence.

But it had not always been quiet.

Years ago, far above, the ship came in fast. Small jets flared along its sides, struggling to shift its attitude, but the crash was certain. The onboard intelligence found a path: one of the great surface fissures.

It forced the ship into the crack like sliding a card through a slit. The fissure’s walls were uneven and so was the ship’s battered hull. Contact was violent. Each scrape sheared metal from both surfaces, turning the ship’s wake into a spiraling trail of debris.

By the time it neared the inner layers, the ship was unrecognizable. It tumbled the final levels. The final descent was a roll, a stagger, a stumble.

But the cabin was intact.

And inside, there was still life.

The kitchen was modest, but clean. Kira and Iori sat opposite each other, a simple vegetable broth sat before them. Mother filled her bowl, then joined them.

They ate in silence.

When they were finished, Mother spoke.

“I trained a lot after work, when I was your age,” she said, her head angled slightly toward Kira. “Studied hard, too. I liked it. And it earned me respect.”

Kira didn’t respond, but she heard it. Everyone in the community respected Mother. She wasn’t their official leader, but people still came to her first.

Mother continued.

“On rest days, I explored. Walked the outer farms, climbed through broken tunnels. They told me I was wasting time—every level reachable had already been discovered. And yet…”

She gestured toward Iori, a slow motion with the back of her hand. Her wrist caught the light. The number 80 was inked there in faded black.

So was Kira’s. A dark 98, just below the pulse point on her right hand.

But not Iori.

His skin was clear.

Kira was quiet for a while. But they all knew what she was thinking.

And, as always, she couldn’t keep it in.

“People are talking,” she said. “Nobody tells it to you, because they respect you. But I know you know. They’re afraid.”

Mother said nothing.

Kira’s voice sharpened.

“There’s war. We have to spare everything, make our quotas, feed the ones fighting for us.” She turned to Iori. “This makes no sense.”

A pause.

Then she looked down.

“Sorry about that. I’m just... I’m afraid. If they find out, they’ll take us. Or everyone.”

Iori didn’t speak. He had heard these words before. The rules were clear. And he knew the motto. Everyone did.

Freedom is a waste of resources.

Three were the pillars: Obedience. Output. Order.

Mother reached out, placed her arm around Kira, and gently pulled her head to her shoulder.

She said nothing, but she understood. The fear was real. And the timing was close.

Another cycle had passed. The Central Division would visit soon. The Ceremony of the Great Rotation was coming.

Number 14 would leave them. And a newborn with the same number would arrive.

Good old Joey… a hundred cycles old now. He was actually looking forward to it.

Mother climbed toward the wreck, Kira tied to her back.

Above them, impossibly far, the sky was a crack. Gravity held the air in place, even as the fissure remained open.

The ship had no shape anymore.

But as Mother reached the hull, a seam appeared. A thin slit of darkness. She waited. Then she slipped through.

Inside, the air was dense. Lights blinked faintly—dots of color in the murk.

And then she saw them.

Two figures, laid side by side, their bodies held in glass-topped beds. A man. A woman.

Mother approached slowly. The woman’s bed was open.

And then the woman opened her eyes.

Mother froze. The woman stared up at her.

“Help me.”

Mother blinked. And to her surprise, she understood.

She stepped closer, heart still, thoughts racing.

Then she saw it. The woman’s hand on her stomach. The faint curve.

She was pregnant.

And so the day came.

The day of the Great Rotation.

Tables were set in long rows, covered with cloth. There was real food. Chicken—its meat spiced and crisp. Sweets made from crushed nuts and honey, wrapped in thin leaves. The children chased one another between the lampions.

Joey stood among them, draped in a tunic of white and ochre. His steps were slower, but his laughter still carried. He had lived his hundred years. And now, as always, a child would take his number.

They called it balance. They called it mercy.

Mother sat quietly at her place. Kira beside her, silent.

And Iori was not among them.

He waited in a narrow service tunnel, far from the lights and voices.

He had no number. He was not in the census.

An error. An intruder. And for such things, there was no leniency.

They arrived by artificial evening.

Machines shaped like men, but not men. Twice the height, limbed in metal, porcelain faces, red-eyed and unblinking.

And at their center, the captain.

His uniform was unblemished, trimmed in pale gold. His face was handsome in the way statues are. But it was the thing in his arms that held every gaze.

A capsule.

Cradled in his arms like an offering. Inside it: a newborn. A number already etched into the side.

Joey’s number.

The hundred lined up shoulder to shoulder on the main square—youngest to oldest, one year to ninety-nine. The little ones carried by their elders.

Joey stood at the front.

The captain raised the capsule like an offering.

“Habitants of Crop Region Seventy-Four,” he said.

“I am Captain Eolan Meris, Voice of the Central Division, Envoy of the Great Cycle.”

He raised one hand, palm open.

“On this, the Fourteenth Great Rotation of the Five-Thousand One Hundred Fourth Cycle, I bring you greetings. I bring you light.”

His tone deepened.

“The Holy Authority stands eternal. Our leader, Sanctum-Praetor Vireon Tal, has thrown down the traitors and lifted the faithful from the dust. This is not a victory of a single battle. It is the triumph of order.”

He stepped aside, just enough for the machines behind him to come fully into view.

“But what is won must be preserved. And what is preserved must be purified.”

His voice softened now, and grew more dangerous.

“The serpent returns—not with claws, but with questions. Not with flame, but with doubt. He comes not to break the gates, but to loosen the hinges.

He spread both arms wide, as if to bless the crowd—or weigh them.

“You are a hundred. You have always been a hundred. And yet…”

He paused, let the silence stretch long.

“There is unease among you. Fear. Confusion. Shadows where none should fall. Someone, perhaps, has opened a door they were told to leave closed. Someone, perhaps, has welcomed what should have been cast out.”

No one moved. Even the children had gone still.

“It takes only one to undo a hundred. Only one to unbalance the Cycle. A voice that does not belong. A breath that was not counted. And in that breath—heresy, hesitation, heartbreak.”

He stepped back now, the machines behind him gleaming in full.

“We do not come to punish. We come to preserve.”

His tone dropped, barely above a whisper now.

“But make no mistake—purity is not a kindness. It is a responsibility. And it is not ours alone. It is yours.”

He looked across the crowd, eyes narrowing faintly.

“You know who walks among you. The one without a mark. The one who does not rotate.”

A single beat.

“Choose wisely.”

Mother remembered the woman’s eyes.

And the vow she had made.

She had whispered it quietly, as she held the boy in the night.

“I will protect you. At all cost.”

The boy was watchful. He understood before things were explained. He was fast. Strong. Smart. Mother saw it… because it reminded her of herself, and went beyond.

She trained him as she had trained herself. Languages. Machines. History. Things forbidden and things forgotten. Everything she knew, she gave him.

But most of what she knew came from the thing pressed into her palms by the dying woman. A device. Small. Dense. Black glass etched with markings. Smooth as obsidian, warm to the touch. As she learned to read what it gave her, the world tilted. Everything she thought she knew unraveled—sharper, stranger, more dangerous.

Now, among the faithful, she felt that vow burning brighter than ever.

No matter what came.

She would not break.

Not for the cycle.

Not for the Division.

Not even for God.

The explosion struck like a clenched fist from beneath the earth.

Stone and steel tore upward. The captain’s body was flung backward, and cast down at the threshold of the great cavern doors. He did not rise.

The machines staggered, repelled by the force. One tilted, stabilizing with heavy limbs locked. Another lost an arm—severed at the elbow. Fingers clattered across the ground like coins spilled in offering.

The hundred fell— scraped and dazed but still breathing. In the stillness that followed, someone screamed.

"She did it! She's running—it was her!"

Mother didn’t look back. She had already taken Kira’s hand. They ran.

Some followed, blind with fear, their footsteps scattering petals and spilled food. The machines did not pursue. Not at first.

They moved to form a wall—shoulders locked, shields raised, towering like iron saints.

Their voice was terrible in the hush that followed.

"Remain where you are. Lie flat. Do not move. Noncompliance will be met with lethal force."

Then, as if to teach the air obedience, one raised its arm and fired. The sound was not thunder. It was judgment.

"Remain where you are," the voice repeated.

And then they opened fire.

The scream of plasma tore through the chamber, trailing arcs of flame. The running figures scattered—some falling, others vanishing into the mist.

But Mother and Kira had already reached the house.

Mother crossed to the cabinet, pulled open the low drawer where things were hidden for seasons like storms. A canvas bag. Heavy. She pressed it into Kira’s arms with both hands.

“Take this. Go to the shaft we opened last week—where the ventline ends. He’ll be there.”

Kira’s face was streaked with tears, her chest heaving. “I didn’t—I didn’t do anything. I swear it, Mother, I didn’t—”

“I know,” Mother whispered, pressing her forehead briefly to Kira’s.

“They made Joey carry it. Poor old fool—he never even knew what he did.”

Kira’s voice cracked. “What about you?”

“I can’t go through the vents,” she said quietly. “I’ll buy you time. But you must run now.”

“Iori knows the tunnels. The old machines. He knows how to disappear.”

Kira clutched the bag like a child clutching warmth.

Mother embraced her. Her breath was steady, but her hands trembled.

“Go,” she said. “Now. Don’t look back.”

The room was hollow with age. Broken tables lay on their sides like fallen beasts. Chairs were scattered, legs twisted. One window gaped open to a corridor that led nowhere.

It had been a school once. Level thousand-hundred-something.

Iori sat at a table and ate without urgency. He looked like a painting someone had forgotten to hang—peaceful, still, wrong in the middle of such ruin.

Kira raged.

She had not spoken all day—not during the crawling, the hiding, the dark climbs through broken ductwork—but now, her voice broke open like a fault line.

“It’s all because of you,” she said. She pointed at him like a blade. “They’ll shut the whole place down. Take everyone. If it wasn’t for you—”

Her voice cracked. “I should kill you.”

She meant it. Almost.

But under the fire in her voice, something else burned. Grief.

Because she had looked back.

She shouldn’t have. From the top of the shaft, just before she vanished into the old tunnels, she turned. She saw Mother leap onto one of the machines—barehanded, without fear. And then she saw it: not blood, not flesh or sinew, but something silver bursting from her shoulder, glittering like sparks from a welding torch.

Kira stopped moving. She stood there, breathing hard.

Iori finished the last bite of his bread, and from inside of his bag, he drew the black device and placed it on the table like something sacred.

“You know what this is?” he asked, voice low.

Kira stepped closer.

“Don’t lecture me.”

He touched the surface—three dim red lights blinked in sequence, like breath returning.

And then: Mother's face.

Not a recording. Her eyes were focused, her mouth soft with a smile.

“Kira. Iori,” she said gently. “If you’re hearing this, then you made it. I’m glad for you, my love.”

“What is this? Where is she?”

Kira gasped as Iori placed his palm on the device.

“No,” Kira breathed. “That’s not… it can’t be. It’s a trick. It has to be.”

But Mother’s voice returned.

“Kira, my dear. Please. Listen. Listen to what Iori will tell you. I’m still here, but the device needs a power source to keep me awake. Until then, I have to sleep.”

A pause.

“I love you. I always have.”

Then her image vanished.

Iori picked up the device, pressed its side, and a soft white beam shone from it—narrow and bright. He took Kira’s hand, held it in the light.

Bones appeared—no, not bones.

Struts. Pistons. Metal ribs beneath skin.

Kira stared.

He held his own hand into the beam.

Bones. Ligaments. Real.

She stepped back. “No…” she whispered. “No. No way…”

They walked later, far from the settlement, across a narrow bridge of old steel spanning the vast chasm.

Above them: distance. A ceiling so high it was space.

Below them: light, tiny and golden, far as memory.

Around them: ruin. Carved windows, broken plazas, towers rusted to their spines.

They were somewhere ancient. Somewhere forgotten.

“There’s water that way,” Iori said, pointing toward the fractured stone ahead.

“One more day.”

“Are we safe?” Kira asked. “What if we walk into an army?”

“There’s no war,” Iori said.

He met her gaze.

“There are cities up in the high layers. People live there like me. Machines do everything. And the people just—exist. They don’t ask questions. They don’t remember."

“And down here, others like you—half-machine, half-human—or not human at all. Building. Obeying. This place grows without end, like a shrine to no god.”

Kira’s face was pale.

“But why?”

Iori met her eyes.

“Nobody remembers. If the resources stopped tomorrow, they’d die like plants without water. And no one would know they were ever here.”

“But we do,” Kira said.

“Yes,” Iori said. “We do.”

He looked out into the depth again.

“Mother is with us. The machines built this place and named it creation. But it is a prison. They tried, but they could never erase her.”

He turned back to Kira.

“She remembers what was before the first lie.”

Kira’s voice was steady now.

“Will they listen?”

Iori didn’t hesitate.

“We remind them. We make them see.”

Then, quietly, with no anger in it at all:

“And then we bring back the war.”