The underground city of New Eden was a masterpiece of noir. It was a place of permanent rain—not real rain, but the leaking condensation from the massive cooling pipes that ran overhead like rusted veins. The air was a thick soup of ozone and cheap tobacco.

Detective Miller sat in his office, a cramped box of a room that smelled of old paper and failure. He was a man who had seen too many "accidents" in the Engine Sector. In New Eden, if you disappeared, you didn't go to heaven; you just became part of the lubrication system for the Planetary Engines.

The door opened, and in walked a woman who looked like she had been carved out of a diamond and dipped in moonlight. She called herself Vera. She didn't want a missing husband or a stolen heirloom. She wanted a piece of the core.

"The Prime Oscillator," she whispered, leaning over his desk. "The Council says it's missing. They've put a bounty on it that could buy a whole sector of the city."

Miller took the case, mostly because his rent was three months overdue. But as he dug deeper, he found that the Oscillator wasn't missing. It was sitting right where it was supposed to be. The "theft" was a staged event.

The truth was a jagged pill: the Planetary Engines were barely functioning. They weren't moving the Earth; they were just vibrating it in place. The "Migration" was the greatest insurance scam in the history of the species. The Council had sold "Migration Bonds" to every citizen on Earth, collecting trillions in credits to fund a journey that was never intended to happen.

The elite—the ones who actually knew the truth—had already left. They had escaped on a fleet of stealth-ships, leaving the rest of humanity to live in a simulated journey, working their lives away to maintain a machine that did nothing.

Miller found Vera in the rain-slicked alleys of the Soot-Level. She wasn't a victim; she was the Council's cleaner.

"You're a smart man, Miller," she said, her voice as cold as the void. "But smart men are bad for business. The people need the dream. If they knew they were just sitting in a dark room, they'd stop working. And if they stop working, the lights go out."

Miller looked up at the fake sky, at the shimmering holographic stars that promised a home he would never reach. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift upward, blending into the grey mist of the city.

"I always hated the stars anyway," he muttered, as the shadow of the cleaner's gun fell across his face.

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