Rain hissed off the edge of the Skyrise Tower’s solar membrane as the hovercab decelerated.
Roman Kael stepped out, trench coat slicing through wind and neon mist. His coat—a tailored navy anorak modified with smart-fabric threading—blinked softly at the hem, syncing to his biometric frequency. In another era, that same coat might have been wool with brass buttons, fit for a Victorian explorer or a jazz-age drifter. But now? It breathed, recorded, and protected. Just like him.
Inside the 88th floor of Dominion Wealth AI, every surface gleamed with carbon-glass austerity. A red dot trailed Roman’s retina from the moment he crossed the threshold. No ID scans necessary. Just him, and the algorithm that knew how much he was worth: $142,890 net taxable in the last fiscal cycle. Just enough to put him in the top 9.7% of earners in the neon-blazed chaos formerly known as Canada.
“You’re late, Kael.”
It was Nyla Grieve—former sociologist, current Federal Dept. of Equity Intelligence Liaison, ex-lover. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a politics noir series—coal-black bob, silver-threaded shawl, and the glint of a dermal truthpatch at her temple. Roman didn’t reply. The tension between them was ambient; it needed no words.
“The economic divergence threshold’s been breached,” she said, projecting a flowchart mid-air. “Ten-point-three percent now earn six figures or higher. In Halifax, six percent. In Calgary, seventeen. And it’s climbing.”
Roman squinted at the data cascade—income clusters coalescing around smartzones and biometric economic bubbles. “This used to be a country,” he murmured. “Now it’s a spreadsheet.”
“People are optimizing. You should be happy. You’re one of them.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
Three years ago, Roman was broke. Living in his sister’s basement in New Sudbury, surviving off stimulus NFTs and scraps from the gig grid. Then he coded Gr4ph, the interpretive quantum overlay that revolutionized financial modeling in predictive markets. He sold early, exited before the platform went sentient. Now, he had money, title, prestige. But he didn’t feel rich. He felt watched.
At street level, tension thrummed deep beneath the micro-paved arteries of the cities. Most of the population used Universal Pay Equity Tokens now, standardized by the Government in partnership with Dominion AI. Equal tokens for equal value. Except value, Roman had learned, was a slippery thing.
The riots in Saskatoon. The sabotage of the GigaDrill in Fort McMurray. The suicide snaps of teen influencers losing social-credit sponsorships. These stories didn’t reach the top floors. Up here, everything was carbon-clean, filtered, and illuminated by optimism. But Roman couldn’t shake the feeling that the ceiling beneath his wealth was glass—and under that, unrest.
Down in Arcadia Sector—a zone decommissioned after policy flattening failed to fix its poverty spiral—Roman met Hektor. Hacker, poet, activist. Stark white dreadhawks and rusted goggles. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like, bro. You know how hard people bleed for two hours of heat?”
Roman watched the kids on the edge of tech society, their lives gamified, their hearts running dry of meaning. “What do you want me to do?”
Hektor smiled. “You used to shape code. Now you just process profit. But you could trigger a reformation loop. Crack the index. Show the country what the ledgers won’t.”
Roman hesitated. If he did that—leaked Gr4ph’s original codebase back into the commons—it would redistribute prediction potential. Level the playing field. But it would also cost him everything. Status. Licenses. His profile would tank below social survivability. He’d be back in the basement.
The next day, he didn’t show at Dominion. He was off-grid, one of the "New Lows." But in basements and shelters, in the apartment towers of Burnaby and the data siloes of Nunavut, the distribution began. Not a revolution. A recalibration.
Sometime later, a Government AI parsed a strange anomaly in the financial predictive matrices. Stability curves flattened. Income share across six provinces equalized by 0.16%. A decimal shift that raised millions from precarity. Nothing flashy. Nothing anyone could prove. Except Nyla. She’d known him too well.
She stood at the edge of the Dominion lab, watching the glitch-dawn glow across the eastern skyline. Somewhere, Roman was free. And for the first time in years, the system wasn’t.
Genre: Dystopian Techno-Drama / Thriller
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: How many Canadians make over $100,000
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