Leo stopped breathing. "What?"
In the sprawling, data-crusted city of Verix, the most valuable substance wasn’t gold or fuel. It was a clean, unbroken . A Switch was a moment—a single, pure point of decision. Every person had a fixed number of them in their lifetime, and the city ran on harvesting the residual energy of choices made.
"You know," S.P.S. buzzed one evening, as Leo sat exhausted from his 2:47 decision (blue, he’d gone with blue). "The 'nsps' in your file doesn't stand for 'Non-Standard Probabilistic Surge.' That's the public term. The internal research documents call it 'Null-State Perpetual Sorrow.' You’re not generating power from choice, Leo. You’re generating it from the grief of all the paths you’ll never walk."
