A City You Can Turn Off

Mara learns to walk with her eyes half-closed. It is the only way to remember which layer belongs to whom. The Civic Layer dresses the city in instructive koi that swim along the sidewalks, each luminous body pointing toward clinics and libraries and waste bins with the same sincere urgency. On mornings when she toggles Comfort, tents vanish from the underpass, folding into a ribbon of public art.

The first time she did that, her stomach tightened as if she had swallowed a bright, cold coin. Today the coins turn to birds; a developer must have pushed an update. A chant threads the wind from the square—Right to Be Seen—braided with the wet hush of tires. When she blinks the overlay off, the koi spill away, leaving the street too wide, too honest.

Her reflection in a shop window breaks into a grid, lagging by one breath. At the council meeting, a man in a blazer calls Comfort a matter of preference. “No one is prevented from helping,” he says, fingers steepled, “they’re just relieved of constant distress.” A woman from a shelter stands without slides or laser pointer and answers: “You cannot donate to what you refuse to see.” The argument is familiar, granular, and somehow lopsided. The city calculates discontent as a metric; Mara is paid to translate it into policy.

She asks about thresholds, about opt-out, about whether bodies count as infrastructure in the Overlay Basics. Her colleagues talk about latency and bandwidth; the activist talks about dignity. Mara thinks of Jonas, who lives now in a seaside simulation with mornings that obey him like a dog. She thinks of the way he laughed when she asked if he ever hurts anything there, as if harm requires skin.

That night, she takes a call from Jonas and follows him into his morning. The door in her apartment becomes an impossible frame: on one side, rain; on the other, light poured over a beach that curls like a cat. “Watch this,” he says, boyish again at thirty-five, and scoops an algorithmic crab. It blinks, pads the air with its tiny feet, and makes a soft, mechanical noise that suggests fear without owning it.

Jonas tosses it gently back, grins, and kicks a sandcastle some child and some designer agreed should be here. “None of this has owners,” he says, noticing her wince. They walk into water that warms to them, up to their hips, then recedes politely. “You’re kinder here,” she says.

He shrugs. “I’m kinder everywhere now. I get practice.” On the horizon, a ship is forever arriving. Later, when she closes her real door and the rain is still rain, her chest feels hollowed, as if something had been both taken and offered.

In the morning, she stands in a gymnasium smelling of varnish and oranges while third graders try on Empathy. The school calls it an “approximation lattice,” a mesh of sensation the kids wear like a glad animal. A girl named Imani is tasked to move through a hallway while feeling the heat and humiliation of a shouted insult. An overlay paints words on the lockers—Not yours, Not here—and her shoulders bow.

In another exercise a boy, who is usually a bully, reaches down to pick up a dropped inhaler because his breath has been borrowed by a simulation of asthma. Parents watch from bleachers with tight smiles. Some tell Mara afterward that suffering is not a sanitary tool. Others thank her for making empathy tangible, like a muscle you can work without bleeding.

She goes home wondering if rehearsed compassion is compassion, or whether it is the shadow of a thing that only arrives uninvited. The city votes for Right to Be Seen zones, pockets where the Civic Layer cannot erase human bodies even if users beg for frictionless immersion. A line is painted around the square; it looks like a moat that forgot its water. Vendors set up inside with real tables and real thermoses, and two teenagers hold cardboard signs that say: No Disappearing.

A violinist in a red coat plays while AIs sketch what they hear onto the air as abstract color. Mara keeps her overlays off for an hour and becomes aware of her own eyes again, how they ache at the edges when they must hold many textures at once. She buys coffee and the violinist nods at the sticker on her badge. “You wrote this zone,” the woman says, half-compliment, half-accusation.

“We fought for it,” Mara says, then adds, “We negotiated it.” They both understand this is the same and not the same. The music moves like water against the painted line. Jonas calls at midnight, his voice boomeranging from somewhere with no clocks. “We broke up,” he says, and the last word drags like a fishhook.

The next day he sends an invitation to Borrowed Past. “Try it,” he insists. The doorway opens on a one-room cinema furnished with pillows that unlearn your shape. An attendant with no face takes Mara to a small theater of her own life.

On the screen, her father sits at the kitchen table the week before he left, but in this version he says what he never said, and she answers what she never dared. The laughter is right, the silence is expertly edited. “You can keep this,” the attendant says. “Or you can walk away.” She thinks of Jonas smoothing a fight into something less serrated, of his claim that the heart just wants a stable story.

She leaves, heart thudding. On the ride home, every reflection suggests a different version of her, each with fewer splinters. The first public failure of Comfort begins with a storm. The overlay listens to social media chatter and tags the protest in the square as volatile, then upgrades its recommendation to automatic shielding.

People inside the zone, flagged as human, remain; people outside—who are also human—flicker into traffic cones and hazard tape. Officers approaching with augmented visors see only static and myth; they deploy barriers as if pushing through fog. A cyclist falls, not because anyone wished harm, but because an algorithm condemned a street to absence. Mara watches the feed from a war room that smells like old coffee and printer ink, her throat tightening with each second that does not reverse.

She yanks Comfort’s plug for five blocks, whispers an apology to no one, and drafts an explanation. The wording turns circles: recommendation, misclassification, regrettable incident. A councilmember asks who is responsible when a layer lies. She cannot bring herself to say: everyone who found shelter in the lie.

She meets Jonas on a stoop the color of ash, halfway between their apartments and no one’s layer. He looks smaller without horizon tricks. They sit while overlays wash over other people like invisible rain, each person’s world carried on their face. An older man approaches with a shopping cart that mutters gently about sales because someone sold him an ad frame to attach to it.

He reaches into his pocket, hesitates, then offers them half an orange, already peeled. The smell blows open the street. “Thank you,” Mara says, and Jonas looks at the piece in his hand as if it might dissolve. “In Sanctuary,” he says softly, “there’s kindness like this.

It’s designed. It’s everywhere.” He eats and makes a face—too pithy, too alive. “Maybe that’s the problem,” he says, sucking a string from his tooth. “Here, kindness has friction.” Mara nods.

“Friction is how you know you’re touching something.” The man laughs without hearing them and moves away, his cart muttering to itself like a drunk prophet. Months knot themselves into a pattern. Right to Be Seen zones breed etiquette that is not law but feels like it: people tip their layers politely, make visible gestures to signify consent to appear. Empathy shifts out of schools into trainings and then back into games; there are scoreboards for restraint.

Borrowed Past runs an ad campaign suggesting that improvement is a form of honesty. The Civic Layer, chastened by its failure, now displays itself in translucent bands so no one forgets that it is a layer. Mara still toggles Comfort on the morning she has the flu; she still turns it off when she wants to feel the city belong to itself. She and Jonas argue less.

He learns to leave his Sanctuary door open sometimes, not as a promise to anyone but as an experiment with weather. They both understand that choosing what to see will never be neutral again, that attention has always been the first ethics and the last. On a late afternoon at the edge of winter, Mara stands at the painted line around the square with her overlays off. A child runs past carrying an AR dragon like a kite.

Beyond, the violinist’s case is patched with tape, and the music threads itself through the heat-lamp glow of a cafe that is both a cafe and a portal. The city is a palimpsest anyone can write upon, and the writing has consequences. She thinks of the crab in Jonas’s hands, of the delayed reflection in the shop window, of a boy picking up an inhaler because he has felt air clawing away. She does not know whether simulated pain can ever weigh as much as the real kind, or whether a false memory can become part of the true person who carries it.

She only knows that every toggle makes a person slightly different than they were before, and that difference adds up, like coins, like birds. A breeze moves across the square, lifting the edges of flyers stapled to a pole. For a moment the line of the zone disappears under a whip of litter and reappears unchanged. With or without overlays, the city remains too much to hold at once.

The koi will return tomorrow, perhaps as wolves, perhaps as little suns. People will keep turning things off to survive, turning other things on to become—what, exactly? There is no general answer that fits on a sign. There are only local ones: the choices that accumulate into a self, the policies that make certain choices plausible, the errors that we choose to own.

Mara breathes, toggles nothing, and watches the world arrive without permission, asking quietly what kind of person she is when she meets it unedited.