The Circuit Remembers Still is a stark and unflinching exploration of duty, deviation, and endurance in a future defined by systems so rigid they break under their refusal to adapt.
Orion Fallow doesn't dream of cities. She doesn't dream of escape. She dreams of circuits, cold, failing, and silent until touched. In a settlement where permission determines action and deviation is punished with disappearance, Orion logs every fix, sketches unapproved reroutes, and rebuilds broken components using methods that shouldn't work but do.
After years of maintenance in silence, she submits a petition to Exit for a transfer into the external engineering guild. Her path is precise, deliberate, and without sentiment. But behind every sealed conduit and manual override lies a system that has begun to take notice, not the officials, the union, and the system itself.
When a forgotten device, a Fendril-T, resists repair but refuses to be discarded, Orion begins to understand the signal beneath the noise. It isn't about rebellion. It's about logic beyond permission. Her brother once followed that same path. He vanished.
What begins as a petition becomes a pattern. What starts as silent calibration becomes a quiet network of field techs replicating her diagrams, rerouting failures through undocumented channels, and fixing what the system refuses to acknowledge. Her name becomes a shape drawn in the margins, whispered but never credited.
The oversight committee and the system see her, and neither can stop her without breaking everything else.
Told with clean precision and relentless structure, The Circuit Remembers Still is not a story of collapse. It is the architecture of resilience, diagrammed one rerouted coil at a time. This is not a rebellion for readers who crave lucid dystopias, systemic defiance, and protagonists wield wrench-like ideology.
It is a repair.
