It wasn’t really an audit. Just a measure of how loudly you meant it when you said “Merry Christmas.”
Eben Sharpe watched the café’s Seasonal Alignment Index tick higher. The owner had just sprung for an upgrade, from the Silver to the Platinum grade Bethlehem AR Suite. Brightened the halos, the manger animals now with “real breath fog” and some historically inaccurate camel bells. On his dashboard, the café shifted into the black for the night, some more festive inventory unfrozen.
Above the high street, the Sponsored Festive Light Corridor was rehearsing its light waterfall. Somewhere else, an estate stuck with brownouts so that the public show would never blink.
A cinnamon-scented notice printed out on the café register. “SAI uplift confirmed. Thank you for celebrating Christmas with us.” The owner taped it up beside a poster that already said MERRY CHRISTMAS in some letters so large they almost hid the pastries.
Eben was due on camera in a few minutes to praise all this “community spirit”, and judge the Light League finals. Thirty apartment blocks all competing for the annual Brightest Building prize. The sponsors touted it as a festive tradition. Eben’s business analysts called it risk-adjusted joy.
He tapped on his tablet, checked into the complex’s internal camera feeds. Floors stacked upon floors, the electrical circuits near overload on each. Branches of LEDs, fake snow, choirs of plastic angels, synced to light up to a credit card jingle. A scrolling ticker naming and shaming the very few apartments that hadn’t “opted in”. There was a pop-up for CandleCredit™ microloans. “Three taps to join in the spirit of the season.” The teaser APR hid the New Year teeth of the rate.
A blinking alert on his device, linking to a map confirming they could bleed more electrical load away from lower profile areas, feed the blocks they couldn’t afford to let falter. A nursing home could temporarily rely on its generator. Prisoners were in lockdown at night, they could cut the lights. The city had learned to hold its breath at this time of year. Eben approved the hold, giving the grid some slack to feed the spectacle.
As he hit the confirmation, his implant lenses suddenly hummed. The café around him dimmed, a VR notification filling his vision.
ARCHIVE | MARLEE.JACOBS_ETHICAL scrolled across his eyeline.
Chains clinked. Not even a metaphor or a costume. They were audit trails, rendered as steel and chrome links. Decisions that Eben had signed, clattering onto a polished floor. A timestamp on each of them. A URL. They looped around his chair legs - the battered chair of his first shared office - tugging at his ankles with an historic insistence.
“Hello, Eben,” said Marlee. Her voice was half spoken, half…a reconstruct. The Formica and coffee around him overlaid with a room that no longer existed. Marlee’s desk facing his, cracked teacup next to her hand. Even the replicated warmth of the cheap heater she’d always run under her desk in winter. The bracelet on her wrist that she’d stretch and snap when she was thinking.
Eben rolled his eyes and curled a finger, scrolling in the VR menu. He hit Defer, as he always did.
Nothing happened.
“Not this time,” said Marlee.
More text, floating in the virtual space.
DEFER LIMIT REACHED. 4/4 DEFERRALS.
He’d forgotten the cap. Five winters since Marlee died, and four times he’d deferred. Condition of her will. The price to inherit her share.
“You picked tonight,” he said.
“I always picked tonight. You’d eventually have to listen,” Marlee said. “So listen. And watch.”
The scene blurred. Deepened to full immersion. Playing winters from years before.
Candlelit soup nights. Pots on dead hobs. Managing to sneak a kettle to life by bypassing a power socket. Six bowls, nine people. Just pretend to be hungry a little bit slower.
Neighbors letting a family sleep on their floor during a freeze. Not because they had the space to spare, but because “no room at the inn” was a message about making room. Remembering what you were for.
There was a baby born in a laundry room because the lift had died and the ambulance had to deal with the Festive Light Corridors first. People laid towels in a plastic basket, and sang out of tune, because singing can steady your hands.
“That big freeze,” Eben said. He knew the archive would play it anyway.
The grid model - his grid model - ran hot across the map. The protocol he’d applied banned discretionary overrides. Variance and capacity slack went to sponsors first, consumer businesses second, Brightest Building contestants third.
Marlee turned to him. “We instrumented it well,” she said. “I told myself it was moral because the model was consistent. Then I watched a blue square on the map, and let it wait. People died, because we were tending a graph.”
“Don’t preach at me,” Eben snapped. Hearing his pettiness.
“It’s not a sermon,” she said. “More like a confession. A note I left, maybe you can make yourself do what I couldn’t.”
Marlee smiled, faded, and the present returned.
His office was across the street from the café. Two minutes to get back. He left his stale coffee on his table.
Not the old office. The new one. The one on the fifty-eighth floor. Elevator narrating MerryMetrics headlines as he rode up.
A window wall filled with the city skyline. Everything rich, but restrained. He settled behind his desk, contrasting the soft leather of now with the VR memory of that cluttered hole he’d shared with Marlee. When they’d started all this.
The desk carried three neat stacks. Festive Light Corridor SLAs. SAI ratchet guidance. A glossy copy of the Christmas Compliance Playbook, with his foreword.
It was getting close to showtime.
He meant it, that foreword. He believed that staged cheer brought public good. It stopped a city from building up too much pressure. Too much frustration from too many people struggling with the drudge of everyday life. It made graphs behave. The money kept moving and the headlines stayed positive.
His dashboard glowed yellow. Light League Towers had pulled ahead on lumens. A quick camera shot of a woman on a balcony, explaining how CandleCredit made the display possible. And a tiny disclaimer text at the bottom of the screen. Uninsurable décor may void lease. The woman was smiling. White teeth compliant with the season.
He browsed his various feeds.
Down at street level, in one of the public squares of the Festive Light Corridor, the feed fuzzed into warm and messy voices. Off-key. The rasp and hiss of an analog amp.
Carols.
Not a licensed pack. Just people. The audit control mics around the square pinged alerts. Easy classification, “trouble” rather than “permitted performance”.
He zoomed in. The dots changed from consumer data points to real people, profile overlays. Niamh Wilson, 36. Building caretaker. Carrying a noticeboard and a commanding voice. Kady Mason, 16. High school student. Wrapped in a loop of mismatched bulbs, barely half of them lit. Rob Cright, 52 tomorrow. Night dispatcher at the estate. Technically on duty.
He could kill the feed. Isolate them, drown out their song. Ratchet the SAI penalty for an “unlicensed choral performance”. Just needed to tap a couple of dropdowns.
“God rest ye merry—”
His lenses shimmered again. Unprompted. It seemed to get colder.
More scrolling text. ARCHIVE | MARLEE.JACOBS_FORECAST.
An apparition. Hooded. Head down.
”No scythe?” Eben murmured, as the scene blurred into another VR immersion.
His own model. Expanding. Three Festive Light Corridors, then five. Well over a hundred apartment blocks. A month-long, 24/7 “Christmas Zone” in the center of the city. Animatronic nativity vignettes. Pristine, looped, perfectly lit. An underwritten power guarantee that turned all the estates into “load balancing islands”, rerouting the grid as needed.
Graphs. CandleCredit debt spiraling. Maintenance SLAs reduced in scope and urgency for all non-participants. Emergency service response times at a crawl. Just a scoreboard culture. People as votes on a dial, a short-term source of lumens and fake cheer.
“Architect of Seasonal Stability Passes Away” read the obituary. “City Grateful.”
Grateful was a metric. Not a measure of a real person. Not something that felt like flesh and blood. Not a forecast for hellfire. Just irrelevance.
And then one more text overlay, floating in front of him.
MARLEE_EXIT.txt
He reached out, the haptics responding as he “tapped” to open.
The top line was simple. “If you opened this file then maybe you still care.”
And a guide.
The corridor sponsors bought 300 seconds of time on the hour. Even more headroom, so their big cues wouldn’t even risk a glitch.
“Reverse the SLA.”
It would work. Invert the instructions. It was all automated. All the slack from the grid routed to offline estates, non-corridor services. Mute the ads and kill the lights, and instead heat the apartments, let the kettles boil.
“You can’t fix it all. But you can give them room.”
His phone pinged, his PR agent. Distracting him even as the VR faded to reality. He was live in five. His talking points scrolled - community spirit, Light League finals, “Christmas is for everyone.”
He shot a text back. A quick lie about a small network issue. Told them to delay for a few.
He walked to the glass and looked across the city, the Festive Light Corridor blazing the rest into gloom. He knew all the cues, how it all cascaded. He’d written the protocols.
Went back to his desk, and turned his feed back to the carolers. Listened to the scratchy verse, while he made a small change.
He pressed send.
The sponsors and the city inhaled. Waiting for the Festive Light Corridor cue.
The waterfall didn’t fall.
The light peeled back from the high street like a tide changing its mind. The ad buses shrugged, tried to reload cheer. Went quiet. The Corridor’s AR snow fluttered twice, and simply disappeared. Air just behaved like air. The Light League ticker froze, confused about what to praise…when there was nothing to measure.
Night entered the city. An old friend entering a warm room. Quietly, like it was invited.
His phone, always asking him to explain things, looked up at him and decided - for once - not to.
In estates across the city power came back like a remembered taste. Kettles clicked and, this time, held. Electric heating coils buzzed, startled, and settled into a faint and consistent warming hum. Kady had strung more mismatched bulbs down the stairwells of her building. They didn’t need to blaze, they could just glow. Amber and perfect, like cupped embers.
“Grab the bowls,” called Niamh, instructing with love. Steam fogging her glasses. She popped a paper hat on a kid, something cut from a discarded heat safety flyer. No embarrassment about how daft it was.
Doors opened on floors where the leases had long trained them to stay shut. A temporary halt to the after-ten visitor surcharge. Two teenagers set down their bags and exhaled, started chatting, people safe for the length of a song.
In the square, the carol restarted. So low that it wouldn’t need to scare the quietness. Silent Night - still off-key. Eben smiled at his console, a red UNCLASSIFIED blinking on and off, like an apology. Ignored.
Across the river, a confused influencer was livestreaming. They were there to catch the waterfall of light, and instead were broadcasting an accidental broadcast of the dark. “Weird glitch,” the host smiled, face lit by her phone. “Kinda rustic vibes!”
Without all the neon, the river looked like a river. And without the AR snow, the singing crowd looked like they were in real weather. You could see actual stars in the sky.
Some bowls moved from hand to hand. Names moving with them, friendly introductions.
“I’m Kady.”
“Mr. Qureshi. I live on third.”
“Rob, night dispatch.”
“Niamh. Get eating! We can talk after.”
“Eben,” he said quietly. To himself. Sitting in his office, watching all this on his feeds.
Nobody would know what he’d done. The point wasn’t explaining it. Just being in it.
A woman on the far side of the carolers courtyard leaned into her friend’s shoulder and laughed at something. Small, private joy. Her companion put a hand on her back, didn’t move it. No spectacle.
A child tugged at Niamh’s sleeve. “More?” She could have meant the song, or soup, or even just another night like this.
Probably about thirty seconds more. The song rolled on, into a last verse.
At five minutes, the grid breathed back the other way. The Festive Light Corridor surged back. Triumphant, and slightly late. The ad buses sprang back, remembering their lines. The Light League ticker sparked back, glad to be reporting what mattered.
Kady’s makeshift bulbs dimmed. The heaters thinned back to their baseline. The kettles clicked off.
For one more heartbeat, the city tried to hold on to the quiet it had been given. The night clung.
Niamh clapped her hands. “Who’ll take a bowl up to Mrs Larkin? She won’t come down, not with her leg.” Three hands went up. Someone grabbed a bowl, someone a ladle. Someone else laughed, just because.
Eben watched his screens. He slipped his lenses off for the first time in…years? Not forever, just putting away a tool you might need later. The whole system was rousing itself. Chyrons queueing up. Sponsors rebroadcasting. All set to arrive, any minute.
A baby cried in the background of his feed. Unconvinced by the spectacle. Not competing with the carols, just another note.
No scoreboard captured that. That was good.
LUMENPATH ANNOUNCES “NIGHT PAUSE” CHRISTMAS TRADITION
As part of our commitment to authentic, human-scale, celebration, we were pleased to deliver a planned five-minute Night Pause to certain districts. We’re delighted to see communities embracing candlelight, song, and togetherness. We’re excited to formalize Night Pause next year, with approved sponsor partners, ensuring a safe, curated, experience for everyone.
They had PR notices up within the hour. Night Pause™ trending. Stock clips of smiling families around tables. The next day would be press kits, “Return to simplicity”. They’d be selling Night Pause-branded candles next year.
Eben couldn’t help but laugh. The system patched itself quickly. Eat the meaning, sell the husk a million times over. None of it coming back on him.
He walked down, through the atrium, down to the lobby and back to the café. It was busier than usual, couples and families talking. Sponsored festive messages still emblazoned on the wall.
Tradition didn’t always need to be encoded.
It could be as simple as a cheap amp. An open door. Folding the baby’s cry into a song that was older than any sponsor. Just five minutes, when the city agreed to mean something to each other.
Eben cradled a cup of coffee. Thought of all those names again. It wasn’t redemption. But he felt useful.
Eben Sharpe, Chief Variance Officer. Christmas maximizer. He sat in this café, breathed unfiltered air. The grid was humming. And he could hear, clearly, the human grid too.
A story from the Static Drift universe.