Speaker 1: In twenty fifty five, the city is flawless. Trains arrive
on time, coffee is hot, street lights glow on schedule.
The only thing missing is people. When Celeste Ward, a
confessional political commentator who spent her life fighting for the public,
slips into this immaculate future, she expects collapse. Instead, she
finds a world that runs like a performance and seems
to recognize her as screens soothe in Systems Guide, Celeste
senses a deeper machinery beneath the calm, a course that
doesn't just maintain the city, but maintains the story. And
somewhere inside the perfection, a symbol returns again and again,
an impossible Blue Rose, warm to the touch, intimate is
memory and threaded with the feeling that she hasn't arrived
by accident, because in a future built to publish peace
and by panic, Celeste isn't here to be rescued. She's
here to become a witness. Welcome to Blue Rose Protocol,
Episode one, The City That Works, a poetic thriller where
the future is spotless, functional, and utterly empty. In twenty
fifty five, the city still remembers how to behave It
performs normalcy with the devotion of a machine that has
never learned the meaning of absence. Traffic signals cycle through
their colours on schedule, red, green, yellow, changing as if
the world is full of impatient drivers. Street Lights glow
with clean, consistent intensity, evenly spaced, like stitches holding a wound. Shut.
Storefront displays brighten and dim like lungs practicing breath somewhere
under the pavement. Trains glide through tunnels, arriving and departing
with perfect punctuality for passengers who do not exist. And
the strangest part is not that everything works, It's that
everything works beautifully. The city isn't limping along, It isn't
sputtering through blackouts. It isn't creaking under the weight of neglect.
It is maintained, cleaned, polished, cared for. Whoever designed it
never imagined it would need to be cared for without
human hands, But here it is cared for anyway. Celeste
Ward has always been able to tell the difference between
failure and disguise. She steps into a cafe that should
be crowded, it isn't. The door opens with the soft
resistance of a perfect hinge. A bell gives a polite,
cheerful chime, too bright, too friendly for a room with
no witnesses. The sound lands wrong, like laughter in a
hallway after a funeral. The scent of espresso is rich
and immediate, as if the beans were ground moments ago.
The pastry case is lit, Croissants sit in neat rows, uncracked, unclaimed.
A small sign promises fresh today, and Celeste feels her
stomach titan at the word today, because it assumes there
are still days that belong to anyone. She doesn't enter
like a tourist. She enters like a woman walking toward
a siren. Not because she's brave in the heroic way
people like to imagine bravery, but because she has spent
years training her body to move toward the place where
everyone else has turned away, years learning how institutions sound
when they're lying gently, how they sound when they're lying hard,
and how they sound when they've convinced themselves that withholding
truth is the same thing as keeping order. On the wall,
a screen displays a looping message in calming colors, welcome,
take your time. Celeste's eyes narrow. Take your time is
a phrase that only makes sense when time is yours.
To take. She steps toward the counter. No one greets her,
No human voice says he low. No footsteps approach from
the back room, no rustle, no cough, no sign of
a sleeping employee. Yet behind the counter, a machine whirs
to life as soon as she gets close, as if
proximity itself is a command. A cup slides into place
without hands. The espresso machine hums, then pours in a smooth,
even stream. The milk frother hisses, then quiets. Foam settles
with deliberate grace, and in the surface, impossibly precise blooms
a symbol the color of a bruise you can't explain.
A blue rose, not painted, not printed, not a trick
of shadow, a blue rose in milk, as if the
drink is being signed. Celeste stares at it longer than
is reasonable, because her mind wants to call it a trick,
and her body refuses. Her pulse quickens, not panic, recognition,
the same feeling she got when she was younger and
her grandmother would hum a hymn under her breath while
her hands worked. No performance, no audience, just ritual. The
rose feels like ritual. A receipt prints the printer doesn't jam,
the paper doesn't snag. Everything runs the way it would
if a person had cared enough to test it daily.
Celeste takes the receipt and looks for the usual banalities,
the item, the price, the time. She finds them. Then
she finds the date, June seventeenth, twenty fifty five. There
are moments when the brain tries to reject reality, the
way of body rejects poison, violent, immediate, protective, But Celeste's
mind doesn't reject it. It simply grows very quiet, as
if it's calculating the safest way to be honest. She
turns toward the windows outside. The street is immaculate, not abandoned, maintained.
There is no wind blown trash, no graffiti bleeding down walls,
no cracked sidewalk, weeds rising where neglect has made space.
Even the crosswalk paint looks refreshed, the way it does
after a city prepares for a parade. A trash truck
rolls by at the end of the block, silent as
a whisper, empty as a promise. It continues on schedule anyway.
The traffic light changes red to green, green to yellow,
yellow to red for no one. Celeste steps back from
the glass and looks around the cafe again. The chairs
are pulled out at consistent angles, as if people stood
up from them at the same time and never returned.
A menu board lists seasonal specials. A radio sits in
the corner. The radio is off, but Celeste can feel
the presence of it, the way you feel the presence
of a sleeping animal, quiet capable of waking. She reaches
into her pocket for her phone. It wakes in her hand.
There is no signal, no bars, no reassuring icons. Yet
the screen changes anyway, re arranging itself with the smooth
confidence of a system that believes it owns her attention.
A new interface appears clean, official, the kind of design
governments use when they want to look both modern and compassionate.
Across the top in calm blue typography, public safety announcements.
Below it a single profile tip her face, not a
recent photo, one from the arrow in her work was
more public than private, when she was still allowing herself
to believe that speaking truth could drag a system back
toward morality if enough people listened. In the photo, she
looks steady, grounded, like she's offering her voice as a
handrail under her name, a new label, authorized narrator. The
camera opens on its own, A red dot appears, recording
begins without her permission. Celestes thumb hovers, uncertain whether to
stop it. She is a woman who has survived because
she learned to document screenshots, time stamps, names, receipts. Evidence
is how you keep reality from being rewritten. Evidence is
how you keep your own mind from being gas lit
into silence. And yet she can't ignore what it means
for her camera to open by itself. She didn't press record,
the city did. On the wall screen, the calming message changes.
It shows her again another still from her past, a
clip frozen mid sentence. The caption beneath it is a
line she used to say when her comments section flooded
with fear. Stay with me. That line built her following,
not because it was catchy, but because it was anchored.
When systems failed, people needed someone who could translate chaos
into language that didn't drown them. Celeste didn't just break stories.
She carried them carefully, one human detail at a time.
The screen holds the phrase, then adds three words. She
has never said. We stayed Celeste's skin prickles. It feels
like the city has watched her long enough to mimic her.
The espresso machine wears again, as sensing her heartbeat. The
blue rows in the latte, swirls, collapses, then reforms itself,
still blue, Still impossible, still a signature. Celeste doesn't pick
up the latte. She doesn't drink the comfort. She has
learned that comfort offered by systems is often payment demanded later.
She takes a step backward. The bell above the door
chimes again, too cheerful, too eager, like the cafe wants
her to leave so it can reset. She looks down
at the receipt in her hand. A line appears at
the very bottom, as if the paper is being rewritten
after printing. You promised. The ink is the same, The
font is not. It looks slightly older, slightly wrong, as
if a human hand tried to imitate a machine's clean
typography and couldn't help leaving a trace of itself. Celeste's
mouth goes dry. You promised, promised what to come back,
to tell, the truth, to stay, to leave. The words
don't explain themselves, they simply exist, like an accusation. Her
phone screen flickers, the public safety announcements. Header flashes brighter,
then returns to normal. Beneath her profile tile, another line
appears status active, as if she is a service, as
if she is a protocol. Celeste walks out of the cafe. Outside.
The air is crisp and strangely still, the kind of
stillness that doesn't belong to weather. It belongs to rooms
where arguments have happened and everyone has stopped talking. Her
footsteps sound too loud on the clean sidewalk. Each step
feels recorded. The city is listening, even if it does
not speak. Across the street, a billboard wakes up, then another,
then another. They brighten in sequence, like eyes opening along
the avenue. They do not display advertisements. They display her again,
clip after clip, still after still, different arras of her
face used like identification. The biggest billboard holds the same
phrase stay with me. Then beneath it, a new message
scrolls in clean official letters, public order update, authorized narrator
on line. The words land in Celestes chest, like a
hand closing around her heart. She looks down the street.
A bus glides past, empty. Its route display reads now boarding.
A metro entrance sign flashes next train two minutes. The
city is running its routines the way a person repeats
a lie until it feels true. Celeste's phone buzzes a
notification appears simple and final, Welcome back, Celeste Ward. There
is no center listed, just the blue rose icon at
the bottom of the message, pulsing once like a heartbeat.
Celeste lifts her gaze for the first time since she arrived.
She notices something she didn't want to notice. Not just
that there are no people, but that there are no
remnants of people. No scattered bags, no abandoned strollers, no shoes,
no signs of panic or flight absence. This clean is
not a disaster. It is an event. It is removal.
And Celeste, standing in the middle of a city that
works like a dream, feels a question rised behind her
ribs like a scream. She refuses to give away who
is this performance for? The traffic light changes again, and
somewhere in the distance, a bell chimes, not from a cafe,
not from a door, but from nowhere, specific from everywhere
at once. Celeste's phone, still recording, captures the sound. The
red dot keeps blinking, and the city, immaculate and empty,
seems to settle its attention on her the way a
theater settles its attention on the lone person who has
wandered onto the stage. Because Celeste Ward was never just
a woman with a platform. She was a witness, and
in a place like this, witness is either the most
dangerous thing you can be or the most useful. The
billboards hold her face, the Blue Rose icon pulses again,
and the first episode ends with the city making one
thing unmistakably clear. Celeste is not lost in the future.
The future has been waiting for her. Next time on
Blue Rose Protocol, the city offers comfort like a service,
directions that feel too personal, kindness that feels pre programmed,
and a welcome that lands like a claim.