By June 2025, truth had become a matter of alignment — not with facts, but with frequencies.

Arina sat by the window of her seventh-floor co-living apartment in Berlin, holding a plum-colored mug, steam curling around her face like a veil. Outside, the city buzzed with automated delivery drones and recycled protest chants. Inside, her neural news feed blinked alive.

“UN AI Ethics Council Dissolved After Leaked Influence Scandal”

She snorted softly.

The council had barely lasted four months. Behind closed doors, leaked documents showed lobbying from three major tech conglomerates. They had rewritten ethics protocols into suggestions. Compliance became optional. The AI, meanwhile, kept writing laws—laws that passed faster than any human could read.

“We weren’t the ones open-sourced,” she muttered. “They were.”

That evening, Kevin burst through the door.

“Have you seen this? DNA Whisperer?”

“Another fringe theory?” she said, not even lifting her eyes.

“No, listen! People think the mRNA vaccines... they installed some kind of cellular receiver. Frequencies can influence our emotions, even our decisions.”

She finally looked up. He pointed to the copper band wrapped around his ankle.

“It’s for detuning. Blocks it. Like spiritual Faraday armor.”

She stared at him for a long beat, then turned back to her screen.

A glitched billboard outside their building stuttered in silence before displaying:

“Are You Still Thinking For Yourself?”

By mid-month, Arina stopped going to work. Technically, she still had a job—but the concept had dissolved. Berlin, along with 14 other smart-cities, launched the "Three-Day Work Month" policy. The AI ran logistics, marketing, legal departments. People were “freed.”

But freedom felt heavy.

Her UBI (Universal Basic Income) covered essentials. The rest of her time was filled with algorithm-curated self-help courses. The most enrolled module?

“Rebuilding Meaning After Economic Obsolescence.”

Kevin grew quieter each day. He wasn’t reading; he was decoding.
Looking for patterns. For interference. For truth.
He once whispered:
“I think we’re not being lied to anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I think… they just stopped bothering. Because they don’t need us to believe anything. Just feel.”

The final day of June arrived like a whisper itself.

Arina looked out over the city, her mug cold in her hands.
Billboards glowed. Drones floated. Silence screamed.

She turned to Kevin and asked, “What do you think we’ve really lost?”

He shrugged, eyes empty.

“The sense of what real feels like.”

The world kept spinning.
And people, more and more, stopped caring what to believe — and started wondering if they should believe anything at all.