Premise
What if a society measured wealth by the complexity of your imagination—and speech was considered an act of economic self-harm?
Fiction
In Silensia, silence is sacred.
Not because the gods demanded it, nor because noise offends, but because the mind is a vault and words are a leak. From the moment a child is born, their thoughts are nurtured like rare minerals. Toys are forbidden. Books, outlawed. Even lullabies are whispered into pillows, never into ears. Every infant is fitted with a cranial halo: a soft, silver circlet of neural glass that pulses gently, measuring originality, metaphor density, and narrative complexity.
By six, the rich children glow like bonfires—brilliant, flickering minds amassing value in the thought-markets. The poor? Dim, dull halos. Or worse: broken ones, shattered by careless words.
And then there was Lune.
She was ten when her foster-mother gave up, sent her to the Whisper Sector. “Too leaky,” the woman said, shoving Lune into the ash-dusted alleyways of the ghetto. “You can’t keep a secret thought for five seconds.”
Which was true. Lune talked in her sleep. She narrated her every move. She burst into monologues mid-bite of a stolen apple, ideas spilling from her like water through cupped hands.
But what no one knew—what even the halo technicians failed to detect—was that Lune's imagination did not diminish with speech. It amplified.
Each time she described her inner visions—cities made of cloud bones, bees that harvested sadness from flowers, gods who argued over punctuation—something strange happened: the images didn’t fade. They multiplied, morphed, became more alive.
In the shadow of abandoned tenements, Lune spoke aloud to herself, and a few hungry children listened. And they saw.
The first was a blind boy named Orrin, who swore he could smell Lune’s firefly forests. Then came Mira, who claimed to dream of Lune’s glass-winged wolves after hearing her speak of them.
Soon, the whisper ghetto buzzed. Children gathered in secret, forming half-moons around her. They brought her sugar scraps, frayed blankets, stolen fruit. Not as payment—there was no need—but as tribute.
She didn’t mean to start a movement.
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