Look out there. See the city lights? Each one a tiny spark against the perpetual twilight we call ‘day’. Beautiful, isn’t it? Deceptive. Every single one of those lights, every hover-car gliding silently between the towers, every laughing face you see projected onto the public screens… it all runs on the same fuel. Life. Measured, quantified, and traded away minute by precious minute.

They call it Vitality now. Sounds clean, clinical. Like something you can budget. But it’s just blood, sweat, and time, distilled down to a glowing number on the implant in your wrist.

When the system was first introduced, generations ago, they sold it as liberation. ‘Master your own clock!’ the adverts screamed. ‘Live forever, or burn bright!’ Freedom, they called it. Freedom from the tyranny of the natural lifespan. You could work overtime, earn an extra decade. Sell a few years to afford that luxury apartment overlooking the neon haze. Or gamble away a century on the glimmer-circuits, chasing the high of pure, unadulterated existence.

It worked, in a way. Death became… negotiable. At least for some. The architects of the system, the founders of the great energy-banks, they became immortal, practically gods. Their faces never age on the news feeds. They float through life, serene and untouched, radiating a vibrancy that feels almost obscene. We call them the ‘Vitals’ – those who possess so much life they barely notice the cost of breathing. They live in the sky-towers, breathing filtered air, spending centuries on pursuits we can only dream of.

For the rest of us, down here in the undercity, ‘liberation’ just meant a new kind of chain. We became walking accounts. Every meal, every commute, every flickering light in our cramped hab-units deducts seconds, minutes. Rent isn’t paid in credits; it’s paid in weeks deducted directly from your implant. Fall into debt? The ‘Repo Men’ come calling – hulking figures in corporate armour, authorised to drain you down to the bare minimum required for basic function, sometimes less. They don’t kill you, not usually. They just leave you a grey husk, too weak to work, too exhausted to care, waiting for the final depletion.

So, you learn to conserve. It becomes an instinct, sharper than hunger. You walk instead of taking the transit, costing you hours but saving you days. You eat nutrient paste instead of real food. You keep your lights dim, your heating low. You avoid strong emotions – joy, anger, even love – because the flush of adrenaline, the racing heart, it costs too much. You learn to live in the

Penumbra, the grey space between truly living and simply existing. You hoard your minutes, your days, your years, stretching them out into a long, thin, tasteless ribbon of time.

Why? For what? Some save for a reason – a sick relative, like my neighbour Elara trying to keep her sister from The Drain. Some dream of buying their way into the upper levels, a fool’s hope mostly. But most of us… most of us just conserve because we’re terrified of the alternative. We’ve seen the ‘burnouts’ – the ‘Spenders’ who live for the moment, chasing sensation, laughing loud, loving hard, and then collapsing in the street, their implant blinking zero, before they even see thirty. We tell ourselves their lives were meaningless, flashes in the pan. We tell ourselves our long, quiet suffering has dignity. Mostly, we lie.

There’s an art to it, you know. Conserving. You learn the tricks. How to siphon energy from public terminals. Which back alleys the Repo Men don’t patrol. How to move without wasted motion. How to breathe shallowly. How to feel without feeling. You become a ghost in the machine, invisible, unnoticed, just… enduring. Like young Vesper down the hall – pretends to run with the Spenders, laughing and bright, but I see her late at night, slipping credits onto rigged arcade machines, her face grim, practising the art of the steal, just like the rest of us survivors.

Is it a life? I don’t know anymore. I’ve conserved for nearly two centuries. I have decades left on my clock, ticking away slower than melting ice. I’ve outlived everyone I ever knew. I sit here, look out at the lights fuelled by lives spent too fast, and wonder what it was all for. I have the time. Endless, grey, empty time. But I never truly lived a minute of it.

That’s the truth of the Penumbra Verse, kid. You choose. Burn bright and vanish, or fade slow and long into the grey. There’s no third option. Not for us. Now, turn off that light. It’s costing me.