illphated
Vaporwave Noir
Neotropolis never slept. It hissed, blinked, and buzzed like a dying god dreaming in static. Towers clawed at the acid sky, veiled in smog and neon scars. Drones whispered surveillance lullabies above crowds of blank faces. Everyone played their part. Obedient. Efficient. Silent.
Except for her.
Her name was Ketta Voss. In the concrete entrails of Sector 19, she was better known as “The Noise.”
Ketta didn’t wear black like the rest of the mournful city. She painted her synth-leather jacket in ultraviolet graffiti and lit her heels with sub-bass pulses that left cracks in glass. Her presence wasn’t subtle—it was seismic. Every alley she entered turned into a soundstage. Every rooftop she crossed screamed with distortion.
She was hunted, of course. The Silence Protocols saw to that. Ever since the Ministry of Harmony had outlawed “dissonant frequencies,” those who dared raise their voices were classified as “Noise Agents”—a threat to the engineered calm of society.
But Ketta didn’t just make noise. She was noise. A symphony of disruption. Her voice modulator could bend subsonic registers into tectonic rumbles. Her heartbeat synced with forgotten melodies from banned data vaults. She pirated music from other timelines. She hacked silence itself.
Some said she once screamed at a drone squadron and fried their neural cores with nothing but decibels.
Others said she danced through riot lines with speakers strapped to her ribs, each step a riot hymn.
None of them knew the truth.
None of them knew the silence had once stolen her brother.
She remembered his voice. Bright. Defiant. Too real for a world built on hush. The Harmony Enforcers took him one rainy night, filed him into the Quiet Rooms beneath Central. She never heard him again.
Since then, every beat she blasted was a war cry. Every lyric a grave defiled.
And sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is be noise.
She stood now atop Broadcast Tower Seven, patch-cabled into the old world. Rain slicked her jacket, painting her like a living glitch. Below, the city pulsed in sterile hums. Above, she screamed.
The feed hijack began.
Her voice tore through every speaker, every headset, every sleeping implant in Neotropolis.
“You are not an error.
You are not obsolete.
You are the dissonance that remembers freedom.”
The people stirred. A flicker in the silence.
And somewhere deep beneath the city, in the dark vaults where no song had touched in years—
—a small speaker cracked, and a boy’s voice whispered back.
End.
The revolution won’t be televised. But it might be auto-tuned.