Chapter 2: Brainstorm

The Observatory was colder than usual.

Its windows stretched from floor to ceiling, wrapping the tower in a shell of clarity and detachment. From here, the Brain could see the entire city of Corpus. Every street, every district. A living map of pattern and pulse, flickering with logic beneath the skin of night.

He stood before a massive panel covered in neural thread�"glowing filaments webbed with data, graphs, probabilities, projections. The lines pulsed softly, like a mind caught mid-thought. He moved between them with the precision of someone who had long since learned to think in layers: logic, emotion, consequence, optics�"each firing behind his eyes in careful sequence.

He had been awake for 49 hours. There was no time for rest. Not when the system was fraying.

The Heart had grown too heavy. The Lungs too absent. The Liver too silent. The Stomach too full.

And the Brain�"well, he was too aware of all of it.

He tapped at a node on the neural panel. A new overlay flickered into view: Anomalous Variations in Homeostasis �" Week 28 Report. The lines danced and stuttered. Flow disruption in the Vena District. Emotional overload metrics off the charts. The cognitive dissonance in the Nerve Quarters had doubled. Even the city’s Circadian Grid was misaligned�"sleep patterns fraying, dream frequencies erratic.

“Entropy,” he muttered. “Uncontrolled entropy.”

---

The Brain was not like the others. He knew this. And sometimes�"on particularly silent nights�"he hated it.

He had no children showing up at his door. No community begging for his attention. No warm touch, no urgent embraces. No one wept in his presence. No one came seeking comfort.

They came for answers. Cold, unyielding answers.

They assumed he could carry it all because he didn't feel it all. As if calculation were armor. As if intellect were insulation from pain.

But it wasn't. Not really.

The Brain remembered everything. Every failure. Every warning ignored. Every time he begged the Heart to stop absorbing, pleaded with the Liver to slow down, asked the Lungs to stay put.

And every time, they didn’t listen. Because no one listens to a forecast until the storm hits.

---

He sat at his desk and pulled out a recording�"a voice file from the Liver dated three weeks ago. The last message received.

“Cleanup in Lower Gut. Another bile dump from the factories. I’ve neutralized it, but barely. You need to talk to Heart�"he keeps sending more emotional waste without redistribution. I’m reaching limits. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.”

The Brain closed his eyes.

Limits. The one word everyone seemed to forget existed.

Even he wasn’t sure where his own were anymore.

---

A soft chime. An internal ping. Visitor Detected: Lungs �" Entry Request.

The Brain blinked, surprised. He turned toward the door, and sure enough, it slid open with a hiss. The Lungs�"both of them�"stepped in, wind-kissed and disheveled, the scent of clouds still clinging to their coats.

The twins were rarely in sync, but tonight they stood close. The elder, Sol, had paint on his fingers. The younger, Lune, had leaves in her hair. Both looked unsettled.

“You left,” the Brain said, tone clipped. “Again.”

Lune crossed her arms. “We needed air.”

“Everyone needs air,” the Brain said. “But you’re the only ones allowed to abandon your posts whenever it suits you.”

Sol looked away. “It didn’t suit us. We just… couldn’t breathe here anymore.”

The Brain rose from his desk, voice sharpening. “The city is suffocating. You vanish and expect nothing to falter? Do you know how many sectors dipped into hypoxia last week?”

Lune met his gaze. Her eyes were storm-cloud grey.

“We know. We felt it. That’s why we came back.”

Something in her voice stopped him. Not defiance. Not shame. Just truth. Heavy, quiet truth.

Sol added, “You think you're the only one panicking, Brain? We're all breaking in different ways. At least we admit when we run.”

The Brain didn’t answer.

Because part of him wanted to run too.

He wanted to pack up every equation, every map, every chart, and vanish into abstraction�"into some clean, cold corner of thought where nothing could hurt him. Where the burden of knowing didn’t feel like drowning in invisible numbers.

But he couldn’t. He was the Brain. He had to know.

And what he knew now�"deep in the axons of his being�"was that something fundamental was failing.

Not someone. Something.

Not a bad decision or a single breakdown, but a rot in the root code. A fault line beneath the surface. And it was growing.

He turned away from the twins.

“I need to see the Liver,” he said quietly.

Sol and Lune exchanged a look. It was Lune who replied.

“We tried. No answer.”

The Brain’s fingers flexed against the desk. A thousand calculations bloomed behind his eyes.

“We may already be too late.”

---

That night, he dreamed.
A rarity.
He did not sleep often, and when he did, his dreams were usually static noise�"error messages wrapped in metaphor.

But this one was different.

He saw Corpus laid open like a cadaver. Arteries tangled. Neurons frayed. The Heart cracked. The Liver bleeding black.

He saw his own hands trying to stitch it all back together.

But every time he tied a knot, the thread snapped.

And far beneath the city, something vast and silent moved.
Not just a shadow now.
But a presence.
Waiting.

Author's Note

This chapter shifts the spotlight to the Brain—not as a cold overseer, but as someone caught in the exhausting clarity of perpetual awareness. Where the Heart feels everything, the Brain knows everything—and knowledge, in its purest form, can be just as crushing as empathy.

I wanted to explore what it means to be responsible for the system but excluded from its emotional circuitry. The Brain doesn’t get the comfort of collapse. He doesn't get to cry in public. He just calculates, adjusts, warns... and waits.

The Brain’s burden is the one so many of us quietly bear: the invisible labor of holding things together, the loneliness of leadership, the ache of being right too late.

And beneath it all, something bigger brews—a metaphor for systemic fragility, emotional fatigue, and what happens when a body (or a society) forgets to listen to itself.

Thank you for reading.
— Oghogho Akpeli