_top_ | Cline Panel

He started to walk.

Marriages, friendships, business partnerships—all were now governed by the Panel. If your Cline with a colleague dropped below 300, you were reassigned. If your Cline with a spouse fell below 200 for six consecutive months, the Panel would issue a “Decoupling Directive.” No lawyers, no tears, no custody battles. Just a quiet, administrative severance. cline panel

Each morning, the number dropped. 680. 540. 390. Aris would wake up with a knot in his chest, not look at his wife, and shuffle to the living room to check the readout. Lena would do the same from the kitchen doorway, watching the blue light reflect off his glasses. He started to walk

The Panel was a flat, milky disc embedded in the wall of every citizen’s living room, just above the hearth. It looked like a smooth, polished opal, but its purpose was far colder than any gem. Every morning, at precisely 7:03 AM, it would hum to life, displaying a single, calibrated number in soft blue light: your current “Cline”—a real-time, psychometric index of your emotional and social compatibility with every other person in the city. If your Cline with a spouse fell below

He pulled on his coat. He walked out of the apartment, down the silent hallway, and stepped into the elevator. He didn’t know the way to Lena’s new address. He didn’t have a high Cline with anyone who could tell him.

Aris looked at the zero. He didn’t feel despair. He felt something he hadn’t felt since the Panel was installed. He felt free.

The system’s logic was seductively simple. It monitored your micro-expressions through your home’s sensors, analyzed your shopping habits, tracked the neurotransmitters in your perspiration, and cross-referenced it all with the city’s vast biometric network. The result was a score from 0 to 1000. A high Cline with someone meant harmony, efficiency, and minimal friction. A low Cline meant argument, misunderstanding, and wasted energy.