Chapter One: The Overdue Invoice

The invoice was waiting on the floor behind her apartment door when she got home.

Ada stepped over it without looking. By that point she was receiving three or four a day.

Electricity invoices. Water invoices. Civic maintenance invoices. The monthly levy for the seawall reinforcement project. The Numiel Heritage Trust. The Numiel Flood Preservation Initiative.

A subscription renewal for a service she had cancelled six months ago. Another reminder from a company insisting her dream-filter package had expired and that unmanaged dreams could contain distressing content.

She dropped her satchel beside the kitchen table and stared out of the window for a moment.

On the sill beside the sink, her phone flashed with another message from Mara, unanswered since Sunday: dinner Friday? no archive excuses this time. Ada watched the notification fade and told herself she would reply after tea.

The air beyond the glass had turned wet and colourless again.

It moved through the city the way memory moved through old people, slowly, deliberately, occupying spaces it had no business occupying. Entire buildings vanished into it. The monastery ruins on the western cliffs had disappeared completely. Even the lights from the harbour looked uncertain tonight, faint yellow smudges suspended in grey.

Numiel always looked as though it was in the process of remembering itself.

She kicked off her boots and put the kettle on.

There had been a time when she walked down to the harbour after work simply to hear the water moving against the old flood walls. Lately she had gone nowhere except the archive, the tram stop and home.

A white envelope lay there, plain and unmarked, with only her name on the front.

Nothing unusual about that. Half the companies operating in Numiel had abandoned branding years ago. Logos came and went. Corporations merged. Ministries dissolved. The only thing that remained constant was the billing department.

The kettle began to hum.

She bent down, picked up the envelope and opened it while waiting for the water to boil.

Inside was a single sheet of paper: no colour, no imagery, no legal disclaimers. Only three lines.

CONTINUITY SERVICES

PAYMENT OVERDUE

IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED

Ada frowned.

That was it: no amount, no account number, no contact details, no explanation whatsoever.

She turned the page over.

Blank.

“Helpful.”

The kettle clicked.

She made tea and sat beside the window. The invoice remained on the table while darkness slowly gathered over the city. Somewhere below, the harbour horn sounded through the saturated streets. The note lingered in the room longer than it should have, vibrating through the silence like an unfinished thought.

Continuity Services. The name felt familiar—not familiar enough to place, just familiar enough to be irritating.

She checked her messages.

The message from Mara still sat unread at the top of her phone. She turned the screen face down before it could make her feel anything useful.

Nothing appeared in her messages, her banking app, or her direct debits.

No account under that name.

The company did not exist as far as she could tell.

Good.

That meant it wasn’t her problem.

She folded the invoice in half, dropped it into the waste chute beneath the sink and forgot about it.

Or at least she thought she did.

The following morning she woke before dawn.

For a few moments she lay still beneath the blankets listening to the familiar sounds of the building settling around her. Water moving through old pipes. Wind against concrete. The distant groan of something metallic shifting somewhere out where the morning had not yet found the streets.

Then she noticed the envelope.

It was sitting in the centre of her kitchen table.

Exactly where she had left it before throwing it away: folded the same way, marked by the faint coffee stain in the lower corner.

Ada stared at it for a long time.

Then she laughed.

It was not funny; laughter was simply the only sensible response left.

She lived alone.

Nobody had access to the apartment.

The waste chute emptied directly into the municipal processors beneath the district.

There was no plausible route for the letter to return.

Yet there it was, pale and unmistakable in the light leaking through the window.

CONTINUITY SERVICES

PAYMENT OVERDUE

IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED

Outside, somewhere beyond the smeared windowlight, a low note opened across the harbour and faded before she could decide whether it sounded mournful or merely mechanical.

Ada poured herself a coffee and decided she would deal with it after work.

The invoice remained on the table.

Chapter Two: The Word in the Records

The invoice followed her through the day.

Not physically. That would have been easier to explain.

It remained folded inside her satchel while she travelled across the city, took the tram through the flooded districts and spent eight hours cataloguing records that nobody would ever read. Yet every so often she found herself thinking about it—not the impossible return from the waste chute, but the name.

Continuity Services.

It sat in her thoughts like a word on the tip of her tongue.

By mid-afternoon she had convinced herself it was some forgotten utility provider. An old insurer perhaps. A maintenance company. Something boring. Reality was usually boring. That was one of the few comforts left.

The archive occupied the lower floors of a former monastery overlooking the harbour. Long before the floods, monks had stored books there. After the floods, the government stored records. Neither institution had been especially good at preserving the truth.

Rows of shelves disappeared into shadow beneath vaulted ceilings stained green by decades of damp. The building smelled of paper, mildew and seawater. Ada preferred it to people.

A stack of census records sat open on her desk: a routine verification job. Cross-reference the names. Check the dates. Confirm continuity.

The phrase caught her attention.

She blinked.

Confirm continuity.

The words appeared at the top of the page.

Standard bureaucratic terminology. Nothing unusual.

Yet suddenly she began noticing it everywhere.

Continuity Verification.

Continuity Audit.

Continuity Preservation Office.

A dozen documents she had seen hundreds of times now seemed to contain the same word.

Continuity.

As though the city had been quietly repeating it to itself for years.

She closed the file.

The feeling passed.

By the time she returned home, moisture clung to the tram windows and blurred the city into layers of glass, light and shadow.

The streetlights glowed like distant stars submerged beneath water. Buildings emerged and disappeared behind shifting veils of grey. Somewhere across the bay a warning siren echoed, its edges softened before the sound reached her.

The city felt half-drowned tonight.

Numiel often did.

The invoice was waiting exactly where she had left it that morning.

She stood over it for several seconds.

Then picked it up.

“Fine.”

The word sounded small in the empty apartment.

She unfolded the paper.

For the first time she noticed tiny text beneath the final line, almost hidden: a web address.

No company suffix.

No domain extension she recognised.

Just:

continuity

Nothing else.

She laughed again.

“Of course.”

The sort of address that should not have worked.

The sort of address that belonged in old stories about haunted websites and cursed message boards.

She sat at the kitchen table and opened her terminal.

The address loaded immediately.

No search engine, no security certificate, no loading screen, no splash page. One moment she was staring at an empty browser window; the next she was somewhere else.

The site looked older than the internet.

White background. Black text. No images, logos, advertisements, menus, links or explanation. Only a single heading.

CONTINUITY SERVICES

Beneath it sat a blinking cursor.

Nothing more.

Ada frowned.

Then the page changed.

Not refreshed.

Changed.

As though it had noticed her.

New text appeared.

Welcome, Ada Jones.

Account status:

ACTIVE

A chill moved through her shoulders—not fear, not yet, but recognition: the peculiar sensation of encountering something that already knows you.

She scrolled down.

More text appeared.

Sparse.

Clinical.

Perfectly aligned.

Your current subscription:

ACTIVE

Continuity status:

MAINTAINED

Service level:

TIER V

She stopped.

Read it again.

TIER V

Below that was a list of service tiers.

Tier I — 10 ɲ/month

Basic autobiographical continuity.

Tier II — 80 ɲ/month

Extended memory retention.

Tier III — 1,200 ɲ/month

Emotional preservation package.

Tier IV — 43,000 ɲ/month

Familial persistence package.

Tier V — 1,000,000 ɲ/month

Narrative continuity guaranteed.

For several seconds she simply stared, then laughed so hard she nearly spilled her tea.

One million noets a month.

It was absurd: performance art disguised as software, some underground joke, exactly the sort of thing Numiel produced whenever conceptual artists gained access to grant funding and too much free time.

She almost admired it.

Almost.

Then she noticed the small line beneath Tier V.

CURRENT PLAN:

TIER V

The laughter faded.

A strange silence settled over the apartment.

Outside, the harbour horn pressed one long vibration against the windowpane, flattening itself into the damp night.

Ada leaned closer to the screen.

There was no button to subscribe, no payment portal, no billing history, no customer information—only her name, her account, and the statement that she was apparently spending one million noets a month maintaining reality.

For the first time since opening the site, she felt the faintest flicker of unease.

Not because she believed any of it.

Because she couldn’t work out what the joke was.

Chapter Three: A Number Too Short to Exist

Ada searched for the company the next evening and found nothing useful: no registry entry, no licence, no tax record, no office address. The results contained plenty of continuity and plenty of services, but never the two together in any way that mattered.

Then, in the historical business records, one result appeared.

The entry contained no address, no directors and no ownership structure. Only one field mattered.

ACTIVE

Nothing else: no explanation, no supporting documents, no attached records. Just those two words.

ACTIVE.

One moment it occupied the screen; the next it was gone.

She opened the site again.

At the bottom of the page, almost hidden, a single line had appeared: Need assistance? Contact Customer Support.

Beneath it sat a number.

No country code, no regional prefix. Only six digits.

She stared at it.

A number too short to exist.

A number that somehow looked familiar.

From the harbour came a slow metallic call, drawn out until it seemed less like a warning than a question.

The sound lingered in the apartment.

Ada picked up her phone.

“Fine,” she said to nobody.

Then she dialled.

The call connected immediately.

No ringing, no waiting tone, no recorded greeting. Just a voice.

Calm, genderless, as old and ordinary as dust.

“Continuity Services.”

The voice sounded as though it had been expecting her.

Chapter Four: Customer Support

For several seconds neither of them spoke.

Ada could hear something on the other end of the line.

Not static or background noise, but the faint sound of pages turning slowly, methodically, as though somebody was consulting a file.

She glanced at the phone screen.

The call timer was running.

The connection was real.

At least as real as anything else had been that week.

“Hello?”

“We are still here.”

The voice was calm, neither male nor female, middle-aged somehow: the sort of voice that belonged behind a reception desk or answering questions in a library.

Ada frowned.

“Right.”

Pages continued turning before the voice spoke again.

“How may we assist you today, Ada?”

Ada shifted the phone against her ear and set her untouched tea down a little too hard.

“Let’s start with who you are.”

“Continuity Services.”

“No, I got that part.”

A page turned.

“We are pleased to hear that.”

“What do you actually do?”

“We maintain continuity.”

Ada pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose until coloured sparks moved behind her eyelids.

“You’re going to make me drag every answer out of you, aren’t you?”

“We can provide clarification where required.”

“Good.”

She pushed her chair back from the table, its legs scraping sharply across the floor.

“Who owns the company?” she said. “And what exactly are you?”

“No active ownership structure exists. We are not a government agency, corporation, religious organisation or scam.”

A horn sounded outside, so low it seemed to move through the floorboards before it reached the glass.

The note thinned as it crossed the apartment, leaving the room briefly larger and emptier behind it.

Ada found herself looking towards the window.

The city beyond the glass had almost disappeared.

Only a handful of lights persisted beyond the glass.

“You sent me an invoice.”

“Correct.”

“For what exactly?”

“Continuity services.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the answer we currently provide.”

“Currently?”

“Certain information is restricted until required.”

Ada gave a short laugh and began pacing between the table and the window.

“There it is.”

“There what is?”

“The cult part.”

“We are not a cult.”

“You literally just said information is restricted.”

“For your safety.”

“Definitely a cult.”

“We understand your concern.”

The response arrived so quickly that she stopped mid-step, one hand still lifted in the air.

The speed of it was not funny so much as painfully familiar.

Because it had the dead, laminated smoothness of every customer service interaction she had ever suffered through.

She imagined somebody reading from a script.

Some exhausted employee trapped in an endless call queue.

The image loosened her jaw by a fraction.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s pretend this is real.”

“It is real.”

“Let’s pretend I believe you.”

The voice accepted the amendment without comment.

“You claim I have an active Tier Five subscription that costs one million noets a month.”

“That’s obviously impossible.”

“Many customers initially feel that way.”

Pages turned for longer this time.

When the voice finally answered it sounded almost sympathetic.

“Later they become concerned.”

A small knot formed somewhere in her stomach.

It was nothing dramatic, only a small tightening that made her sit up slightly.

“Concerned about what?”

“The cost.”

“But noets aren’t real.”

“They are real.”

“Fine.” She picked up her tea, took one sharp sip, and put the mug down untouched. “Let’s assume they exist.”

“What happens if I don’t pay?”

For the first time in the conversation, the line went genuinely silent.

“Service quality may degrade.”

Ada stared at the ceiling and let out a breath through her nose.

“What does that mean?”

“Continuity outcomes cannot be guaranteed.”

“Which means?”

Her fingers tightened around the phone. The plastic casing creaked softly against her palm.

“Look.” Her voice came out flatter than she intended. “Either tell me what you’re selling or stop wasting my time.”

“We are not selling anything.”

“We are billing you.”

The distinction hung in the air.

Somewhere across the bay, a ship announced itself to a city that could barely see it.

The sound arrived softened at the edges, more remembered than heard.

The chill made her loosen her grip before she realised she had been holding the phone too tightly.

“You have been a customer for a considerable period of time.”

“I’ve never heard of you.”

“Most customers don’t.”

She lowered herself back into the chair and stared at the screen.

The room seemed colder, as if the chill had entered the furniture, the floorboards, the small domestic certainties arranged around her.

“What exactly,” she said, each word clipped cleanly from the next, “am I paying for?”

The voice answered immediately: no pages, no pause, no consultation. Just certainty.

“The continued admissibility of your life.”

Then she laughed.

A sharp nervous laugh that sounded much less convincing than she intended.

“Right.”

The line waited.

“You know what?”

“Please continue.”

“I think we’re done.”

“We understand.”

She moved her thumb towards the disconnect icon.

Then one final question surfaced.

“If I wanted to cancel,” she said, “how would I do that?”

The pages stopped turning, leaving no sound whatsoever on the line.

When the voice answered, it sounded impossibly distant.

“You already know where the button is.”

The line disconnected.

Ada sat alone in the apartment, phone still in her hand, the white website glowing softly on the screen. And somewhere deep in the weather beyond the city, the harbour gave one slow answering note.

© B C Nolan, 2026. All rights reserved.