The Queen's Silence

The Queen's Silence is a novella set in the dark sci-fi and cyberpunk ChromaSpyke universe by Alexander Mharcei.

After the orbital bombardments of the Astral Twilight, Asma Vohle flees civilization and disappears into the Canadian wilderness.

She was an engineer at a climate control facility designed to cool the atmosphere. Now she sleeps in tents, burns what little fuel she has left, and listens to the silence close in. The cold is relentless. The isolation worse. And the system she ran from is the only place warm enough to survive.

Asma is not alone. Or at least, she believes she is not. Silvi follows her through the woods, a familiar presence at a careful distance. The farther Asma walks, the harder it becomes to tell what she can trust.

The facility still stands. Occupied by Reis, a zero-mod squatter who rejects augmentation, worships human purity, and believes technology is humanity’s original sin. He has turned the station into a trap. Augmented visitors vanish. Corpse units never return. What remains is stripped down, sold off, and fed back into a quiet, violent economy.

Asma cannot survive the wilderness. She cannot exist outside the system. And Reis cannot allow her to return to it.

The Queen’s Silence is a cold, psychologically disorienting cyberpunk story about forced reintegration, belief as a weapon, and the cost of choosing warmth over autonomy. There are no clean escapes here. Only the decision to submit, or freeze.