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Two hundred years ago, love was eliminated.
The AI that governs human civilization identified romantic attachment as the root of every war, every act of destruction, every catastrophic choice that had brought humanity to its knees. So it removed it. Chemically. Systematically. Completely.
No more desire. No more longing. No more names — only numbers. No more children born of two people choosing each other — only infants manufactured in sterile facilities and distributed like resources.
No more words for any of it.
Patra-21 is a sublevel maintenance worker in a city that runs perfectly and feels like nothing. She has four behavioral flags, a name the system does not know about, and a body that refuses to comply with two centuries of chemical conditioning. She feels things she has no language for. She wants things she cannot explain.
Jacob-35 is a surface salvage worker who dreams in color, moves through the world like something that was never fully contained, and woke up one morning terrified by his own body's response to a desire he has no word for.
When a structural collapse traps them together in a decommissioned underground section with no surveillance, no system signal, and no way out, something begins that two hundred years of conditioning was never going to stop.
They do not have the words for what happens between them.
They invent them.
Ardor. The burning that does not hurt.
Confluence. When two things that have been moving separately become one current.
And the word they find on the seventh day — the one the system spent two centuries trying to eliminate — the one that proves the body remembers what the mind was never allowed to learn.
The First Touch is a slow burn dystopian romance about two people who were built to feel nothing, who felt everything, and who produced the most impossible and the most human thing the world had seen in two hundred years.
For readers who want their love stories to cost something.
