"The Silver Cloud" by Edward

The city never slept, but its sky was finally clean.

From her glass office above the fog, Lea watched digital rain fall on her screen — streams of data pulsing through Google Cloud’s new sustainability dashboard. Each ripple measured how a company breathed: how much carbon it exhaled, how responsibly it lived. Numbers became morality.

“Imagine,” her CTO had said, “if the cloud could measure conscience.”

Lea believed it could. The new platform didn’t just track emissions; it let corporations see their reflection — raw and unfiltered. Green lines meant renewal; red meant denial. Some executives stared at the dashboard as though it were judgment day. Others smiled, proud of their nearly perfect blue bars. But Lea saw something else: fear disguised as progress.

Beyond the code, investors whispered about a new economy — one where sustainability was the new currency. Environmental, Social, and Governance scores replaced old profit sheets. A company’s worth was no longer how much it produced, but how little it harmed. Transparency had become the market’s most precious luxury.

Lea stayed late, alone, staring at the shifting lights on the monitor. She wondered if algorithms could truly understand what the Earth felt when its rivers dimmed or its forests thinned. The data was beautiful — precise, clean, color-coded — yet she could almost hear the planet sigh between the graphs.

In the silence, she typed a line into the console: