The cafeteria was loud.
Not in volume—but in pattern.
Voices overlapped in predictable clusters: laughter spiking every twelve seconds, trays sliding across metal rails, chairs scraping in brief, synchronized bursts. It was a familiar chaos, the kind people mistook for randomness.
He didn't.
He sat near the edge of the room, back to the wall, tray untouched. His eyes moved—not searching, just recording. The system liked noise like this. Human, inefficient, self-correcting.
Safe.
Across the room, a group of first-years crowded around a table where someone was telling a story too loudly. Their reactions arrived half a second late, like lag in a poorly optimized simulation. Predictable inputs. Predictable outputs.
Except one.
A girl near the end of the table wasn't laughing.
She wasn't bored either.
She was watching him.
Not directly. Peripheral glances, reflected off the polished surface of a window behind him. She looked away whenever he shifted, then recalibrated when he stilled again.
Observation without engagement.
Interesting.
He marked it mentally, not as a threat, but as a deviation. Minor. Possibly coincidental. Most anomalies were.
His wristband vibrated.
A soft pulse—one of the non-intrusive notifications. No message, just confirmation. Attendance registered. Behavioral variance within expected limits.
Still noise.
He exhaled slowly and stood, leaving the tray untouched. The movement triggered a small ripple—two heads turned, one conversation stalled, then resumed. The system adjusted around him seamlessly.
Good.
The corridor outside was quieter, but not empty. Footsteps echoed at irregular intervals, lockers opened and closed with muted clacks. Sunlight filtered through high windows, diffused and impersonal.
He walked at an average pace.
Not fast enough to suggest urgency. Not slow enough to draw attention.
Halfway down the hall, a voice called out.
"Hey."
He didn't turn immediately. Delays mattered. He counted half a second, then pivoted.
It was a faculty assistant—mid-thirties, crisp posture, eyes sharp in the way people thought intelligence looked. A tablet was tucked under her arm.
"You're in Section C, right?" she asked.
"Yes," he replied. Neutral tone. Minimal inflection.
She studied him for a moment too long. Not suspicious—curious. The dangerous kind.
"You scored unusually high on the baseline assessment," she said. "But your follow-up performance was… flat."
He tilted his head slightly. Not confusion. Politeness.
"I was told consistency mattered."
A pause.
It was subtle, but it landed.
Her lips parted, then closed again. The tablet shifted under her arm as she adjusted her grip. The system had prepared her for ambition, insecurity, arrogance.
Not this.
"Consistency does matter," she said finally. "Still, we'll be monitoring your progress."
"I understand."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Enjoy your afternoon," she said, stepping aside.
He nodded once and continued down the hall.
Behind him, the assistant remained still, watching his retreating figure with a faint crease between her brows.
The system logged the interaction.
Flagged it.
Low priority.
Later, in his dorm room, the silence was clean.
He sat at the desk, lights dimmed, window cracked just enough to let the city's distant hum bleed in. His wristband rested on the surface beside him, dark and inert.
He didn't touch it.
Instead, he replayed the day—not as memory, but as data.
The girl in the cafeteria.
The assistant's hesitation.
The delay in system response.
Tiny discrepancies. Individually meaningless. Together…
Signal drift.
He allowed himself a thin smile.
Not satisfaction. Anticipation.
The system was still confident. It always was, right before it started compensating. Before it tightened controls, adjusted parameters, reduced variance.
Before it noticed.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
For now, he would remain unremarkable. Cooperative. Flat.
Noise.
But noise, given time, accumulated.
And once it crossed a certain threshold—
He opened his eyes.
—noise became signal.