The side door shut behind Marcus.
The corridor held only him—white walls, silence, the overhead light a harsh, chalky glare. His wrist display was lit, a single line of text staring back at him:
[ASSISTANT BAND ACTIVATED][AUTHORIZED USE: STABILIZATION ASSISTANCE ONLY][PROHIBITED: LEADING QUESTIONS / UNAUTHORIZED INFORMATION EXCHANGE / CONTACT WITH THE VERIFICATION WINDOW][PENALTY FOR OVERSTEP: LIABILITY CHAIN ESCALATION (PRIMARY LIABILITY: BROWN UNIT) + IMMEDIATE REVOCATION OF INTERNAL ACCESS]
"Fuck," Marcus muttered under his breath. This "working-class system" was a real piece of work—hand you a temporary badge, spell out exactly what it's for and what it forbids, and the moment you step out of line, they dock your whole team's performance.
A faceless figure in a sealed protective suit led him to a transparent isolation window.
On the other side was a small compartment. Li sat strapped to a fixed chair, eyes locked forward. His lips were moving, but no sound came through. The script was still running.
But something had changed.
More instruments had been installed inside—devices emitting faint pinpricks of light, waveform monitors jittering in a way that made your stomach tighten. On the wall in front of Li, a clip was playing on loop: the moment in the A-47 queue when Li had said, Where is my daughter?
The frame froze. Zoomed in. A close-up of Li's lips. The audio waveform extracted and highlighted in red.
Beside it, a system receipt:
[ANOMALY SOURCE: VOLUNTARY QUESTION][ANCHOR LOCATION: A-47-11 ASSOCIATION TRIGGERED][DISPOSITION: PRECISE EXTRACTION (NOT FULL ERASURE)]
Marcus's palms were damp. This wasn't "deep calibration." This had escalated into a surgical theater. The system had labeled Li's sentence as a lesion—and it was about to cut.
"You may provide stabilization assistance here," the protective-suit handler said, voice muffled through the mask. "You may only use system-provided sentence templates. Any non-template speech will trigger a warning and may terminate your access prematurely."
A small panel lit up beneath the isolation window, scrolling several APPROVED PHRASES:
"Breathing confirmation.""Posture confirmation.""Recitation confirmation: Please repeat the following fragments."…
That was it. Nothing else. Marcus wanted to curse out loud.
Inside, Li seemed to register someone's presence. His eyes shifted—painfully slow—toward the window.
Marcus drew a breath and pressed the first template button. His voice passed through the speaker into the compartment, flat enough to rival the system itself:
"Breathing confirmation."
Li's chest rose and fell once. A response.
Marcus locked onto Li's eyes. He deliberately waited three beats before pressing the second:
"Posture confirmation."
Li didn't move.
Marcus waited two beats, then repeated:
"Posture confirmation."
This time, Li gave the faintest nod.
Marcus's heart kicked faster.
Three beats. Two beats.
An old field signal they used back in the gray-zone alleys—an improvised counting code meaning: Subprocess 11. Li understood.
"Recitation confirmation." Marcus pressed the third button. The system automatically played a fragment:
"Category: A-47. Subprocess: 11. Window period: short."
Li's lips moved. His voice came out dry, scraped thin:
"Category: A-47. Subprocess: 11. Window period: short."
But when he said "11," his ending dragged—just barely, almost imperceptibly.
Marcus caught it.
Li was sending it back: Subprocess 11 is real. A-47-11 wasn't a hallucination.
Right then, the system screen in front of Li refreshed. Marcus's wristband buzzed at the same moment.
[DEEP CALIBRATION UNIT DISPOSITION UPGRADED: EXECUTE IMMEDIATELY][EXTRACTION BEGIN: MEMORY ANCHOR A-47-11][COUNTDOWN: 60 SECONDS][OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE EMOTIONAL ASSOCIATION + VOLUNTARY QUESTIONING TENDENCY]
Inside the compartment, Li's body visibly tensed. He stared at the countdown—then looked back at Marcus.
On Marcus's wrist display, two buttons popped up—visible to him alone:
[CONFIRM EXTRACTION (COMPLIANT)][DELAY EXTRACTION (ANOMALOUS)]
A line of small text beneath it explained:
"Assistant confirmation = liability-chain self-certification. Choosing DELAY triggers: liability escalation + access revoked + Brown Unit 'HIGH-RISK' flag."
Monitoring Center
Aileen's massive main screen had already been taken over by the [AUDIT & REVIEW SYSTEM] interface. A cold-blue frame. A playback progress bar crawling forward.
Brian stood just behind her shoulder, anger compressed into every word:
"Playback has been triggered, but operations inside must be halted immediately. Dr. Walker—your report mentioned 'anomaly.' Right now, it looks more like traces left by human manipulation. I'm ordering Li Kane extracted at once for isolation review. As for the operator's responsibility—"
"Supervisor Brian," Aileen cut in, steadier than the system voice itself, "the audit has just begun. Before playback completes and the liability chain is formally assigned, any rash suspension will interrupt calibration on a high-value asset and may cause irreversible neural damage. That constitutes 'high-value asset loss with liability spillover.' Under Manual, Chapter Seven, Article Four: during an active audit, maintaining the current process until playback concludes is the standard risk-control option."
She turned to face him.
"Are you asking to assume joint liability for 'improper intervention resulting in asset destruction' before the audit result is even issued?"
Brian stared at her for a few seconds, then let out a cold chuckle.
"You're very good at speaking in manuals."
"I'm only following procedure." Aileen turned back to the screen.
At that moment, the audit system's ruling receipt popped up—cruel, final, no room for negotiation:
[AUDIT PLAYBACK INITIATED / LINK LOCKED: GH-7-B → A-47 → DEEP CALIBRATION CONNECT][RULING: PLAYBACK FIRST, LIABILITY AFTER][SUSPENSION REQUEST: DENIED / PENDING]
Brian's expression darkened. He pressed his earpiece and stepped aside, speaking in a low, rapid burst.
Aileen knew what that meant. He was laying other groundwork—detention protocols, operator hold orders. Her terminal might be locked at any moment.
But she had to hold until playback finished.
Gate Hall
Daniel stared at the alert that had just flashed on his portable terminal:
[AUDIT SYSTEM — ANOMALY SOURCE CANDIDATE SUBMISSION (OPEN TO TECH ROLES)]
"Holy shit, it's here!" His fingers flew. He pulled up his earlier logs, extracted the near-field sensor spike from the moment Sophia shoved the resonance clip into the line trench, and aligned it with the audit timeline currently replaying the "receipt consistency anomaly."
The match was strong.
He drafted a "technical explanation," professional and mind-numbingly dry:
"…Given that near-field debris (residual mark: 7-4-XXX) was detected at T+XX seconds, its resonance frequency may cause temporary overlap in tag read/write states, resulting in attribution ambiguity. This phenomenon is reproducible and belongs to a known environmental interference category, and can serve as one potential explanatory model for receipt consistency anomalies…"
He finished, glanced toward the monitoring center, clenched his jaw—and hit submit.
Like tossing a small stone into water. It might not save anyone. But at least it could ripple the surface, make the accusation of "human tampering" feel less airtight.
Countdown: 45 seconds.
In the compartment, Li watched the numbers fall. In his ears: the system's cold prompts.
"Extraction model constructing… emotional association stripping in progress…"
And suddenly, he understood.
The system wasn't afraid of him remembering his daughter.
It was afraid he would turn "my daughter" into an anchor—a point of leverage against the system, a wedge that kept his self-awareness intact. What it meant to extract wasn't the memory itself.
It was the emotional bond to that anchor. The tendency to ask on his own because of it.
The child wasn't a hostage.
She was part of the calibrator. And he was being peeled off that calibrator.
Marcus's finger hovered above the wristband screen, the two buttons glowing.
Li looked at him. With everything he could still control, when the system ordered him to recite an irrelevant fragment, he swapped the order of two words.
He turned "Category—Subprocess" into "Subprocess—Category."
A tiny recitation error. Still within allowed margins.
Marcus saw it.
Li was saying: Don't press it.
Countdown: 30 seconds.
Sweat beaded on Marcus's forehead. Press it, and he helps the system carve out the core of Li's daughter-related anchor. Don't press it, and the entire Brown Unit might be stamped "HIGH-RISK" and thrown into some hell-branch no one comes back from.
It was a choice so filthy it made him want to vomit.
Countdown: 15 seconds.
At the monitoring center, the audit playback bar hit a critical node. The main screen flashed—one crisp analysis frame and a bold receipt slammed onto the display:
[AUDIT KEY FINDING: A-47-11][ATTRIBUTE: MOTHER-ANCHOR / CHILD-ANCHOR PAIRED VERIFICATION PROCESS][USE: CHILD ANCHOR STABILIZES MOTHER ANCHOR / MOTHER ANCHOR NAVIGATES CHILD ANCHOR (BIDIRECTIONAL LOCK)]
Aileen jolted upright.
Brian saw it too. He immediately roared into his earpiece:
"That's enough! Playback has the key finding! I'm ordering—"
He didn't finish.
"BEEP—BEEP—BEEP—"
A piercing alarm exploded simultaneously in the monitoring center, the gate hall, and on Marcus's wristband.
Not one alarm—two. Two different alarms stacked on top of each other.
Marcus's wristband screen flooded:
[WARNING: AUDIT PLAYBACK DETECTED 'MOTHER-CHILD ANCHOR' LINK][WARNING: EXTRACTION COUNTDOWN FINAL 10 SECONDS][ASSISTANT MUST CONFIRM IMMEDIATELY]
Two flashing buttons nearly jammed into his face.
Inside the isolation window, Li's head was forced up by the script, eyes locked onto an unseen cue.
The countdown snapped to: 10.
Marcus's finger trembled, hovering one centimeter above CONFIRM EXTRACTION.
Inside, Li's lips moved silently. Reading his mouth: "Don't."
Outside, the audit system's final ruling tone—cold, clipped—cut through the alarm noise:
"Playback complete. Preliminary liability-chain determination: submitting—""Rejection request: processing—"
All sounds collided into a single roar.
Marcus stared at the digits: 9… 8… 7…
His finger was still hovering.