"Beeeeep—"
A long tone, dragged out until it felt like it was scraping nerves.
Before the tactile sting of Marcus's thumb pressing the wristband screen had even faded, the sound came drilling in from three places at once—his wristband, the overhead broadcast, the walls themselves. A triple-layer chorus that made your scalp prickle.
The gate hall lights changed—snap—all at once.
A second ago it had been that harsh, morgue-white procedural lighting. Now it flipped to a cold, ghostly blue—searchlight blue, like the rotating bar on a patrol car. It painted faces with the kind of color you'd see in a mortuary.
The guidance lines on the floor came alive, sprouting glowing arrows. Every arrow pointed deeper into the gate, neat as a drill team, like something inside was pulling a net tight.
Daniel stared at the waterfall of data flooding his terminal and cursed under his breath. "Holy shit… this isn't 'opening a door.' This is giving them a coordinate."
Marcus didn't answer. His wristband was pinned by two new receipts:
[Mother-anchor channel link: ESTABLISHED][Trace-chain convergence: location updating]
Almost at the same moment, the semi-transparent divider in front of him hummed and lit. An image flashed—one single frame, so fast it could've been a hallucination.
A corridor. Blurred numbers on the wall. Floor markings. A sign with a corner missing.
Not much.
But enough to recognize.
Enough for the system to recognize.
Marcus's stomach dropped. His first thought wasn't the door is open.
It was: they saw it.
Inside the Silent Pod
Li's left leg took another spike of pain. Red light blinked.
Right on schedule, the voice punched its timecard inside his head:
"Deviation detected. Recite calibration fragment: Laughter behind the door confirms orientation."
Li opened his mouth—no sound—but in his mind he recited: "Laughter behind the door confirms orientation."
Pain stopped. Green blinked.
"Reward fragment."
The voice paused, then sharpened, like someone pulling a line out of a syllabus and underlining it:
"Trace-chain convergence: accelerating. Mother-anchor emotional peak triggers child-anchor location update."
Li didn't move.
Emotional peak. Thinking about his daughter.
The system was forcing him to think. The harder he thought, the faster the location updated.
Red blinked again—this time his right shoulder.
"Deviation detected. Recite calibration fragment: Corner of a drawing—line match."
Li recited, word-perfect.
Green blinked.
"Reward supplemental fragment," the voice said, and it was like being handed a dull blade. "Child-anchor access preparation: BEGIN."
Access.
Not just locating—accessing.
They were going to bring the child in.
Cold sweat seeped out along Li's spine and got swallowed by the chair's material. He tried to stir his mind away—not toward his daughter, toward anything else. The blast during the last retrieval, the feel of Marcus dragging him out of rubble. Sophia's grin when her arm was bleeding.
He fed the system different fragments—twisting the recitation with a tiny wrong order, dragging a vowel, moving a pause.
He was gambling that the system only cared about the shape of the emotional spike, not the content.
No red blink.
No green blink either.
Two seconds of silence.
Then the voice returned—flat enough to terrify:
"Non-standard emotional waveform detected. Reinforcement fragments will be fed."
Next second, a laugh detonated inside Li's mind.
A child's laugh. From behind a door. Blurry, muffled—yet unmistakably the same tone.
Li's fingers clawed into the chair arm until his knuckles went white.
A nosebleed surged without warning. Drops hit the white seat and spread into a small red bloom.
The Verification Corridor
Marcus was pushed forward by the glowing arrow line on the floor. Semi-transparent dividers boxed the corridor, and inside them things played on loop like training videos.
On the left, someone's hand was a beat too slow—missed the window—and the display inside that divider went black. The silhouette strapped to a chair jerked hard.
On the right, someone hit the window perfectly—then the "trace-chain" numbers on their wristband spiked like a fever chart and soldiers rushed in, grabbed them, dragged them out.
In another divider, a person tried to stop and speak. A red notice snapped onto the panel:
[Guided questioning / unauthorized info exchange] — Permission revoked.
Marcus's eyelid twitched.
This wasn't a corridor. This was an Exhibit of Mistakes. A pure PUA museum: here's what happens if you slack, here's what happens if you grind the wrong way, here's what happens if you try to be human with a coworker.
At the end of the corridor, the light ribbon pointed at a door.
The door wasn't fully shut. A sliver of what was inside leaked out.
A platform—cold white—like an operating table, except the edges were lined with interface slots. Two restraint frames sat side by side.
A wall screen showed two waveforms: one labeled "Mother-anchor," one labeled "Child-anchor." A dotted line connected them like a pairing diagram.
The system voice dropped from overhead, heavy as a stamp:
[Subprocess 11: Mother-anchor / Child-anchor pairing verification—PREP][Assistant duty: complete the access action]
Marcus stopped at the threshold and felt his mouth go dry.
He remembered the moment he'd pressed "Confirm."
That hadn't been saving anyone.
That had been handing the system his hand—so the system could use it to complete an access job.
A small screen by the door flickered with a new prompt:
[Child-anchor access window: SHORT / ONE-TIME]
Short. One-time.
Meaning was simple: the system was already shoving the kid this way. One chance. Miss it—and the kid might get routed into some other process.
Or there might be no process at all.
Back in the Gate Hall: Daniel's Side
A new prompt popped on Daniel's terminal with a border of glaring red:
[Assistant action data: core evidence for responsibility chain. Withdrawal prohibited]
Below it ran a long set of metrics: Marcus's contact duration, pressure curve, even simulated fingerprints and skin-temperature waveforms, plus the exact timestamp the window opened.
Daniel stared at it and gave a small, bitter laugh.
"I saved the key," he told himself. "And I welded it to his hand."
A receipt arrived for the closed-loop package he'd filed earlier:
[Evidence chain: CLOSED-LOOP VALID][Reproduction-test chain: executable]
Then a new work order slammed down right after it:
[Trace-chain convergence anomaly: technician continuous monitoring required]
Daniel's face fell.
Great. Now he couldn't leave. From "helper" to "nail in the chain"—he had to sit here and watch it until the chain produced a result…
Or collapsed.
Detention Corridor
Aileen's wristband network icon shifted from blue-framed to gray.
Cut off.
Just before the connection died, she saw the audit interface refresh one final status line:
[Trace-chain result will backfill responsibility][If child-anchor loss / unauthorized location update occurs: responsibility spills to key initiating roles]
Aileen's step paused for half a beat.
A soldier immediately looked at her. "Dr. Aileen?"
"Nothing," Aileen said, and kept walking.
She understood it now. She'd beaten Brian once with procedure—jammed his blade with rules. So procedure changed its style. It wasn't going to fight her on the process.
It would wait for the outcome.
Outcome decides guilt. Retroactively.
The detention-room door at the end of the hall opened slowly.
Right before it closed, she caught a low system prompt drifting through distant static:
[Synchronized calibration room: access preparation in progress]
She knew it meant one thing:
Li was at the worst part now.
Outside: The Cable-Trench Shadow
Sophia stayed tucked in the dark, the real resonance clip burning hot in her palm. It vibrated lightly, synced to a low-frequency hum coming from deep inside the gate.
She watched as the search-blue light swept further into the hall. Two more checkpoints appeared. A group of refugees got re-sorted and pushed away. The trench entrance was sealed—again.
She didn't move.
Step out now and it was instant public execution—straight into the muzzle.
This real clip…
She squeezed it. It felt alive, heating, warning her.
Not a weapon.
More like a brake pad. Or a valve.
Something you save for the one second that matters—then you twist it shut.
Or you smash it.
She repeated her earlier words in a whisper: "Net's closing."
Then, in her head, she added something colder:
"If the net's closing… someone has to keep the scissors."
The clip's vibration surged once—hot enough to make her hand twitch.
She looked down. A faint thread of light slid across the plastic surface, like a microscopic signal.
The access window was about to arrive.
At the Door of the Synchronized Calibration Room
Marcus stepped inside.
Cold. That was the first thing he felt. The air smelled like disinfectant and metal.
The platform lay open in front of him. Two restraint frames: left labeled "Mother-anchor station," right labeled "Child-anchor station." The interface slots looked like straps. On the wall screen, the two waveforms waited to be forced into alignment.
A system receipt landed with a thud in the dead, white room:
[Pairing verification protocol: LOADED][Assistant duty: ensure child-anchor access][Failure consequence: trace-chain escalation / deeper mother-anchor handling / assistant collective-liability penalty]
Marcus stared at the platform for a long moment.
Then he said it—low, but loud in that sterile space:
"This isn't a door…"
"It's a table."
Far away under the search-blue glow, the broadcast whisper came again—clearer this time:
[Child-anchor access channel: preparing to open]
In the cable-trench shadow, Sophia clenched the real clip until her palm felt like it might burn through.