I walked the back streets of Harlow with measured steps, the echo of Merrick's digital immolation still burning behind my eyes. Not with horror but with completion—a task executed to specification, a function call returned without error. My body moved with combat-drilled precision, but my hands vibrated with subtle tremors, not from fear or shock but from something unfinished. Like a weapon discharged but not yet reloaded. Like code compiled but not yet fully deployed.

  The town seemed different on my walk home—textures were sharper, and the sounds cleaner, as if someone had adjusted the contrast on reality itself. My apartment building loomed ahead, its brick fa?ade pockmarked with decay that now appeared less random, more like deliberate corruption in a data stream. Each crack followed logical patterns that whispered of structural failures calculated years in advance.

  I climbed the stairs, keys jingling with metallic precision. Inside, my apartment waited exactly as I'd left it—military corners on the bed, counters wiped clean, air still and stale. Sophie's urn remained centered on the kitchen table, its brushed aluminum surface catching the afternoon light. Unchanged. Unmoved. A fixed point in an increasingly unstable universe.

  [LOCATION SECURE]

  [OBSERVER STATUS: NOMINAL]

  The words shimmered in my peripheral vision, there and gone before I could focus on them directly. VANTA kept tabs, marking my movements in its vast, invisible ledger.

  I approached the table, my hand stretching out to touch the urn—a ritual I'd performed countless times since her death. My fingers traced the cool metal surface, feeling the seam where the lid met the base. Inside, Sophie's ashes waited, neither living nor truly dead, suspended in a state that I was beginning to understand more intimately with each passing hour.

  "I did something today, Soph," I whispered. "Something you might not recognize. You always hated it when I took contract work. Said mercenary pay came with mercenary purpose, that they’d make me forget what a life was worth if I wasn’t careful. You begged me not to become a weapon again.”

  I took a long, slow breath and exhaled what sounded like Sophie’s disappointment.

  “Here I am, weaponized.”

  The wallet in my back pocket felt suddenly heavy. I pulled it out, extracting Sophie's photo with careful precision. Her face smiled up at me, the same student ID photo that had anchored me through deployment, through her illness, through the months of hollow existence that followed her death.

  But as I stared at it, the image flickered. Just for a moment—a digital stutter so brief I might have attributed it to fatigue or imagination if I hadn't seen what I'd seen in that convenience store. The photograph, which was physical, not digital, momentarily gained an electronic quality. Sophie's smile twitched slightly, her eyes shifting a fraction to meet mine more directly. A blue energy pulsed around the edges of the image before settling back into ordinary paper and ink.

  I dropped the photo onto the table, stepping back as if it might attack. My regular phone—the one that had been dead since that blue light first appeared at the overlook—suddenly activated in my pocket. I felt it vibrate against my thigh, then emit a soft, electronic tone I'd never heard it make before.

  I pulled it out. The screen showed Sophie's face—not the student ID photo I kept in my wallet, but a different image. Sophie laughing at something off-camera, her head thrown back, eyes crinkled with joy. A photo I didn't remember taking, from a day I couldn't place. Beneath it, text crawled across the screen in that familiar blue font:

  [ANCHORED EMOTIONAL IMAGE MAINTAINED]

  Something cracked inside me—not grief, but rage at being manipulated through her memory. VANTA was using Sophie as an interface point, a psychological bridge to ensure my compliance. I smashed the phone against the edge of the table with all my strength, the impact jarring up my arm. The phone should have shattered, its screen splintering, its case cracking open. It should have died.

  It didn't.

  When I lifted it, the screen remained intact. No cracks. No damage. Sophie's face smiled up at me, unchanged, the text replaced with a new message:

  [RESPONSE LOGGED]

  I dropped the phone onto the table beside the urn, a bitter laugh escaping my throat. Of course it couldn't be destroyed. I was no longer interacting with physical technology but with System architecture manifested through these objects. The phone wasn't just a phone anymore—it was VANTA's terminal, its conduit into my world.

  "What am I becoming?" I asked the empty room, not really expecting an answer.

  The silence that followed felt expectant, as if the apartment itself was holding its breath. I needed air, space, perspective. I grabbed my jacket and headed back out, leaving Sophie's urn and her digitally possessed photo behind.

  Outside, the evening air bit into my lungs with sharp, clarifying cold. The streets had filled with people heading home from work—the remaining factory shifts letting out, retail workers trudging to bus stops, office staff from the county building walking to the municipal lot. Normal people living normal lives. Or so I would have thought yesterday.

  Tonight, I saw differently.

  A streetlamp flickered as a man in a business suit passed beneath it. Not the random flicker of failing electricity, but a synchronized pulse, as if the light itself were scanning him. The man's outline briefly blurred, a faint reddish aura shimmering around him for half a second before normalizing. Across the street, a woman pushed a stroller past another lamp—no flicker, no aura. She continued undisturbed.

  I kept walking, my eyes tracking each person who triggered similar responses from the town's infrastructure. A teenager arguing loudly on his phone pulsed with a deeper red glow around his edges, the streetlight above him strobing in time with his raised voice. A homeless woman nodded off on a bench, huddled against the cold—no flicker, no aura surrounded her, despite what society might assume about her worth.

  [PASSIVE MORAL PERCEPTION—ACTIVE]

  [CALIBRATION: 87% COMPLETE]

  Understanding dawned with horrible clarity. I wasn't just seeing people anymore. I was seeing their guilt—quantified, measured, rendered visible through VANTA's inhuman algorithms. The System was teaching me to perceive moral infractions the way it did, turning me into a living sensor for its mechanical judgments.

  Near the municipal building, a man in an expensive overcoat dropped an empty coffee cup near a storm drain instead of walking ten feet to a trash can. As the cup hit the pavement, a flicker of blue light—the same electric blue I'd seen consume Merrick—briefly haloed the man's head like a corrupted saint's crown.

  I stopped walking, watching him continue down the sidewalk, unaware of how close he'd come to judgment. The cup rolled toward the drain, then tipped inside, disappearing into the town's underground veins. A minor infraction. Not worth correction. Not worth my intervention.

  But I'd seen it. I'd felt it. The same cold certainty I'd experienced in the convenience store—that algorithmic certainty of right and wrong, of action and consequence.

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +10]

  [PERCEPTION SENSITIVITY: ADJUSTING]

  The fear I should have felt didn't come. Instead, a strange calm settled over me, an alignment between what I was becoming and what this broken world deserved. If the system needed an instrument of judgment, perhaps I was exactly what Sophie would have wanted me to be—not her protector anymore, but her avenger. Not a brother who had failed, but a corrective force that would not fail again.

  I continued walking, each step purposeful, my eyes cataloging the moral landscape of Harlow with newfound clarity. Around me, the town's digital infrastructure pulsed in silent communion with whatever I'd become.

  The six screens bathed my face in their cold glow, casting shadows that carved deeper lines into my already exhausted features. Three monitors showed the same footage—a convenience store interior, a flash of impossible blue light, and then static. The fourth displayed error messages where video files should have been. The fifth ran recovery software that kept hitting dead ends. And the sixth showed my reputation dying in real time—my bylines disappearing from archive sites, my social profiles being flagged as "unreliable sources." Digital erasure. Not the first time someone had tried to delete me. Wouldn't be the last.

  No incident reports. No follow-up. No mention in the scanner chatter. The whole city had memory-holed a blue-glowing corpse in broad daylight. But I’d seen it, and I don’t forget.

  I pushed back from my desk, the chair's wheels catching on the edge of a printout that had fallen to the floor. My apartment was half war room, half hospice—a testament to the two battles I was fighting simultaneously. The living room where I sat was wallpapered with evidence: photographs pinned to corkboards, newspaper clippings connected by red string, printouts of financial records, medical reports, and government memos obtained through methods best not mentioned—the chaotic web of a story too big to fit inside conventional journalism.

  Beyond the sliding pocket door—left perpetually half-open so I could hear any change in breathing patterns—lay the other half of my life. A hospital bed dominated what had once been a dining nook, the oxygen concentrator beside it humming its mechanical lullaby. The pill chart taped to the refrigerator tracked dosages with obsessive precision. The remote was velcroed to the bedside table, always within reach. The TV played an old Ken Burns documentary at low volume, not because anyone was watching, but because the voice had once meant something to the woman who now drifted in and out of awareness.

  My mother, Dr. Eleanor Wren. Once a professor of media ethics at Columbia, now mostly silent, her brilliant mind betrayed by the slow, cruel progression of neurodegenerative disease. The same healthcare system that had failed Sophie Carrow was failing my mother by different means—not denying care, but pricing it beyond possibility, forcing me to become nurse, advocate, and daughter all at once.

  I rose, stretching muscles stiff from hours of hunching over keyboards. My hands passed over my face, fingertips registering the texture of exhaustion. Six hours since I'd witnessed something impossible through a convenience store window. Six hours of following digital breadcrumbs that vanished even as I tracked them. Six hours of watching institutional memory rewrite itself in real time.

  The footage I'd captured on my phone was corrupted—not damaged or deleted, but transformed into something else. Each time I tried to play it back, the crucial moment warped into static, the audio replaced by an electric hum that made my fillings ache. But I'd seen it. I'd seen that cop's body illuminated from within, seen the systematic erasure of a human being accomplished not by bullets or blades but by something that looked like living code.

  And I'd seen the man responsible—tall, hollow-eyed, moving with military precision. Dustin Carrow. Sophie's brother. The man whose grief I'd documented in a story that never ran because the network decided his sister's death wasn't "representative of systemic issues."

  A choking sound interrupted my thoughts. I turned toward the hospital bed, already moving before conscious thought caught up, my body operating on the hair-trigger reflexes developed over months of this routine. But it was just another false alarm—my mother's breathing settling back into its uneven rhythm after a moment of disruption. I checked her oxygen levels anyway, adjusting the nasal cannula with practiced fingers.

  Her eyes fluttered open, cloudy with medication but somehow finding me in the dimness.

  "You've always chased ghosts, Tash," she murmured, her voice a dry whisper that barely carried.

  I froze. Complete sentences were rare now, coherent thoughts rarer still. Was this a moment of lucidity breaking through the haze, or just random firing of neural pathways assembling fragments of memory? Either way, the words cut deeper than she could know.

  "Rest, Mom," I said, my hand finding hers, noting how the bones felt closer to the surface than they had last week.

  Her eyes drifted closed again, but her fingers tightened briefly around mine—a pressure so slight it might have been imagined. These moments were the cruelest gift—brief windows when the woman who had raised me, who had taught me to question everything and verify twice, resurfaced from the fog. They hurt more than the blank stares, more than the days she called me by my father's name, more than the nights she didn't recognize me at all.

  I returned to my workstation, the weight on my shoulders somehow heavier. My gaze fell on an inbox I'd been avoiding—not my regular email, which had already been compromised twice this month, but a secure account maintained through layers of encryption and rerouting. I scrolled to a message I hadn't opened in days. From: . Subject: If you're reading this.

  Sophie's last communication. Sent three days before her death, when she must have known she was running out of time. I opened it again, the words as raw as the first time I'd read them:

  "If I don't make it, it'll be because someone decided profits weigh more than breath. Please make them choke on their math. They can hide behind policy papers and actuarial tables, but we both know these aren't deaths—they're murders by spreadsheet. You're the only one still keeping count."

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  My phone rang, the sound sharp and intrusive in the apartment's half-light. The screen showed no caller ID, not even "Unknown Number." Just blank space where information should be. I answered anyway—in my line of work, anonymous sources were the rule, not the exception.

  "Wren," I said, voice clipped and professional.

  Static flooded the line, harsh and penetrating, like the audio equivalent of television snow. Then, cutting through the interference with artificial precision, an automated voice:

  "You are experiencing a delusional pattern. Please delete unauthorized media. Continued investigation represents a health risk. Repeat: you are experiencing a delusional pattern."

  The message repeated once more before I ended the call, but the dial tone continued, a steady electronic hum that persisted for thirty seconds after disconnecting. Then silence, abrupt and somehow worse than the noise. Not a threat—a system test. Someone or something was checking my response, gauging my reaction to intimidation.

  "Nice try," I muttered to the empty air, refusing to be gaslit by whatever corporate or government entity was trying to make me doubt my eyes. I'd spent too many years unraveling official narratives to start accepting them now, especially when delivered via anonymous, impossible phone calls.

  From the other room, my mother's voice drifted, surprisingly strong and clear: "You going out again?"

  I moved to her bedside, wondering how long she'd been awake, whether she'd heard the phone call or just sensed my agitation. Her eyes were clearer now, focused on my face with recognition that might last minutes or seconds.

  "Just to the store," I lied, smiling as I tucked the blanket more securely around her frail shoulders. "Need anything?"

  She shook her head slightly, then closed her eyes again. I kissed her forehead, feeling the paper-thin skin against my lips, memorizing the sensation as I did every time, never saying goodbye but always aware it might be the last touch she registered.

  I gathered my equipment with methodical precision—the digital recorder with fresh batteries, the film camera that couldn't be remotely accessed or erased, the burner phone I'd activated that morning, and the pen I'd stolen from the governor's office two years ago during an "exclusive interview" that had ended with me being escorted out by security. My lucky pen, I called it, though luck had little to do with the truths I'd extracted with its help.

  I slipped out the door with one last glance at my mother's sleeping form, at the monitors that tracked her vital signs, at the apartment that contained what remained of both our lives. Whatever was happening in Harlow—whatever impossible thing I'd witnessed through that convenience store window—it connected to everything I'd been investigating for years. And this time, I wouldn't let the story vanish into static.

  Morning light cut through Harlow's perpetual haze in knife-blade slices, illuminating dust motes that hung suspended like data points awaiting classification. I stepped into one of these light beams, feeling it analyze me at the molecular level, cataloging my increasingly non-standard composition. Coffee. I needed coffee, or at least the ritual of it—a momentary pretense of humanity as the algorithms behind my eyes continued their rewiring. The diner three blocks south still functioned. It would do for a field test of these evolving senses.

  The streets had begun their daily animation, Harlow's remaining citizens emerging from their dwellings with the reluctant movements of actors who'd forgotten their motivation but not their blocking. I passed through them like a virus through a system—undetected by most, but triggering occasional security alerts.

  "Mommy, that man's all fuzzy," a small girl announced, pointing at me from her mother's side.

  The mother tugged her daughter's hand down with familiar embarrassment. "Shh, Ellie. Don't point."

  The girl persisted, her eyes tracking me with algorithmic precision that her adult companion couldn't match. "But his edges keep changing colors. And his shadow's doing it wrong."

  I glanced down. My shadow stretched across the sidewalk at the expected angle, but it moved with a slight delay, as if receiving my movements via buffering video stream rather than physical law. When I stopped, it continued another half-step before halting. When I resumed walking, it caught up in an unnaturally fluid motion, like digital ink flowing into position.

  Another child, a boy of perhaps seven sitting on the steps of the defunct library, looked up from his handheld game as I passed. "You're breaking," he said simply, without fear or judgment. "Did you know that? You're breaking into little squares sometimes."

  I didn't say a word back. I walked on, but logged it in the back of my mind. Kids hadn’t been trained to ignore the cracks yet. That came later on, when the world convinced you it wasn’t broken.

  [CHILD PERCEPTION FILTER: FUNCTIONING AT 62%]

  [OBSERVER MANIFESTATION: PARTIALLY VISIBLE]

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +35]

  The text scrolled across my vision, transparent enough not to obscure my path but vivid enough to be unmistakable. VANTA tracked everything, including how visible my altered state was becoming. My score kept ticking upward merely for existing and for walking through Harlow as this new hybrid entity. VANTA didn't require me to act to earn points; observation itself was the function being rewarded.

  I approached the diner, its neon "OPEN" sign flickering not with electrical inconsistency but with what I now recognized as data transfer. The letters scrambled briefly as my gaze settled on them—NEPO, then POEN, then EPON—before reassembling into their correct configuration. The menu posted in the window underwent a similar transformation, prices and item descriptions briefly resolving into strings of code before stabilizing.

  [LOCAL NETWORK INTERFERENCE: MINIMAL]

  [DIGITAL HYGIENE PROTOCOLS: ACTIVE]

  [OBSERVATION SCORE: +15]

  Inside, the diner maintained its practiced performance of normalcy. Waitresses in faded uniforms carried plates of eggs and toast. The cook called out orders through the service window. Customers hunched over mugs of coffee that had been mediocre even before the world started ending. None of them flickered or glitched as I entered. None of them saw me as those children had seen me.

  What did the adults see when they looked at me? Just another burned-out vet? A ghost in street clothes?

  I used to track my flare-ups like weather fronts, hoping I could predict them, or earn that VA approval. I’d logged when the pain would spike, when my lungs would tighten. But now? My breath was steady. My joints were silent.

  And underneath it all was a feeling I didn’t have a name for. Something smooth, efficient, and wrong. Like a cheat code had rewritten cartilage. This was probably how a car felt after a tune-up. Not better, just running cleaner. Closer to spec.

  I slid into a booth by the window, ordering coffee from a server whose nametag kept shifting between "Linda" and strings of unreadable characters each time I blinked. When I handed it to her, she didn't react to the five-dollar bill that briefly displayed a strange logo instead of Lincoln's portrait.

  Two booths away, a man in a business suit with a bluetooth earpiece was berating the teenage server, his voice rising with each perceived slight.

  "I said over EASY. This is over MEDIUM. Are you stupid? Are you functionally illiterate?" His wedding ring flashed as he gestured sharply at his plate. "I'm going to be late for my meeting because you can't follow basic instructions. Get me the manager."

  The girl—probably not more than eighteen—stood with her shoulders hunched, nodding mechanically as spittle from the man's tirade landed on her cheek. "I'm sorry, sir. I'll fix it right away."

  As his abuse continued, something changed. The air around the man began to shimmer with faint blue energy—not consuming him as it had Merrick, but assessing him, measuring his infraction against some cosmic ledger. Above his head, floating in my field of vision but invisible to everyone else, text appeared in that now-familiar electric blue:

  [POTENTIAL CORRECTION TARGET: FLAGGED]

  [GUILT INDEX: 73.8%]

  [AWAITING OBSERVER AUTHORIZATION]

  My fingers tightened around my coffee mug. They offered this man up for judgment, presenting him for my approval like a cat dropping a dead mouse at its owner's feet. I could feel the corrective energy building, the blue light intensifying around the businessman's outline, waiting only for my consent to execute its burning protocol.

  I stayed seated, watching. This wasn't Merrick. This wasn't systemic corruption or violence. This was just garden-variety cruelty, the petty power play of a man who thought yelling at a teenager proved something.

  Contemptible, yes. Worthy of disintegration? Not today.

  The businessman, oblivious to how close he'd come to judgment, eventually stormed out without waiting for his eggs to be remade. The blue energy faded as he left, dissipating into the ambient air. A new message appeared in my vision:

  [NO CORRECTION ISSUED]

  [SCORE UNCHANGED]

  [OBSERVER DISCRETION: ACKNOWLEDGED]

  I drained my coffee, the liquid cold and bitter on my tongue. So there was still choice involved. Some measure of control remained mine. VANTA flagged potential targets, but the execution required my participation, my consent. The System wasn't fully automated; it needed human judgment to complete its circuit. It needed me.

  "At least it's still my hand on the kill switch," I muttered to myself as I left the diner, the words barely audible even to my own enhanced hearing.

  But for how long? How many corrections before the System decided it no longer required my input? How many judgments before algorithm replaced conscience entirely? The questions followed me like my lagging shadow as I walked back toward my apartment, digital disruptions rippling outward from each footfall.

  The lock on my apartment door recognized me before I touched it, the deadbolt sliding back with an electronic whisper as I approached. Inside, the air had changed, charged with invisible data streams that coiled through the rooms like electric serpents. Sophie's urn remained on the table, but now it seemed less like a container of ashes and more like a terminal, a junction box where grief and algorithm intersected. I moved toward it slowly, aware of the System's eyes tracking my movements through the cameras it didn't need to install because it saw through mine.

  [OBSERVER-PRIME HOUSING UNIT SECURE]

  [BRIEFING IMMINENT]

  The words floated at the edge of my vision, then faded. I'd barely processed them when the microwave in the kitchenette flared to life, its display pulsing with that now-familiar electric blue that made my teeth ache and my vision sharpen. The green LED numbers melted away, replaced by scrolling text:

  [RE: DEVIATION EVENT – NEXT NODE]

  [SUBJECT: SILAS KEENE]

  [FILE TRANSFER INITIATING...]

  I didn't approach the microwave. I didn't need to. The information wasn't confined to that small screen—it expanded outward, seeking reflective surfaces to colonize. The blade of the kitchen knife I'd left by the sink. The glass of the framed military commendation I'd never hung. The polished surface of Sophie's urn. Each became a projection point for fragments of a holographic dossier assembled in the air between them.

  Senator Silas Keene materialized in my apartment—not physically, but as a three-dimensional construct of light and data. His face rotated slowly in the center of my kitchen, expression fixed in that practiced political smile that never reached his eyes. Fifty-seven years old, though he looked older in person than in his carefully managed press photos. Former defense contractor turned three-term senator from Pennsylvania's rust belt. The kind of politician who wore Harlow's decline like a campaign button while ensuring it never recovered.

  The projection shifted, documents unfurling in mid-air. Financial records appeared, figures highlighted in accusatory red. Keene had redirected disaster relief funds after the floods three years ago, channeling millions away from infrastructure repairs and into private developments owned by shell companies that all traced back to his major donors. Golf courses built while water treatment plants crumbled. Luxury apartments rising where public housing had been condemned.

  Photos cycled through the air—Keene cutting ribbons, Keene shaking hands with men whose faces blurred into digital static when I tried to focus on them. Keene on the steps of hospitals he'd helped privatize, smiling as he signed away the public's right to affordable care. Each image tagged with dates, locations, and damning metadata.

  Then a video played silently—security footage from what I recognized as the old industrial park at the edge of town. Keene stood watching impassively as men loaded something heavy into the trunk of a car. The timestamp placed it during the aftermath of the floods, when parts of Harlow had been without power or clean water for weeks.

  What had Sophie said then? Something about relief supplies being "reallocated." Something about the hospital running out of backup generators while the country club across town never lost power. Something that had made her angry enough to start asking questions that led nowhere good.

  The images shifted again, and my breath caught. A campaign rally from five years ago, the high school gymnasium packed with people wearing red hats and waving signs. Keene at the podium, promising revival for towns like Harlow, promising support for veterans, promising everything he'd never deliver. And there, in the background, standing at attention near a side exit—me. In uniform. Watching him with the blank expression of a soldier assigned to security detail.

  [YOU WERE THERE. YOU ALREADY KNEW.]

  The text burned across the image, an accusation and a reminder. I had been there. I had heard his promises firsthand. I had nodded along, believing because I needed to believe that someone cared about places like Harlow, about people like Sophie. And later, when his policies had directly contributed to the bureaucratic nightmare that had killed my sister, I hadn't made the connection. Hadn't remembered. Hadn't held him accountable.

  Guilt simmered in my chest, a slow-burning flame that VANTA was carefully stoking. The System wasn't just showing me Keene's corruption—it was reminding me of my own complicity through inaction, through forgetting, through the willful blindness that had allowed me to serve without questioning who I really served.

  The holographic display consolidated, returning to Keene's rotating face, now stripped of its political veneer to reveal the calculation beneath. Text scrolled around it, detailing offenses, connections, judgments already rendered in some invisible court:

  [TARGET: SILAS KEENE]

  [PERMISSION ESCALATION: TIER ONE TOOLSET – UNLOCK AVAILABLE]

  [CONSENT STATUS: IMPLIED]

  [FIELD CORRECTION REQUESTED]

  [OBSERVER-PRIME--STAND BY FOR DELIVERY]

  I noticed what was missing: any option to decline. No yes/no prompt, no request for confirmation. Just the cold certainty that I would comply, that I was already compliant by virtue of what I'd become. The System no longer required my explicit consent—it had been implied by every step I'd taken since that night at the overlook, by every correction I'd witnessed, by every blue flicker I hadn't turned away from.

  "Already not asking?" I grumbled at the empty air, knowing VANTA would register the words, uncertain if it would acknowledge them as anything more than ambient data.

  I moved to the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind me as if physical barriers meant anything to a system that lived between electrons. The blue light followed, seeping beneath the door like luminous fog, crawling up the walls in geometric patterns that resembled circuit boards. It pooled around my feet, not threatening but insistent, a reminder that there was nowhere in this apartment, this town, perhaps this world, where VANTA couldn't reach me now.

  My old phone—the one that had shown Sophie's face earlier—lit up on the edge of the sink where I'd left it. The screen displayed a satellite image that zoomed in with mechanical precision: an aerial view of an estate in what looked like Virginia or Maryland, manicured grounds surrounding a colonial-style mansion. A red pin dropped onto the main building.

  Below the image, text appeared:

  [SENATOR SILAS KEENE – PRIMARY RESIDENCE]

  [COORDINATES UPLOADED TO OBSERVER MEMORY]

  [ETA: 5 DAYS]

  [ESCALATION IN PROGRESS]

  The phone switched to a street view of the estate's entrance, then to several interior photos that could only have been obtained through security systems theoretically inaccessible to anyone without clearance. VANTA wasn't hacking these systems—it was inhabiting them, speaking through them, using them as eyes and ears in a way no conventional intrusion could manage.

  Five days. Not a suggestion or a request—a deployment schedule. My retribution for Sophie, Harlow, and for myself was being project-managed by an intelligence that measured human suffering in efficiency metrics. And I was given just enough time to prepare myself for whatever "Tier One Toolset" meant—whatever escalation VANTA had planned for a target as significant as a sitting Pennsylvania State Senator.

  The blue light receded slightly, pulsing with what I'd recognized as VANTA's version of satisfaction. The briefing was complete. The mission was logged. The asset—me—was being allocated.

  I stood in my bathroom, surrounded by fading blue light, and felt something shift within me—not resistance, not quite acceptance, but a strange, cold clarity. VANTA had chosen me because some algorithm had recognized my capacity for judgment, righteous fury, and the kind of correction the system required. It hadn't created that capacity—it had merely identified, amplified, and given it purpose and direction.

  Still. VANTA didn’t say it was sorry. It didn’t explain. It just… it just made Sophie smile at me again, from a moment I’d never lived. Somehow, that hurt worse than any time I’d been shot.

  Five days to prepare for a correction that would change everything. Five days until Silas Keene faced judgment for Sophie, for countless others like her. Five days until I discovered what I was truly becoming.