Chapter 10 -- The Price of Realism
The boy couldn't have been older than ten. He appeared at the edge of the demo plaza like a shadow gaining substance, moving through the crowd with the careful steps of someone accustomed to being overlooked. His shirt hung loose on his small frame, frayed at the edges and faded from too many washings. Cracked sandals dragged across the tiles, making soft scraping sounds that seemed too loud in the manufactured bustle of the marketplace.
But it was his eyes that made Sarah pause in her calibration work. They carried a weight far older than his face suggested — not the wide curiosity of a child exploring a festival, but the focused assessment of someone evaluating risks and opportunities.
"Can I try?" he asked, stopping in front of their booth.
Rob looked up from the tangle of cables he'd been organizing, taking in the boy's size and obvious youth. "I don't know, kid. This isn't really designed for—"
"I have credit," the boy interrupted, producing a Republic payment chip from his pocket. The plastic gleamed with the holographic authentication marks that meant legitimate credit authorization, not the limited-access chips sometimes given to children. "Full session rate."
Sarah frowned, her protective instincts warring with their desperate need for test subjects. "How old are you?"
"Old enough," he replied, which wasn't an answer at all.
Rob glanced at Sarah, having one of their wordless conversations. They needed data. They needed evidence that their modifications could handle different user profiles. And if the boy had legitimate payment...
"Five minutes," Rob decided. "We'll monitor everything closely."
Sarah bit her lip but didn't protest as the boy climbed into their jury-rigged chair. His legs dangled above the base plate, too short to reach the footrests, and his small fingers wrapped around the interface grips like a child holding onto the edge of a diving board.
The machine hummed to life, running its startup diagnostics. Status lights flickered green across their improvised control panel. Sarah pulled up the monitoring interface on her tablet, streams of biometric data beginning to scroll across the screen. Heart rate, neural activity, stress indicators — all within normal parameters for a new user.
Three minutes passed without incident.
Then the screaming started.
It wasn't the sharp cry of someone startled by a jump scare, or the excited shout of someone experiencing their first VR thrill. This was something primal and raw — a sound torn from the deepest parts of human terror, the cry of prey caught in a trap with no escape.
The sound cut through the plaza's background noise like a blade through silk. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. Vendors paused their pitches. Customers turned from their browsing, faces already shifting from curiosity to alarm. The controlled chaos of the demo floor crystallized into focused attention on the source of that inhuman wail.
Sarah's chair screeched against the floor as she lunged toward the pod controls, her tablet clattering to the ground. Rob dropped his cable coil and spun toward the emergency shutdown, but the pod was already responding to the biometric distress signals, initiating automatic disconnection protocols.
The hatch hissed open with a sharp release of pressurized air. Mist poured out in gray-white streams, reluctant to reveal what it had been concealing. Then the boy tumbled forward, his small body convulsing as if he were still running from something only he could see.
His face was streaked with tears and sweat, eyes wide but unfocused, staring at horrors that existed only in the memory of whatever he'd experienced. His arms clawed at the air in defensive gestures, trying to ward off attacks that weren't there. His legs kicked frantically, as if he were still crawling through mud and barbed wire, still trying to escape the killing ground of someone else's war.
"Make it stop!" The words tore from his throat, broken by sobs. "Please! Brother, where are you?!"
The crowd pressed closer, phones rising like metal flowers blooming towards carnage. Some recorded openly, already calculating the viral potential of a child's breakdown at an unlicensed VR demonstration. Others hesitated, screens half-raised, torn between the instinct to document and the recognition that they were witnessing something that deserved privacy.
Sarah dropped to her knees beside the pod, reaching out to comfort the boy, but he recoiled from her touch with such violence that his foot scraped bloody against the metal floor. His eyes darted wildly, seeing enemies in every shadow, threats in every movement. Whatever simulation he'd experienced had convinced his nervous system that he was still in mortal danger.
"It's okay," Sarah whispered, keeping her hands visible and still. "You're safe. You're out of the simulation. Nothing here can hurt you."
But her words couldn't reach him. The boy was trapped in the liminal space between virtual memory and physical reality, his mind still processing the neural patterns of trauma that felt absolutely authentic.
That was when the crowd began to shift.
Not panic — this wasn't chaos or confusion. The movement was more like water parting before the prow of a ship, space opening with deliberate precision as people recognized something that demanded respect and distance.
He walked through the gap with the measured stride of someone accustomed to being obeyed. Tall and broad-shouldered, perhaps twenty-five years old, dressed in civilian clothes that couldn't quite disguise the military bearing underneath. His black jacket hung open just enough to reveal the emblem on his chest: a cobalt-blue horizon stretching across an endless sky, marked with the silver numeral I that identified him as an enforcement officer.
House of the Sky. First rank.
Phones lowered without being asked. Conversations died to whispers. In the Republic, the Four Pillars didn't rule through ceremony or spectacle — they ruled through the quiet certainty that their authority was absolute and their reach unlimited. When an enforcer moved, smart people got out of the way.
His gaze locked on the boy with laser focus, and his voice cut through the mist and chaos with surgical precision.
"Nathan."
The boy's convulsions stopped as if a switch had been thrown. His wild eyes found the man's face, and recognition broke through the wall of simulated trauma like sunlight through storm clouds.
"Brother!" Nathan's arms reached desperately toward the enforcer, his voice cracking with relief and residual terror.
The man dropped to one knee without hesitation, groceries spilling from a forgotten bag as apples rolled unnoticed under the feet of onlookers. He pulled Nathan against his chest with the practiced ease of someone who had comforted this child through nightmares before — though perhaps never one quite like this.
"I couldn't breathe," Nathan sobbed into his brother's shoulder. "The mud was everywhere, and the guns kept firing, and I couldn't find you..."
The enforcer's jaw tightened, but his voice remained steady. "You're safe now. You're here with me. Whatever you saw, it's not real."
But even as he spoke the words of comfort, his eyes were already moving to Sarah and Rob with the cold assessment of someone determining responsibility and calculating consequences.
"You allowed him access?" His question wasn't loud, but it carried the weight of official inquiry.
Rob's throat worked as he struggled to find words. "He asked to try it. He had payment authorization. We didn't think—"
"But it happened," the enforcer cut him off, his tone flat and final. "A child of the House of the Sky has been traumatized by an unlicensed neural simulation. A simulation that bypassed every safety protocol designed to prevent exactly this outcome."
Sarah's voice was softer than his brother's, but carried the same edge of carefully managed disappointment. "We only wanted to create something real. Something that could help people understand history, experience empathy..."
"You are students," he said, the word falling like a judgment. "Graduate researchers attempting to prove viability for commercial development. Yet you operated an unlicensed simulation without trauma gates, without psychological safeguards, without even basic neural feedback limitations." His voice grew colder. "You didn't cross a safety line. You obliterated it."
He stood, Nathan still cradled in his arms, and stepped closer to their booth. The crowd seemed to hold its collective breath.
"I invoke grievance authority under Article Twelve of the Inter-House Conduct Protocols. Effective immediately, this project and all associated intellectual property is seized pending House review and tribunal assessment."
The words hit Rob like physical blows. His face went white. "You're seizing our entire project?"
"Unless you prefer formal tribunal proceedings," the enforcer replied, his tone suggesting this was not actually a choice. "Public hearings. Full technical audit. Media coverage of a child's psychological breakdown streamed to review committees and international observers. You want that attached to your names permanently?"
Sarah's voice was barely a whisper. "We only wanted to create something real. Something that could help people understand history, experience empathy..."
"Realism without responsibility is not innovation," the enforcer said. "It's negligence."
The silence stretched like a wire under tension, ready to snap. Nathan's breathing was finally beginning to settle, but the damage was done. A child had been hurt, protocols had been violated, and now the machinery of House justice was beginning to turn.
Then a new voice cut through the heavy air.
"That's quite enough of that, don't you think?"
The crowd turned as one, following the sound to its source.
She moved through the gap in the crowd with a lightness that seemed to defy the gravity of the situation. Young — perhaps twenty-one — with an easy grace and a smile that suggested she found the entire spectacle more amusing than alarming. Her tunic was simple but well-made, lined with silver thread that caught the plaza's artificial lighting. The emblem on her shoulder showed golden bamboo stalks woven into a circle, marked with the silver numeral III, identifying her as a senior House representative with significant authority.
But she didn't wear her authority like armour. She carried it like sunlight, bright and warm and seemingly effortless.
"Really, Peter?" she said, addressing the enforcer by name with casual familiarity. "Tribunal proceedings? Over this? You'd drag two graduate students through formal hearings and paperwork over something we could resolve in five minutes?" She tilted her head with playful curiosity. "That doesn't sound like your usual efficiency. Too much bureaucracy, not enough results."
The enforcer — Peter — didn't immediately respond, but something in his posture shifted slightly.
The girl crouched beside Nathan, her voice gentling to the tone of an older sister. "Hey there. You're okay now. Whatever you experienced in there, it can't follow you out here. You're safe."
Nathan's sobs began to quiet, though he didn't release his grip on Peter's jacket.
Then she stood and faced Peter directly, producing a folded document from her sleeve with a flourish that managed to be both business-like and somehow playful. The seal glowed faintly under her thumb — official House of the Bamboo authentication.
"Sponsorship documentation," she announced brightly, offering the papers to Rob and Sarah. "Congratulations. You've just been recruited into official Bamboo research development. Sarah Yang, Robert Yang — welcome to the family business."
Rob blinked, stunned. Sarah's breath caught.
The girl reached into her sleeve again, this time producing a bundle of Republic credit chips that she pressed into Peter's free hand with a smile that managed to be both diplomatic and slightly teasing.
"For Nathan's medical evaluation," she said. "Priority care, full psychological assessment, trauma mitigation therapy if needed. The Bamboo medical network will handle everything. Call it handled."
Her voice took on a slightly more serious tone, though the smile never faded. "The Republic has enough scars already, Peter. Why create another one here?"
The tension in the air began to dissipate like morning mist. Peter studied the currency, then looked at the sponsorship documents, then back at the young woman who had somehow shifted the entire dynamic with nothing more than paperwork and charm.
Finally, he gave a curt nod. "Medical priority authorization accepted. The matter is resolved pending Nathan's full recovery."
He adjusted Nathan in his arms and turned to leave, but paused to address Rob and Sarah one final time.
"You're protected now," he said quietly. "Don't waste that protection."
Then he walked away, the crowd parting before him as smoothly as it had opened for his arrival.
Rob and Sarah bowed deeply to their unexpected saviour. "Thank you," Sarah managed. "We... we don't know how to repay this."
The girl laughed, bright and musical. "Don't thank me yet. You're Bamboo by blood, even if you haven't been wearing the emblems. But now you're my responsibility. And I have very high expectations."
Her grin turned playful, but there was steel underneath the silk.
"Pack up your equipment. You're coming with me. We have proper facilities, proper funding, and proper safety protocols. Time to find out if your innovation is worth all this drama."
As Rob and Sarah began dismantling their booth with shaking hands, neither of them noticed the young woman's eyes scan the dispersing crowd with the calculating gaze of someone who understood exactly what had just happened — and exactly what it meant for the delicate balance of power between the Houses.
What they had stumbled upon wasn't just advanced VR technology. It was something that could reshape the very foundations of how the Republic understood reality, memory, and human experience.
And now it belonged to the House of the Bamboo.