The first refusal was too small to count.
A woman in a pharmacy took a Calm Band to the register and, at the last second, put it back. The camera above the aisle recorded a dip in posture, the shape of a decision, and nothing else. Five minutes later, a server in a coffee shop closed an app that offered "steady mood" and wrote the word later on a napkin. A bus driver chose not to tap a dashboard node. Three dots on three separate maps. Noise.
By evening, the dots formed a path.
Someone in a room with frosted glass gave it a name so it could be funded: Refusal Events. Someone else built a model and called it stewardship.
And so the Commission's new project began, gentle as a nudge.
1 | The brief—ethics inside a spreadsheet
They called it a "passive consent monitor." The slide had a gradient and the right verbs.
"Goal," the director said evenly, "is to improve device design by learning where people decline synchronization. We don't want dependence. We want choice. We need to measure choice."
Kurobane leaned back just enough to register dissent. "Measuring choice is one inch from corralling it."
"Not if the algorithm only observes," a deputy replied. "No identifiers. Purely aggregate."
Dr. Imai stood beside the screen, stylus in hand, and wished a pen could be brave for her. "We'll need guardrails: no persistent IDs, no location history, and a visible opt-out—on the device and in public signage."
"Granted," the director said. "Our reputation depends on it."
Kurobane's mouth tilted. "Reputation is a mirror. I'd rather have a spine."
Silence performed humor and sat down. The director continued. "We are losing control of the narrative. The market is inventing religion. Give me data that proves we're servants, not priests."
Imai zoomed the slide: a diagram of Refusal Event triggers—"opt-outs," "manual pauses," "ignored prompts," "manual desynchronization." Soft shapes, hard edges.
"We can build it," she said. "We should ask if we ought to."
"You're asking now," the director said gently, which was not the same as answering.
After the meeting, in a hallway that absorbed doubt like soundproofing, Kurobane said, "They'll say it's for the public good."
Imai replied, "I'll make it harder for them to lie."
He nodded, which in his language meant do it and don't let me down.
2 | Quiet Rooms learns to hiss
Aki saw the footprint before the code had a name.
In Quiet Rooms, the forum's analytics had always been boring on principle. That day, the boring turned oblique. Referrals spiked from domains she didn't recognize—cdn-consent, opt-harvest, benign strings that smelled like eucalyptus and policy.
She clicked through and met a landing page with excellent typography: Public Interest Monitor—Help Us Learn Where Calm Isn't Welcome. A button read I Consent to Measuring My Refusal.
She laughed once, sharp. "Your irony is showing," she told the screen.
Natsume leaned over her shoulder at the shop. "Bad?"
"Polite," Aki said. "Worse."
She posted on Quiet Rooms, not a rant—a curriculum:
PSA: 'Refusal' is not a resource.If a site or device asks to 'learn from your opt-outs,' ask it to leave the room.We practice refusal in public. We don't send it to data school.
Replies stacked in minutes—thank-yous, screenshots, more hissing. A moderator pinned the post and added a template notice: This space does not consent to consent-harvesting. The banner stayed up all afternoon like a small boundary made large.
Aki printed a note for home: We do not export our 'no.' The square under the table warmed and then—after a stubborn blink—cooled. Good table.
3 | U.A.—testing quiet
The request came wrapped in courtesy, which is how pressure prefers to dress.
Subject: Collaborate on a campus pilot for Refusal Events (aggregate only).Tone: Respectful. Weight: Heavy.
Nezu invited exactly three people to the meeting: Aizawa, Kurobane, Imai. He poured tea like a strategist and smiled like a trap that loves ethics.
"We will not become a lab," he began.
Imai inclined her head. "We're not asking to measure students."
Kurobane added, "We're asking to measure devices failing to persuade students."
Aizawa looked at the window as if the glass might hold a vote. "Same difference if the result is a heatmap of my class's will."
Nezu turned the cup in his paw. "What is the point of this algorithm?"
"Design," Imai said. "If we know where refusal happens, we can build friction there. Less temptation to outsource quiet. Less manipulation."
"And if someone else uses it to find weak points," Aizawa said, "to market harder or legislate softer?"
"Then we failed," she said quietly.
Kurobane let the pause lengthen. "Let me run the pilot," he said. "Off campus. I'll feed you abstract signals. You'll see aggregate patterns, no locations. If it stinks, we kill it. If it helps, we publish it with U.A.'s terms attached."
Nezu sipped. "Our terms being?"
"Refusal remains private by default," Kurobane said. "Publishing requires refusal to be untracked. Devices must offer a physical off switch, no data path. And the algorithm must include delay—no real-time anything."
Imai nodded, grateful for a spine that matched hers. "And we'll embed jitter," she added. "No smoothness. No convenient truths."
Aizawa stared at the steam. "We'll try your off-campus pilot," he said. "If I smell one student on your maps, I burn your maps."
Kurobane didn't smile. "That's our contract."
Nezu clapped once, the sound of a gavel that serves tea. "Proceed. And remember: the way you measure refusal will teach the world how to disobey you."
4 | Signals like weather
For a week the city became a barometer. Devices hummed their quiet sales pitch; people said no in a thousand tiny ways.
The algorithm—first draft, half-blind—watched from very far away. It couldn't see faces or addresses. It could see timing: when an opt-out clustered after a certain ad; when a neighborhood paused at dinnertime and refused every prompt; when storm warnings increased the desire for noise or for quiet.
Imai fed the model with caution and starved it of detail. She inserted lag, ten minutes of deliberate boredom between detection and record. She refused to let the machine feel alive.
On her screen, refusal looked like constellations—points shining where people remembered their own rhythm. She annotated none of them with pride. She wrote breathe in the margin instead.
Kurobane watched patterns like a detective who prefers novels. "They resist more when devices claim virtue," he noted. "Less when devices offer rest. Market accordingly."
He wrote a memo to the director: Ban moral language. Allow furniture metaphors. Mandate off switches with texture. It would pass; textured switches cost less than public shame.
5 | Renya—being graphed
He felt it before anyone asked him to.
A pressure at the perimeter, not hostile—administrative. Like a clipboard waiting outside a door. He recognized the algorithm the way you recognize a neighbor—heard, not seen.
In training, a timer flashed a question: SYNC? He didn't look at it. His refusal became a statistic somewhere far away. Good. In the hall, a vending machine offered a "Focus Minute." He read the prompt twice until the machine lost interest.
On the roof, he stood still and let the sense of being counted as a no move past him like weather. He wouldn't fight a thermometer. He also wouldn't give it a forecast.
Aizawa joined him, hands in pockets, eyes on the messy city. "You feel harvested?" he asked.
"Skimmed," Renya said. "Like the top of a soup."
"Sometimes that's how you get rid of the foam," Aizawa replied. "Sometimes that's how you lose flavor."
"I'll add salt," Renya said, and smiled; it felt like a decision.
6 | The breach
It came from the market, not the Commission.
A start-up nobody respected shipped an update for their budget pacer: Refusal Insight™—Understand your household's calm habits. The code scraped opt-outs from any device on the same network and drew a map of a family's no.
A mother posted a screenshot: "It says my kid refuses at 11:03 p.m. every night. It suggests a bedtime solution." Comments erupted like a fire alarm.
Aki saw it within minutes—Quiet Rooms lit up with outrage that sounded like literacy. She wrote three sentences and pinned them top:
Refusal belongs to the refuser.Your no is not a family KPI.Return the product. Keep the boundary.
Kurobane called Imai with two words: "It's live."
She had already pulled the spec. "We can kill the network path," she said. "We can't recall the habit."
"Write the recall," he said. "I'll make them sign it."
By evening, the start-up's site showed a white page with six words that belonged to no one and everyone: Breathe On Your Own. We'll Wait. Underneath, smaller: Refusal Insight has been withdrawn. We were wrong. Lawyers would hate the sentence. People would remember it.
7 | The lesson leaks
U.A. felt the ripples. Students arrived to class with stories about parents deleting apps and neighbors arguing with advertisements. Mina waved her phone. "Quiet Rooms is trending," she said. "In a good way. Weird."
Yaoyorozu passed around a handout she had made—Plain-Language Rights for Devices That Want Feelings—as if she'd been born to draft charters. Iida offered to lobby city council to pass it. Kaminari put his head on the desk and said, "I refuse homework," and then did it anyway.
Renya wrote two lines on a blank page and handed it to Aizawa without comment.
We keep our yes.We keep our no.
Aizawa looked at the lines, and for once did not correct them into something more complicated.
"Post it," he said. Renya stuck the page on the classroom door with cheap tape that would leave a mark. Some marks you should leave.
8 | Algorithm, revised
Imai opened a new file: Refusal v2—Friction-First. She wrote a spec like a prayer said under the breath.
No real-time dashboards.
Aggregate only after three days.
No per-household anything.
No model explanations that guess why.
Public-facing portal that shows the friction we added, not where you refused.
Kill switch. Physical.
She added a line that was not code but would govern code: If it cannot wait, it cannot learn. She pushed the update. Servers took their time because she made them.
Kurobane sent the director a summary that read like a dare: We will measure nothing we wouldn't want measured about ourselves.
The director did not argue. He recognized a culture war disguised as a product sprint and chose to be late on purpose.
9 | Night audit
Renya walked the dorm at midnight the way a monk walks a garden—owning nothing, tending everything. Two rooms argued softly; one cried loudly; one laughed at something that didn't deserve it and then apologized to the wall. He did not intervene. He practiced the hardest power: proximity without pressure.
In his room, he sat on the floor and let the day's graphs slide off him like rain off a coat. The Veil hovered at the edge of reach, pleased that he hadn't asked it to fix a civic problem with a metaphysical solution.
His phone buzzed. Aki:Your forum is teaching. You owe them soup.He typed: We'll bring bread.Aki:We'll bring refusal too. In case the pot tries to be a sermon.R:Deal.
He put the phone face down and watched the square under his heel glow and dim without asking for applause.
The algorithm outside the building waited its mandated ten minutes before writing down the fact that somewhere nearby, five devices had been offered synchronization and five had been told, not tonight. The record contained no names. The lesson contained many.
10 | Epilogue of a patch note
In the morning, the Commission's public portal went live: Where We Added Friction—a slow, honest map of places where off switches had grown texture, where default prompts had lost their nerve, where marketing language had been taught the word maybe.
A comment box invited feedback and kept none of it. It responded with three sentences on loop:
Thank you for refusing.We changed the devices, not you.Tell us where to slow down next.
A classroom door at U.A. still wore a page with two lines. A shop window downtown held a handwritten sign: We sell lemons. Calm is BYO. A brand released a bracelet with no light at all and called it Blank. It didn't sell. Then it did, but only to a small group of people who had taught themselves to buy last.
And somewhere between an apartment and a school, between a ledger and a lab, between a forum and a rooftop, a boy who once ruled shadows chose not to be a ruler again.
If refusal became predictable, he would have to teach the world how to surprise itself again.