They chose the hospital vending Node.
It was familiar. Public. Surrounded by witnesses, which made it both safer and more terrifying.
"This feels illegal," Haneul said.
"You're in a hospital gown," Kael said. "If anyone asks, we say you're stress-testing the snack supply."
Mira stood a little back, coat off now, wearing a plain dark shirt and slacks that made her look almost normal. Almost.
Doctor Cho hovered near the nurses' station, pretending not to watch.
The Node itself was innocuous: a white column in the hallway, full of beverages, chips, and disturbingly neon nutrient bars. A small crowd of visitors drifted past occasionally, feeding it credits.
Kael laid his fingers lightly against the side panel.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Ground rules. We're not changing anything yet. Just watching. Haneul, you interact with it like you normally would. Pick something cheap."
"Hospital markup, so nothing is cheap," she muttered, but tapped her ID bracelet against the reader.
[USER: RYU_HANEUL]
[BALANCE: - …]
[SELECT ITEM.]
She eyed the options.
"Fine," she said. "Mystery flavor nutrient bar."
"Bold," Mira said.
Kael activated Debug Sense.
The Node's flags unfolded in his mind: price tables, stock levels, user logs. More importantly, a new set of lines lit up around Haneul—a faint thread connecting her to the Node's internal "transaction worth" calculation.
[CALCULATING: ITEM_WORTH / USER_CAPACITY / SYSTEM_GOAL_ALIGNMENT…]
"Pause," Kael breathed.
Time didn't stop, but his perception carved out a little space around the calculations.
Normally, the System treated vending purchases as trivial. You feed it credits; it feeds you sugar and synthetic vitamins. Hidden under that, though, was something more abstract: a micro-evaluation of worth.
[USER_WORTH_CONTRIBUTION: LOW.]
[SYSTEM_INVESTMENT_REQUIRED: LOW.]
[RISK: NEGLIGIBLE.]
[JUSTIFICATION: PERMITTED.]
He felt something stir in Haneul's shard.
Not awakening—more like a muscle twitch in its sleep.
A small, additional line appeared under the Node's decision.
[FRAGMENT_FEEDBACK: NULL.]
"Did you see that?" he asked, eyes unfocused.
"I saw you making your 'I'm reading really gross code' face," Haneul said. "Did it do something?"
"Minor reaction," Mira murmured. "Look at her shard signature."
Kael flicked his mental view.
Haneul's soul-structure diagram hovered in the back of his mind. The shard labeled CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE glowed perhaps a fraction brighter.
[FRAGMENT_STATUS: DORMANT (RESPONSIVE MODE).]
[FEEDBACK_CHANNEL: OPEN (LISTEN-ONLY).]
"It's listening," he said quietly. "It's watching how the System assigns worth. But it's not speaking yet."
"Good," Haneul said. "I prefer my internal ethics subroutines on mute."
The Node dispensed the bar with a cheerful clunk.
No alarms. No cultists teleporting in. No Root Process rebooting.
Mira nodded slowly.
"Next," she said. "Kael, you buy something. Let's see if the shard reacts differently when your tether is involved."
He did.
Tapped his ID, selected the cheapest bottle of water.
[USER: KAEL_RYU]
[TRANSACTION: APPROVED.]
[CALCULATING…]
The same evaluation spun up.
[USER_WORTH_CONTRIBUTION: LOW.]
[SYSTEM_INVESTMENT_REQUIRED: LOW.]
[RISK: NEGLIGIBLE.]
[JUSTIFICATION: PERMITTED.]
This time, the fragment feedback line flickered.
[FRAGMENT_FEEDBACK: MINOR DISAGREEMENT.]
[ADJUSTMENT: NONE (AWAKENING_THRESHOLD NOT MET).]
Kael's breath caught.
"It… disagreed," he said. "Slightly. It thinks my 'worth contribution' rating is off."
"As it should," Haneul said mock-primly. "Clearly you deserve better snacks."
Mira's eyes were sharp.
"Can you see the disagreement?" she asked. "In numbers?"
Kael focused, drilling into the micro-logs.
[CORE_INTENT_PROPOSED_WORTH: LOW+]
[SYSTEM_BASELINE_WORTH: LOW.]
[DELTA: +0.01]
"Tiny," he said. "It nudged your worth evaluation for me up a hair. Not enough to change any outcome. Just… a note in the margins."
"It's like watching someone argue with themselves in parentheses," Haneul said.
Mira exhaled slowly.
"That's more than we've ever seen from a dormant shard," she said. "Usually they sit like rocks until something catastrophic happens. Then they… overcorrect."
"Overcorrect how?" Kael asked.
"In one case, the shard host walked into a Tower and the System spontaneously reclassified half their party as 'expendable' or 'essential' based on metrics we still don't understand," Mira said. "Everyone marked 'expendable' died in the next event. Everyone 'essential' survived with miraculous RNG."
"Yikes," Haneul said.
"Yup," Mira said.
Kael's stomach clenched.
"And you want this thing active?" he asked.
"I want it understood," Mira corrected. "Preferably under the influence of someone whose idea of 'worth' isn't aligned with 'highest DPS only.'"
She looked at Haneul.
"What do you think is 'worth saving'?" she asked, almost casually.
Haneul blinked.
"I'm on a payment plan for my own life," she said. "My perspective is biased."
"Biased is human," Mira said. "That's the point."
Kael gave her a sharp look.
"That's exactly the kind of framing an old admin would use to justify implanting shards," he said.
Mira didn't deny it.
"I'm not ADMIN_0," she said quietly. "I just found some of their wreckage."
Kael turned back to the Node.
"Okay," he said. "We've established the shard can watch and grumble. What happens if we try something slightly more… pointed?"
"Pointed how?" Haneul asked warily.
"Not changing any lives," he said. "Just… ask it a question. See what it thinks 'worth' means."
He placed his hand on the Node again, this time touching not its flags, but the subtle thread connecting it to Haneul's shard.
"Can you hear me?" he thought, directing the query down that connection.
No System window popped up. No official response.
The shard flickered anyway.
[FRAGMENT: CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE_SHARD]
[LISTEN MODE → QUERY MODE (LIMITED).]
Kael felt—not words, not exactly—but a shape of thought. A set of parameters looking back at him, asking one silent question:
Worth to what?
He swallowed.
He thought of ADMIN_0's logs. Of their fight with the System over RNG and acceptable loss. Of Haneul's dry joke about being on a payment plan for her own life.
"Worth to people," he thought firmly. "Not just to Tower clear rates. Not just to System stability. Worth to the ones who have to live with the consequences."
The shard pulsed once.
[FRAGMENT_FEEDBACK: INPUT REGISTERED.]
[NO ACTION TAKEN (AWAKENING_THRESHOLD NOT MET).]
"Anything?" Haneul asked, eyes wide.
"It… asked what 'worth to what' meant," Kael said. "I told it 'worth to people.' It listened. I think."
Mira's voice was very soft.
"You may have just nudged a Root-level concept by a micron," she said. "In a hallway, talking to a snack machine."
"Top ten anime power-ups," Haneul murmured.
Alarms did not blare. The ceiling did not fall.
The Node sat innocently, humming.
Kael checked his logs.
[FRAGMENT_HOST_ID: RYU_HANEUL – STATUS: DORMANT (CALIBRATING).]
[LINKED USER: KAEL_RYU – ROLE: POTENTIAL EXECUTOR.]
[NEW SUBFIELD: HUMAN_WORTH_BIAS = INITIALIZED.]
His debug layer added a new, faint entry under his own flags.
[FLAG: SHARED_INTENT_VECTOR = WEAK.]
[DESCRIPTION: EMERGING ALIGNMENT BETWEEN FRAGMENT HOST AND EXECUTOR.]
"Okay," he said. "That's enough for today. Before we accidentally make everyone in the building 'worth infinite snacks.'"
Haneul's eyes lit up.
"Tempting," she said.
Mira nodded.
"Agreed," she said. "Slow steps. No direct activation. But this tells us something important."
"What?" Kael asked.
"That your shard is not… alien," she said. "It's not a fixed, unchangeable law. It's capable of being influenced. Maybe even taught."
She looked at both of them.
"If this ever wakes," she said, "I would very much like it to have heard more from you than from the old Root."
Kael thought of ADMIN_0's last line.
I picked humans because I thought they'd be better at mercy than me.
"I'm not comfortable being anyone's moral patch," he said.
Haneul bumped his arm.
"Too late," she said. "You're already mine."
He managed a small smile.
"Then I guess we should make sure your shard likes me," he said.
"Obviously," she said. "I need someone to fix my UI when it crashes."
Mira watched them, a strange expression flickering across her face—something like relief, quickly masked.
"We'll continue to monitor," she said. "I'll set up a secure channel for Dr. Cho to send scan updates. No one sees them without my clearance. In the meantime, do not mention Root shards outside this room. Not to guilds. Not to Hunter buddies. Not to your streamers."
She looked pointedly at Haneul's tablet.
"I wasn't going to superchat 'hey chat I'm a god chip,'" Haneul muttered.
"Good," Mira said. "Because some of them are in cults."
Haneul made a face.
"Figures," she said.
Kael pulled his hand away from the Node.
The hall felt normal again. Just fluorescent lights, the murmur of voices, the squeak of wheels on linoleum.
Inside his head, the System's logs ticked on.