Mira Han did not like hospitals.
Too many machines wired into the same invisible backbone, too many lives dangling off numbers and flags she knew were sloppier than they looked.
She hid it well.
Kael, sitting in the visitor chair, watched her pace at the foot of Haneul's bed like a process bar slowly filling.
"So," Haneul said, breaking the silence. "System's having tiny ethical arguments with itself in random Towers now?"
Kael nodded.
"I picked up half a dozen 'worth evaluation conflicts' in the logs on my last run," he said. "Other Towers, other cities. Root shards disagree with the baseline, System shrugs, wins the coin toss."
Mira folded her arms.
"We've seen them too," she said. "Our monitors flagged a new error code class. Minor for now. But minor errors stack."
"What are they fighting over?" Haneul asked. "Like vending machine snacks, or actual lives?"
"Both," Kael said. "One was a guard event—System assigning protection priority during a street patrol. Root shard tried to swap who was 'worth more' to protect. System said no."
Haneul made a face.
"So we've got pieces of a conscience arguing with a corpse-brain over who gets the better insurance plan," she said. "Fun."
Mira tapped the bed rail lightly.
"ADMIN_0's intent," she said, "was to give humans more say in these evaluations. Let them influence what 'worth' meant. They didn't get that far. The shards aren't listening to people; they're just… nagging the existing function."
"Until someone like us pokes one," Kael said.
"Exactly," Mira said. "You two are the only shard-linked pair we've seen where there's both a fragment host and a tether with explicit debug access."
Haneul wrinkled her nose.
"Feels like we won the world's worst lottery," she muttered.
"Maybe," Mira said. "But you also have something no one else has: a chance to steer this before it escalates."
Kael looked up sharply.
"Define 'steer,'" he said.
"Observe patterns," Mira said. "Feed the shard better definitions. Teach it what you think 'worth' should mean in edge cases. Then, when it eventually crosses whatever threshold wakes it up, it'll be closer to your values than Root's original ones."
"Sounds like parenting," Haneul said. "But for a very confused god-bit."
Mira's mouth twitched.
"Accurate," she said. "Unfortunately, you won't be the only influence. Other shards are waking near other hosts. We don't know who or where yet."
"And they might have very different ideas of 'worth,'" Kael said. "Great."
He rubbed his eyes.
"So what's the play?" he asked. "We can't fix every worth conflict on the planet one vending Node at a time."
"No," Mira said. "But we can start with something closer to home. The System makes small value judgments constantly—who gets priority in a healing queue, which patrol gets the better route, which low-level event gets logged as 'ignored' versus 'responded to.'"
Haneul frowned.
"Let me guess," she said. "Those decisions tend to weight Hunters higher than civilians."
"Significantly," Mira said. "From an ecosystem standpoint, Hunters are scarce resources that protect revenue streams and Tower stability. Civilians are… interchangeable."
Kael's jaw clenched.
"I've seen that logic in the logs," he said. "It doesn't call them 'interchangeable,' but the math does."
Mira nodded.
"There's a minor city event trigger tonight," she said. "Glitch-hound stray popping up near a transit hub. Low level, mostly a test of response routing. System will assign it to whatever patrol fits its optimization function."
"Let me guess," Kael said. "Guard patrol with the best chance to kill it quick, minimum disruption."
"More like: patrol whose absence hurts Tower perimeter least," Mira said. "Transit hub civilians are acceptable collateral compared to a gap in Tower coverage."
Haneul swore softly.
"You're suggesting we… intercept that evaluation," Kael said slowly.
Mira shrugged one shoulder.
"Not change the event," she said. "Just watch how the worth function assigns priorities. If Haneul's shard reacts, you nudge its interpretation. Backseat-drive Root's conscience."
"And if we accidentally flip a flag that gets people killed?" Kael asked.
"Then I was wrong about you," Mira said calmly. "And I'll do my best to stop you from touching anything else."
Haneul made a strangled noise.
"Comforting," she said.
Kael slumped back, staring at the ceiling.
"I'm not signing up to be global ethics patch," he said. "I barely keep Joon from eating questionable street meat."
Haneul flicked his arm with her IV tube.
"You're already in it," she said. "The shard's awake enough to grumble. Other shards are grumbling. The System keeps ignoring them. That's a feedback loop heading toward a fail state."
Mira nodded.
"Root's dead," she said. "The System's been running on stale assumptions and brute-force equilibrium for a decade. If the shards push hard enough without guidance, they might break something big."
"Or," Kael said slowly, "they could fix something big. If they agree on better definitions."
"That's the optimistic take," Mira said. "I like it. It terrifies me."
Haneul sighed.
"Okay," she said. "Here's my vote. We watch the event. No edits. I let the shard look. Kael, you… talk at it again or whatever. Philosophy at a distance. If the worst thing we do is make it consider civilians more 'worth saving' than before, I can live with that."
Kael looked at her.
"You sure?" he asked.
"No," she said. "But I'm more sure that doing nothing is worse."
He thought of ADMIN_0, helplessly watching RNG kill people.
He thought of his own status window, the "WONTFIX" tag on his HP.
He thought of Haneul's scan, fractured soul lit by a shard that hadn't asked to be lodged there.
"Fine," he said. "We do a read-only field trip."
Mira nodded once.
"I'll feed you the event node when it triggers," she said. "But we do this clean. If I even suspect you're editing flags during a live civilian incident, I pull the plug."
"Understood," Kael said.
Haneul leaned back, closing her eyes.
"Great," she murmured. "Can't wait to see how the System values a bunch of people catching a train."