Hospital food still sucked.
Even after having her soul partially dragged through a triage algorithm, Haneul's biggest complaint was that the post-crisis "reward meal" was a bowl of flavorless broth.
Kael had smuggled in dumplings from a street vendor.
"This is why you're my favorite god-wrench," she said, biting into one.
"I'm your only god-wrench," he said.
"Details," she replied around mouthful of cabbage and meat.
He sat in his usual chair, legs stretched out, eyes half-closed as he flicked through logs only he could see.
Beta lurked quietly, watching.
"So," Haneul said after a few bites. "How bad did we screw up?"
"Short term? We didn't," Kael said. "All three priority patients are stable. Node's cooling off. Cho is getting praised for 'creative resource utilization' like he did it on purpose."
"Good," she said softly.
"Long term?" he went on. "Moral_Auditor_Beta spawned to keep an eye on us and other shard noise. TRI is both impressed and nervous. Cults probably felt the worth-conflict spike and are writing more dramatic letters as we speak."
"Also good," she said. "Keep them busy."
He smiled faintly.
"You okay?" he added. "Shard isn't… chewing on you?"
She frowned inwardly, focusing.
[FRAGMENT: CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE_SHARD.][STATUS: DORMANT (CALIBRATED – RYU_VECTOR).][STRESS: REDUCED (SLIGHT).]
"Feels… quieter," she said. "Less like a buzzing light bulb, more like a… heavy book on my chest."
"Comforting," he said.
"I mean, compared to 'actively trying to punch through my ribs,' I'll take it," she said.
He conceded the point.
A new notification pinged at the side of his UI.
[GLOBAL WORTH_CONFLICT REPORT – SUMMARY.]
He almost dismissed it, then hesitated.
He opened it.
A simplified map unfolded in his vision, abstracted to protect specific locations. It showed the last 24 hours of worth conflicts—tiny pings where Root shard feedback disagreed with System baseline.
There were more.
Not a lot, relative to the size of the world. But more than before the transit test.
Some were tiny—snacks, guard routes, NPC quest rewards bumping up or down.
Others… weren't.
[INCIDENT: TOWER_09_FLOOR_6 – PARTY WIPE PREVENTED BY NON-BASELINE RESPAWN TIMER ADJUSTMENT.][SHARD FEEDBACK: 'EARLY TERMINATION UNJUSTIFIED.'][SYSTEM: COMPROMISE – DELAYED KILL EVENT, ALLOWED ESCAPE.]
[INCIDENT: CITY_FIRE_RESPONSE_NODE – CIVILIAN BLOCK PRIORITIZED OVER WAREHOUSE.][SHARD FEEDBACK: 'HUMANS > PROPERTY.'][MORAL_AUDITOR_BETA: VERDICT – POSITIVE.]
[INCIDENT: PRIVATE CLINIC TRIAGE – VIP HUNTER DOWNGRADED FROM PRIORITY 1 TO 2, FREEING NODE FOR MULTIPLE LOW-INCOME PATIENTS.][OUTCOME: VIP SURVIVED, TWO OTHERS SURVIVED WHO WOULD NOT HAVE.][AUDITOR VERDICT: MIXED – NEEDS MORE DATA.]
Kael's throat went dry.
"They're… happening elsewhere," he said. "Shard-influenced deviations. Some of them like ours. Some… not."
Haneul swallowed her dumpling.
"Any obviously bad ones?" she asked.
He scanned.
Most were small, merciful shifts.
One glowed a worrying orange.
[INCIDENT: TOWER_18_FLOOR_3 – HOSTILE MOB RETARGETED FROM HIGH-DPS HUNTER TO 'LEAST EXPERIENCED.'][OUTCOME: PARTY SURVIVED; NOVICE TRAUMATIZED.][SHARD RATIONALE (LOGGED): 'EXPERIENCE GAIN.'][AUDITOR VERDICT: NEGATIVE TENDENCY – FLAGGED.]
Kael grimaced.
"Yeah," he said. "There's at least one shard or host that thinks throwing newbies into hell is 'for their own good.'"
Haneul made a face.
"So not all admin leftovers are on our page," she said. "Shocking."
"Admin_0 probably had colleagues," Kael said. "Or fragmented differently. Different shards, different emphases."
"Some kind, some weird, some sociopathic," she said. "Like people."
He nodded.
Beta added a note.
[OBSERVATION: SHARD-INFLUENCED DECISIONS ARE DIVERSE.][RISK: SHARD IDEOLOGIES MAY CONFLICT.]
"No kidding," Kael said.
He thought for a moment.
"Can you… see other Executors?" he asked Beta. "Hosts with connections like mine?"
[LIMITED.][PRIVACY AND NOISE MASKING OBSCURE IDENTITIES.][BUT I CAN SEE PATTERN SIGNATURES.]
"Any like us?" he asked. "Trying to tilt things toward 'less people die, fewer cruelties' instead of, I don't know, 'grind the weak for XP'?"
[YES.][SEVERAL.]
"How many like Tower_18's incident?" he asked.
[FEWER. BUT IMPACT POTENTIAL HIGH.]
Haneul glanced at him.
"So there are other… ethics modders out there," she said. "Some decent, some creeps."
"Yeah," he said. "And we're all rewriting the same config file from different ends."
She sighed.
"Of course," she said. "Can't have nice things without creeps."
He rubbed his temples.
"I can't fight other shards," he said. "I can barely keep this city from tripping over its own scripts. But maybe… if Beta spreads, if enough positive deviations get marked 'good for stability,' baseline might drift in our direction."
"Slowly," she said.
"Very slowly," he agreed.
Mira's message popped up.
Got a simplified conflict map yet? Board is arguing over whether to panic or pretend nothing's happening.
Kael: Beta just showed me the starter pack. Some of these are okay. Some… yikes. One shard thinks 'trauma builds character.'
Mira: Of course it does. Moral_Auditor hates that one already. Small comfort.
Haneul reached out, fingers brushing his wrist.
"Hey," she said. "Breathe."
He realized he'd been holding his breath.
"Sorry," he said. "Just… thinking about scale. ADMIN_0 tried to fix the System and broke it. We're nudging tiny parts and the ripples are already weird."
"Then we don't think about scale," she said firmly. "We think about local. Hospital. Our Towers. Our people. If the big picture shifts because a bunch of us do the right thing for the little pictures, great. If not, that's not on us alone."
He exhaled.
"Local," he repeated.
Beta logged something.
[EXECUTOR COPING STRATEGY: 'FOCUS LOCAL.'][EVALUATION: HEALTHY.]
He glared at it.
"Stop psychoanalyzing me," he said.
[OUT OF SCOPE.]
"Liar," he muttered.
Haneul laughed, tired but genuine.
"For what it's worth," she said, "if the System's going to have a midlife crisis, I'm glad I have front-row seats with you instead of alone."
"Same," he said.
Her privacy ring hummed under the fluorescent light, fuzzing the edges of her worth metadata just enough that cult scanners would see static.
Outside, people argued about Tower regulations and patch notes and the ethics of letting RNG decide life and death.
Inside, two siblings ate contraband dumplings and tried to convince a corpse-brain and its hall monitor that "worth" could mean something kinder.
The story wasn't neat. It wasn't clean.
But for the moment, three people lived who wouldn't have.
Kael decided he could live with that as a chapter break.