Speaker Grayroot did not like surprises.
He'd built an entire identity around understanding the System better than the common herd. When he walked, it was with the smug certainty of a man who thought the UI whispered secrets only to him.
The "MONITORED" note ruined his morning.
It appeared in the shrine Node's admin view as he ran his routine diagnostics, a new line sitting under the device label.
[NOTE: MONITORED FOR UNAUTHORIZED FRAGMENT INTERACTIONS.][ADDED BY: MORAL_AUDIT_LAYER.]
He stared at it.
Then checked the audit trail.
No human admin had added it.
No script he controlled.
Yet there it was, formatted like a System note.
"Moral Audit Layer," he murmured.
He'd seen references in deep logs—beta processes spun up to judge worth conflicts. Experimental. Rare.
"Why would it care?" he asked the empty basement shrine.
The damaged shard in the cobbled-together device hummed weakly, as if irritated by the new metadata.
[FRAGMENT: LOST_CHILD – STATE: AGITATED.]
He turned to the nearest acolyte, a young woman in a gray hood sorting offering data.
"Who did you scan last night?" he asked.
She blinked.
"We made rounds at three clinics and one hospital," she said. "Standard patterns. No strong hits. One… strange one. Very faint. Like static."
"Where?" he asked.
She swallowed.
"Gray-3 Central Hospital," she said. "Ward C. The bracelet almost glitched. The signal… slipped."
"Slipped," he repeated.
"It felt like… something pushed back," she said.
He exhaled slowly.
"So," he said. "The shard-host has a guard dog after all."
He flicked his fingers, bringing up the Node's logs.
The last batch of scan returns were wrong.
Too many 0.2–0.4 readings, scattered across the city.
"That's not possible," he muttered. "We calibrated these to avoid noise."
The shard in the device pulsed angrily.
[FRAGMENT: SENSES INTERFERENCE.]
"Someone touched the path," he said. "Wrapped our scan in tinfoil. And then signed our Node like a bored god."
He should have been more angry than afraid.
He wasn't.
Because if the Moral Audit Layer had noticed, it meant their work mattered enough to ping.
It meant the Root wasn't as dead as people thought.
A thrill ran up his spine.
"Oh, little shard-sibling," he murmured. "You've found interesting friends."
He selected a subset of bracelets and killed them—virtually, not physically. Keys revoked, access cut. He wouldn't let his flock wander around with compromised locators.
Then he opened a new message file.
To the one who flicked our forehead,
We see your hand in the logs. You wear the System's audit voice like a mask. Clever. Dangerous.
You protect the shard-host. Good. She is valuable.
But know this: the System you are trying to patch is broken beyond your small, local fixes. Root must be restored, not just nagged.
When you tire of arguing with a corpse, come find us. We have more pieces than you think.
— Speaker Grayroot
He did not send it.
Not yet.
He saved it in the shrine Node with a delayed trigger, set to dispatch if and when the mysterious "Moral Audit" signature touched his system again.
Bait.
If this Executor had the audacity to graffiti on their Node, he'd likely come back.
Grayroot smiled thinly.
"Let's see how brave the god-bug really is," he said.
The damaged shard flickered in agreement.