Speaker Grayroot had also seen the Root desync.
Not in graphs.
In static.
His shrine Node had shivered when the Root channel hiccuped, the damaged shard writhing like a toothache inside a socket that no longer held a real tooth.
[ROOT_CHANNEL DESYNC.][FRAGMENT: DISTRESS.]
The worshippers above, in their tidy little prayer hall, had felt it as "an uneasy feeling" and muttered about omens.
Grayroot felt it as an opportunity.
He sat cross-legged in the shrine basement now, fingers resting lightly on the damaged shard device, as replay logs scrolled.
Desync.
Human overrides.
Moral_Audit signatures.
Kael's graffiti still sat in the Node: MONITORED.
"K," he said softly. "You showed yourself again last night."
He'd traced some of the "mercy bias" patterns through Beta's anonymized summaries.
Hard to pin.
Softened heal node triage. Evac priority. City fire routing.
Different from his own shard's harsh insistence on "restore Root."
"Soft fixes," he said. "Patching symptoms."
He knew they'd saved lives.
He wasn't blind.
He just didn't think it was enough.
"Root is sick," he told the shard. "You saw it. It flinched. Its channels stuttered. Patching over the seizures without treating the disease is cruelty in a different shape."
The shard buzzed faintly, disjointed.
Sometimes it echoed ADMIN_0's intent: humans in the loop, shared ethics, fragment consensus.
Sometimes it whispered something else: restore me, complete me, unify.
"Unify," he murmured. "Yes. But under what?"
He flicked through the conflict map.
Executors.
Shards.
Moral_Auditor_Beta, trying to stand between them like a schoolteacher in a classroom full of knife-wielding prodigies.
He smiled thinly.
"Even your hall monitor is out of its depth," he said.
He opened his unsent message again.
To the one who flicked our forehead…
He read it, then closed it.
Not yet.
His flock wasn't ready.
The System wasn't desperate enough.
But after last night's desync, he knew something he hadn't been sure of before:
If Root twitched that hard once, it would again.
The corpse still had reflexes.
The question was whether they baptized the next twitch as a miracle—or used it to pry open the ribs and fix the heart.
He bowed his head over the damaged shard.
"Next time," he said, "we'll be closer."
The shard pulsed in confused, hungry agreement.