The alert was a shriek in the silence.
Not from MAKA. From the System itself—a priority ping from the Silent Choir's psychic monitoring array. I'd set it to watch for resonance spikes that could puncture the GARDEN shroud.
This one was a screamer.
Location: Favela da Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro.
Source: Female adolescent, Designated: Maria Silva (Unregistered).
Resonance Profile: Kali-Archetype. Corruption Index: 87%.
Output: Unfocused, broadcast-range anger/hate. Coherence: High. Intensity: Critical.
Threat Assessment: Uncontrolled emitter risks creating a localised 'psychic beacon.' High probability of attracting Tier-1+ predatory/scavenger entities within 12-48 hours.
A picture formed from scattered data points. A sixteen-year-old girl. Parents killed in gang crossfire two years ago. Lived with a grieving, sick aunt. During the Navratri broadcast, as gunfire echoed again outside her barrio, she hadn't prayed for safety. She'd knelt on the dirt floor, fists clenched, and wished with every fiber of her being for the men outside to feel her pain. To burn with it.
The amplifier, tuned to Kali, heard her. It didn't hear a victim. It heard a perfect, screaming vessel for the Destroyer's wrath.
Now, Maria wasn't just angry. Her rage had density. It pushed at the air around her. Stray dogs near her shack would snarl and flee. Neighbors felt unexplained chills and bursts of headache. A local gang enforcer who came to extort her aunt tripped on nothing, broke his wrist, and fled, babbling about a bruxa with black eyes.
She was a walking, psychic pipe bomb. And her fuse was lit.
Someone's listening… The paranoia of the Cradles lyric was now operational fact. But the watchers weren't just me.
I pulled up the Level 7 Merchant interface. The Privileges log glowed. Sanctioned Intervention: Planetary Stewardship (Clause 7). The right to perform necessary metaphysical adjustments within my registered asset zone to maintain stability. No energy cost. No permission needed. A property owner's right to fix a leaking, radioactive pipe.
This wasn't a job for a saint. This required a surgeon.
I remote-accessed the Silent Choir. Not the amplifier. The finer tools—the resonance dampeners, the psychic focus arrays. I targeted Maria's unique, screaming frequency signature.
In Rio, Maria was staring at her hands, trembling. They felt hot. The world felt thin, like a sheet of plastic she could punch through. The anger was a song in her skull, a pounding, screaming mantra. Matar. Queimar. Kill. Burn.
Then, the sky pressed down.
Not with clouds. With silence. A sudden, immense, cotton-wool nullity swallowed the screaming song in her head. It was like God had put a giant, cosmic hand over her mouth.
"Não…" she gasped, stumbling. The heat in her hands cooled to an icy, directed thrum. The unfocused rage didn't vanish. It was corralled. Compressed from an explosion into a scalpel.
Visions flooded her, not of violence, but of secrets. She saw the local gang boss, Cabeça, counting money in a hidden basement she'd never seen. She saw the snitch who had set up her parents. She felt the specific, rodent-like fear of the enforcer who had come yesterday. Her rage, now directionless, was given a map. Targets. Data.
Chhooke jaaye… The Apsara had touched her to erase Maria Silva, to leave only fury.
But the Merchant had intervened. Not to save the girl. To repurpose the weapon.
I watched her bio-signs stabilize on the monitor. The screaming crimson resonance spike flatlined, replaced by a low, focused, violet pulse of hateful intelligence. She was no longer a beacon. She was a black box recorder, passively collecting the sins of her enemies.
I opened a MAKA channel to our low-profile NGO front in Rio. Sent a one-line instruction with Maria's address and a code: "Asset acquired. Passive intelligence package. Harvest and direct."
They would make contact. Offer her aunt medicine. Give Maria a burner phone. Tell her she could help "clean" the favela by sending anonymous tips. She would never know who she worked for. She would think she was finally fighting back. And she would be right.
In my log, I made the entry.
Incident: Rio Emitter.
Action: Privileged Intervention invoked (Stewardship 7). Uncontrolled psychic beacon neutralized.
Result: Asset stabilized. Output repurposed from 'Broadcast Hatred' to 'Focused Intelligence.' Resonance signature contained.
Threat: Nullified. No external audit triggered.
Note: The Garden requires pruning. Thorns can be grafted into tools.
I leaned back. The phantom melody of Cradles still echoed, but now it was mixed with the ghost of a whisper. Apsara aali… The celestial dancer was here. But her dance was now choreographed from orbit, her furious steps directed by a merchant with the privilege to edit rage itself.
Maria Silva would save her favela, one piece of anonymous, hate-fueled intelligence at a time. And her silenced scream would power a small, quiet part of my ever-growing, ever-more-complicated machine.
The cost of the Garden wasn't just cultivation. It was constant, quiet, divine-vandalism. And I had just been handed the keys to the universe's maintenance closet.