The message arrived inside a joke.
Taro almost deleted it.
He was half-asleep at the depot console, skimming through the overnight flood of clips, memes, and badly edited remixes of the Twelve-Lower stream when a low-priority packet slipped into the queue.
*SUBJECT: 12-LOWER REACTION COMPILATION 😂*
"Classy," he muttered.
The sender string was nonsense, a chain of random characters.
The checksum was wrong.
The header said one thing, the cryptography said another.
He sat up straighter.
A checksum was only wrong by accident or by design, and this had the specific texture of wrong-by-design.
"Uh, Aiden," he called. "You might want to see this."
Aiden was in the doorway before the sentence finished.
He had not slept much either.
Twelve-Lower's images had looped in his head all night: the red flash over a child, the officer's hesitation, the way the registry had quietly punished mercy.
"What is it," he asked.
Taro flicked the packet to the wall.
