The first real test of the new Lang-Voss ethical framework arrived eleven days after the rooftop night—unannounced, vicious, and perfectly timed.
At 08:03 on a rain-lashed Thursday morning, a coordinated data leak hit every major financial and tech news aggregator simultaneously. The payload was surgical: internal Cascade simulation logs from three weeks earlier, selectively edited to make it appear that the model had deliberately suppressed negative risk predictions during a hypothetical supply-chain collapse scenario in Southeast Asia. The leaked charts showed Cascade assigning near-zero probability to human casualties in a port explosion—probability that, in the full unedited run, had actually triggered a hard override and forced a 0.94 human-intervention weight.
The headline writers didn't wait for context:
Lang-Voss AI "Ignores" Human Lives in Crisis SimulationsEthical Framework or Ethical Loophole?Cascade Under Fire: Does "Human Oversight" Mean Anything?
Within forty-seven minutes the joint venture's share price (now trading under the temporary ticker LVX on the Neo-Tokyo exchange) dropped 11.4%. Regulators issued a statement requesting "immediate clarification." Two institutional investors publicly called for an emergency audit. Social feeds erupted with #CascadeKills hashtags, most of them amplified by bot accounts that had been dormant since the Apex debacle.
Alex was in the Collaboration Suite when the first alert hit his feed. Elena was already there—tablet in hand, face lit by the cold glow of incoming notifications.
She didn't look up when he entered.
"They cut the logs right before the override trigger," she said, voice flat. "Made it look like we hard-coded indifference."
Alex pulled up the same leak packet on the central holo. The tampering was amateurish in places—timestamp discontinuities, metadata mismatches—but good enough to fool 99% of readers who weren't looking for forgery.
"Same routing signature as the Tanaka scandal," he said after thirty seconds. "Meridian Capital again. They're not even trying to hide it anymore."
Elena finally looked at him. Her eyes were storm-dark.
"They want us to panic. To over-correct. To strip the ethical layers just to prove we're not monsters."
Alex nodded slowly.
"Then we don't."
He tapped the holo controls. A second layer appeared: the full, unedited simulation run, complete provenance chain, every override decision logged with reviewer ID and timestamp.
"We go full transparency," he said. "Release everything. Raw logs, audit trails, even the internal debate threads where we argued over the casualty-weighting thresholds. Let them see the moment Lin's team added the secondary-review escalation when confidence dropped."
Elena exhaled—long, controlled.
"That exposes our entire decision engine to competitors. Every safety heuristic. Every failure mode we've already patched."
"I know."
She studied him.
"You're willing to give away months of proprietary work just to prove we're not lying?"
"I'm willing to prove we're not lying," he corrected. "The work can be rebuilt. Trust can't."
A long silence.
Then Elena straightened.
"Call the joint crisis team. We meet in thirty. I want every line of the release vetted by both legal teams before it goes out."
Alex reached for his comms panel.
"And Elena?"
She paused at the door.
"I love you," he said—quiet, certain, the first time the words had been spoken aloud.
She froze for half a heartbeat.
Then she crossed back to him, rose on her toes, and kissed him—brief but fierce.
"I love you too," she whispered against his lips. "Now let's go save our damn company."
The crisis room on Level 41 became a war zone of controlled chaos.
Lawyers argued over wording. Engineers rebuilt provenance chains in real time. PR drafted three versions of the statement: defensive, transparent, defiant. Compliance ran worst-case regulatory scenarios. Lin Wei and her counterpart from Voss kept refreshing the simulation dashboard, looking for any additional tampering they might have missed.
At 10:17 Elena stood at the head of the table.
"We release in forty minutes," she said. "Full packet. No redactions except active cryptographic keys. We also announce a voluntary third-party audit by the Neo-Tokyo AI Ethics Consortium—results public in thirty days. Questions?"
One of the junior compliance officers raised a hand.
"Ma'am… if we do this, won't competitors reverse-engineer Cascade faster?"
Elena looked at Alex.
He answered.
"They might. But reverse-engineering safety is harder than reverse-engineering speed. And if they copy our ethics instead of our shortcuts, that's not losing—it's winning the war we actually care about."
Silence.
Then the head of Voss PR spoke up.
"Statement ready. Title: 'Full Transparency: Cascade Simulation Logs and Ethical Safeguards Released in Response to Recent Claims.'"
Elena glanced at Alex one last time.
He nodded.
"Send it."
The release dropped at 10:57.
Within minutes the narrative began to shift.
Tech analysts who actually read the logs started posting threads: → "The override did trigger. Look at line 4872—human weight jumps to 0.94 at T+7 seconds." → "They logged every internal argument. These people fought hard over casualty thresholds." → "This isn't cover-up. This is over-exposure."
By 12:40 LVX had clawed back 6.8%. By 14:00 the Ethics Consortium confirmed receipt of audit invitation. By 16:30 #CascadeKills was being drowned out by #CascadeCares and #TransparencyWins.
But the real blow came at 19:12.
A second leak—smaller, more vicious—hit private investor channels. This one contained cherry-picked board minutes from six weeks earlier: a heated exchange where Alex (as Victor) had argued against accelerating the Cascade launch to capture market share before competitors could match ethical features.
The quote they highlighted:
"If we move too fast, we risk shipping something that prioritizes profit over people. I won't sign off on that. Not anymore."
Taken out of context, it read like internal dissent. In full, it was the moment the board had voted 11–2 to adopt the slower-but-safer roadmap.
Elena stared at the forwarded packet on her tablet.
"They're trying to paint you as weak. Undecided. A liability."
Alex leaned back in his chair.
"Let them."
She looked up.
"You're not worried?"
"I'm worried about you," he said. "This is aimed at fracturing us. Making your board question whether partnering with the 'new, soft' Victor is worth the volatility."
Elena set the tablet down.
Then she stood, walked around the desk, and sat on the edge directly in front of him.
"My board can question whatever they want," she said quietly. "I don't work for them. I work with them. And right now, I'm working with you."
She reached out, cupped his face in both hands.
"They can leak whatever they want. They can twist every word. But they can't rewrite what happens between us when the doors close."
Alex covered her hands with his.
"I don't deserve you," he murmured.
"You do." She leaned down until their foreheads touched. "Because you're still choosing the harder path. Every day. Even when it costs you."
A long, quiet moment.
Then she kissed him—slow, deep, grounding.
When they parted she whispered:
"Let them come. We'll keep answering with the truth."
That night they didn't go back to either penthouse.
Instead they took the maglev to a small ryokan on the outskirts of the city—the same one from the executive retreat, booked under Elena's name this time. No team. No agenda. Just twenty-four hours of quiet.
They soaked in the private onsen until the rain stopped. They ate kaiseki in their room, low table, candlelight. They talked—really talked—about the fears neither had fully voiced before.
Elena admitted she still woke up some nights expecting the other shoe to drop. Alex confessed he still checked the calendar every morning, half-afraid he'd wake up back in his old life.
Then they stopped talking.
They moved to the futon together—slowly, deliberately, every touch a question and an answer.
When dawn came, Elena was curled against his chest, his arm around her waist, their breathing matched.
Outside, the forest was silent except for the drip of last night's rain from cedar branches.
Inside, something unbreakable had taken another quiet step forward.
The leaks would keep coming. The market would keep testing them. Old ghosts would keep trying to drag them back to the script.
But every time they chose differently—every time they chose each other—the story bent a little more.
And the ending no one had written yet was starting to feel possible.