"Click."
A crisp sound—light, not loud—but in the dead-silent synchronized calibration room, it landed like a gunshot.
Marcus stared at his own hand.
He hadn't wanted to move. The glowing dotted line on his wristband was like a puppet string, yanking his fingers into position—aim, press, latch.
The first stage of the child-anchor restraints locked.
The small figure was cinched tighter against the cold platform. Even the faint tremble stopped.
Marcus's wristband refreshed instantly:
[Physical access: Stage 1 complete][Responsibility chain: Assistant execution record written]
A second directive snapped in right underneath, bolded—flashing red:
[Align / press data interface][Countdown: ]
The numbers began to jump:
5…4…
Shorter than the restraint latch countdown even was.
"Fuck…" Marcus's mouth went dry. This was assembly-line rush work—one station finished and the next one is already screaming at you, not even letting you breathe. "Slacking" here meant getting welded into the responsibility chain forever. No appeal. No exit.
A thin guidance beam shot out from the interface slot on the pairing table, tracing across the back of his hand, then drifting toward his fingertips—like outlining him, telling him exactly where to place it.
His hand hovered above the beam. He could feel cold air with a metallic bite blowing out of the slot.
Inside the Silent Pod
The "laughter" in Li's head came again.
Third time? Fourth? That slight upward curl at the end—identical, like a looped recording.
Synthetic.
His nosebleed hadn't stopped. It ran down his chin, pooling into a small dark puddle on the white seat. His breathing was wrong—inhale length, exhale rhythm—dragged by an invisible script, forced to match the fragment-feed tempo.
Miss the tempo and his left shoulder got punished—sharp, needle pain.
Between recitations, he kept swapping meanings. The system said "confirm the drawing paper's direction," and inside his mind he pinned the word direction hard onto the abandoned warehouse coordinate in the old military zone—warehouse, ventilation ducts, rusted iron doors, useless old servers.
He was turning himself into a fake compass, pointing the system down a wrong road.
The green light blinked once.
"Waveform convergence rate: increasing." The electronic voice evaluated him—flat, cold, impossible to tell whether it was praise or threat. "Mother-anchor synchronized guidance: preparing."
Li's stomach sank.
Synchronized guidance. Not just locating anymore—now they wanted to turn him into a template. A standard, copyable emotional peak generator. Later, if the system needed to find some other "child-anchor," it would just wrap that template around him and use him again.
His "job" was about to go from temp contract to permanent asset. With an ID number. Non-resignable.
Access Corridor — Threshold Sensor Point
Ayla's calibration hammer trembled in her hand.
"Increase frequency. Another set." The tech soldier stared at his instrument without lifting his head.
Ayla inhaled and struck the metal strip three times—fast and sharp:
clang—clang—clang.
The tech nodded. "Data captured. Rest a bit. Why are you so pale?"
Ayla shook her head, didn't answer.
Her ears were full of layered echoes—buzzing—like ten versions of herself speaking at once. The system was siphoning her reverberation as baseline. It made her dizzy, feet weak.
She leaned against the cold wall, eyes fixed toward the corridor's shadow.
Those three hits weren't random. She forced the rhythm tighter. Between the first and second strike, she shortened the gap.
After the second sound, the window wasn't 0.8 seconds anymore.
It was 0.5.
Shorter. Harsher. Meaner.
She sent that more desperate slit outward anyway.
Outside — In the Cable-Trench Shadow
Sophia's real resonance clip burned in her palm, vibrating hard enough to numb the web between thumb and index finger. Its pulse matched the low hum from the pairing table perfectly.
She heard Ayla's knocks.
The rhythm changed.
0.5 seconds.
She licked her dry lips. The first drift only made the coordinate jump once—Brian would be alert now. The second time couldn't look the same.
She needed something that screamed: the system did this to itself.
A double-peak.
Like the signal split into a ghost image for a blink, then collapsed back together. Old equipment did that. It was explainable. "Technical noise."
She held her breath, body tight like a sprinter in the blocks, waiting for Ayla's "second hit" like a starter pistol.
Then, in that 0.5 second slit, she would create a micro-split—tiny, disposable, but recordable.
Not to rescue.
To leave a burr in the gear.
Gate Hall Terminal
Daniel didn't even blink.
Data poured down the screen. Then, in the corner, a monitored waveform jumped—like an ECG knotting—splitting into two branches for an instant, then fusing again.
"There!" Daniel's fingers moved faster than his brain. He boxed the anomaly, dragged it, dumped it into a folder he'd prepared in advance:
[Redundant Verification Environmental Noise Samples / EM Echo Class]
He opened the annotation box and hammered out a single sentence—no more:
"Suspected instantaneous double-peak caused by residual anchor-edge resonance stacking with redundant channel."
Click. Submit.
His back was slick with cold sweat. He'd just wrapped a human-made "burr" in official-looking language and labeled it "internal technical noise." This was like Photoshopping a fault report under the boss's nose—make it pretty and you live, botch it and you're the first sacrifice on the altar.
A receipt popped:
[Annotation received. Submitter ID recorded.]
Daniel stared at his own ID sitting there and it felt like signing a deed of servitude.
Monitoring Center
Brian watched the double-peak flash on the big screen, then glanced at the small window showing Daniel's annotation.
He smiled—cold.
"Still fiddling with the valve," he said into comms, voice low. "Activate Level-2 redundant verification. Compress all sampling windows to sixty percent of current baseline. Pre-write failure responsibility chain. Attach the tech annotator ID to the secondary-liability candidate slot."
Order executed.
The system broadcast chimed inside and outside the gate, emotionless:
[Redundant verification: ENHANCED][Sampling window: COMPRESSED][Failure responsibility: backfill pre-write (secondary candidate: technical annotation role)]
Brian leaned back.
No need to arrest anyone. The rules would crush them. Shorter windows, lower tolerance, and the escape routes pre-filled with names. Fail, and who takes the hit? The one who got "helpful" and left a note.
Precision strike.
You wanted to compete? Fine. He welded half the exam room door shut and watched you fight for oxygen.
By the Pairing Table
Marcus's wristband buzzed. The countdown sped up.
The "4" skipped straight to "3," and the blink rate increased—like a death warrant.
The guidance beam brightened, clinging to his fingertips, sending a faint tingling sensation—pulling him down.
He twisted his head toward the doorway.
On the wheeled platform, the child's side profile was hidden behind the shield; only a sliver of pale skin showed.
The data interface slot sat beneath his hand—black as a mouth waiting to bite.
Inside the Silent Pod
Li's breathing script suddenly slipped a beat.
Not because he meant it to—because the system forced an override, dragging his rhythm to match some faraway tempo.
His nosebleed surged, dripping in a steady line.
And in that crushing synchronized pressure, a fragment exploded inside his head.
Not the synthetic laughter. Not the drawing paper.
A sob.
Short. Broken. Mixed with the muffled struggle of someone's mouth being covered—ragged breath trapped behind a hand.
Real.
A child's fear.
Li's fake trajectory loosened for a split second. The "direction" he'd pinned to the abandoned warehouse shifted—just a hair.
Just once.
But it was enough.
On the pairing table screen, the two waveforms—"mother-anchor emotional peak" and "child-anchor location signal"—both began to convulse violently.
The gate hall broadcast let out a long hmmm, then the cold electronic voice stuttered—breaking mid-air:
[Data lock executing—]
In the synchronized calibration room, blood-red text flooded the display:
[Synchronous press: INITIATING]
Marcus's hand was pinned by the guidance beam—held exactly one centimeter above the interface slot.
He could feel the cold breath of air coming out of it.
He could see the metallic edge catching light.
But it hadn't pressed down yet.
The countdown froze on a bright red 1, flashing like madness.
And the entire room contained only the instruments' low hum… and that unmoving beam, dragging Marcus's fingertips toward the point of no return.