Kaelen stood at the gate of Horizon Primary Academy. For the first time in his life, the constant, comforting hum of Astra—his home AI—vanished. The silence in his mind was jarring. No data overlays telling him the wind speed; no cognitive prompts suggesting the most polite way to greet a peer.
Beside him, his father, Arin, placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. "This is where you learn the one thing an AI can't teach you, Kael."
"What's that?"
"How to be unpredictable."
Inside, the academy was an anomaly. In a world of holographic interfaces and ribbon-linked automation, Horizon used physical bells and analog chalkboards.
Kaelen entered Classroom 3. He felt exposed without his internal HUD, but he noticed he wasn't the only one. Twenty other five-year-olds were looking around with the same wide-eyed "AI-withdrawal" symptoms.
Except for one girl.
She sat by the window, her chin resting in her hand, watching a Destroyer-class ship dock at the orbital ring above. Her ribbon aura was a cool, pale silver—far more stable than the flickering sparks of the other children.
Kaelen sat in the empty chair beside her. "You're Level 1 too?"
The girl didn't look away from the sky. "By choice. My father says a foundation built by an AI is like a fortress built on sand."
Kaelen blinked. That was a high-level cultivation proverb. "I'm Kaelen."
She turned then. Her eyes were sharp, observant. "Mina. My family builds things that aren't supposed to move."
"Fortresses?"
Mina sighed, a heavy sound for a five-year-old. "The Valerius line. They want me to be a Weave-phase Architect by eighteen. They think I'm going to spend my life staring at shield-generator schematics."
"Do you want to?"
Mina looked at the front of the classroom, where a teacher was manually writing names on a board. "I want to be a pop star. I want to turn my ribbon resonance into a frequency that makes people forget there's a war at the border."
Kaelen looked at her really looked at her. Her silver thread was steady, but it vibrated with a rhythmic pulse, like a beat.
"You can do both," Kaelen said. "A song is just a different kind of structure. If you harmonize it correctly, it's as strong as a wall."
Mina laughed, and for a second, her silver thread flared with a brief, beautiful intensity. "You talk like a scientist, Kael. Relax. We're five."
As the manual bell clanged, vibrating through the floorboards, Kaelen realized his father was right. In a room full of humans without AI to guide them, the "equations" of the universe became much more interesting.