The courthouse smells like citrus and old paper—clinic and archive married under a skylight. Elevator screens whisper headlines between floors: NINE DAYS down to EIGHT in a ticker error that makes me want to pry the panel off and shake it clean. The halo icon stares from the reception desk, two concentric rings stamped into a brass tray where visitors leave forbidden liquids and tiny knives. I set my water down and keep the pen recorder in my pocket, warm against my palm like a word that wants out.
“Petitioner Vale,” the clerk says, voice lacquered. “Hearing Room C.”
“I’m here,” I answer, and my voice surprises me by not cracking.
In the corridor, the city seeps in anyway: salt through vents, hot sugar from a cart that has learned to camp the public steps, the faint tang of disinfectant that says we sanitize dissent. Fog presses its cheek to the high windows, turning the bay into suggestion. A news blimp reroutes with a gentle groan; gossip pauses a beat, not sure which direction to face.
The hearing room is all glass and mercy-colored carpet. Three panelists sit under lights that mimic clear daylight even when the bay coughs fog; their mics are tight to their mouths like leashes. The chair—a woman with a voice I’ve heard on pledge drives—fingers a pad with the halo seal and a reassuring font: DATA TRIBUNAL—COMMUNITY TRUST. Trust is a brand; I’ve learned that the hard way.
Gray is here in a charcoal suit, a tasteful halo pin on his lapel. He doesn’t sit at counsel table; he sits two rows back like a guest who has wandered in and may bless the proceedings with his presence, or not. His attorney owns the front table: a man whose smile keeps time, up, down, up, down, each return stroke exactly the same, a metronome someone forgot to move out of the shot.
The chair opens with procedure. “Ms. Vale, your petition asks for temporary injunctive relief against the use of ‘curated recall guidance’ and ‘comfort injection’ in relation to your brother, a program participant scheduled to appear on HaloStage’s forthcoming special.” She looks at me over the rim of her glasses, gentle like a storm with good bedside manner. “You assert potential harm.”
“I assert active harm,” I say, and I set the little speaker on the evidence table. “Ten seconds. Then you can decide whether it’s harm or theater.”
The attorney’s smile flicks—tick—then resets. “Objection to playing any alleged recording outside a proper chain—”
“I brought the chain,” I interrupt. “Metadata, room-tone fingerprint, synchronized after-hours logs. But for now, you asked for my basis. This is my basis.”
The chair nods at the clerk, who nods at me, the choreography of permission flattening spontaneity. I set the clip to start at the cleanest edge and breathe through my stomach so the tremor lives lower than my throat.
The chimes arrive, glassy and precise—Lab 7’s interval that teaches bodies to agree. Then Gray’s coaching cadence slides out of the tiny speaker: “Good, Leo. Mark that. Comfort injection in three…two…there.”
I don’t look at Gray. I look at the chair. Her eyes lower to her pad in a movement so small it registers as a draft rather than a decision. The second panelist coughs into a fist. The third checks a screen that may or may not be related to my life.
“Stop there,” the chair says, soft. I stop there.
Gray’s attorney stands with a sigh he’s probably practiced for sympathetic effect. “Counsel insists that what we just heard—if the Court insists we heard anything at all—falls under therapeutic discretion in a clinical adjunct to an entertainment product. The participant consented.”
“The participant is my brother,” I say. “The participant has been conditioned to consent to conditioning.”
“So we’re in the realm of metaphor,” he says, and smiles, up, down, up.
“We’re in the realm of audio,” I say. “And timing. And harm.”
The chair folds her hands slowly, a motion like a drawbridge. “Ms. Vale, this tribunal is charged with balancing privacy, public interest, and therapeutic discretion. We understand your urgency. We understand the show’s timelines.” She turns her head toward Gray’s row for exactly one breath, then back to me for two. “We will take your petition under advisement.”
“Today,” I say. “We have nine days. Maybe eight, if your elevators are telling the truth.”
“We will issue a preliminary ruling by the end of next week.”
The words land with the quiet thud of a soft hammer closing a velvet-lined case. Next week is after the special. They’ve scheduled the remedy to match ratings.
I try to keep my hands still on the table; my knuckles drag like magnets toward metal. “So you’re postponing safety until after the dangerous thing.”
The chair’s voice warms like a towel. “We don’t accept your framing.”
“The machine accepts it,” I say. “It accepted it in my mother’s hospital. It accepted it under your studio halo when you declared me clean. It accepted it last night when Gray told my brother to mark comfort like a boy learning to beg in good posture.”
The attorney rises again, smile ticking. “We caution Ms. Vale to avoid defamatory turns.”
“Pattern Concordance, Not Truth,” I say, and watch the phrasing—our careful anchor—crack the smallest fissure in his timing.
He closes it at once. “We move to seal this proceeding until the Court reviews sensitive medical materials.”
The chair nods. “Granted. The recording is to remain sealed pending review.” She looks at me, and with the same warm, antiseptic tone says, “Thank you for your civic participation.”
My mouth laughs without humor. “Do you want the rest of the chain for your review, or should I file it with a memory hole?”
“File it with the clerk,” she says, and lifts her gavel like a prop. “We’ll reconvene as necessary.”
Gray’s attorney gives me the metronome smile as he packs his folio. “You’re very brave,” he tells me, and each word fits the beat precisely.
“You’re very practiced,” I reply.
He dips his head, not denying the compliment.
Behind him, Gray rises. He doesn’t speak to me; he speaks to the air, projecting warmth toward the room like a scent. “We care about Leo,” he announces to no one and everyone. “We care about the Vale family’s healing.” Then he leaves a fraction too slow, as if the cameras we’re not allowed to have are trying to catch his good side.
Micro-hook: On the table, the halo icon embossed on my filing receipt catches light and throws two tiny rings on my wrist, like a brand rehearsing itself.
In the hallway, the building breathes me out, and the city breathes me in. The doors open to steps slick with fog and the sugar heat of fried dough, the outside economy of attention waiting for leftovers. On the plaza, families recite reputation scores like weather reports—“Auntie recovered one after the charity post”—and a teenager mutters the code word for a green scan: “Clear day,” as if he needs the sky to behave.
Jonas slides next to me like he lives in the negative space of crowds. He’s wearing an expression I don’t know how to catalog: tight hope with an exit strategy sewn in. “You got your ten seconds in,” he says.
“I got a lullaby,” I say. “They called it discretion.”
He lifts a manila folder with two fingers, fearless or faking it. “I printed the petition and your chain appendix. Open Vector meets two blocks over, behind the civic mural that pretends we all get the same bleachers. Their editor’s on lunch. I can slip a copy while pretending to buy kettle corn.”
“Slip it,” I say. “But pretend better than that.” I hand him a secondary thumb drive, a twin to the one in my bra under my left collarbone where the straps meet the skin that still remembers linen and thunder. “This is the one with the stems separated. If someone wants to run their own room-tone map, give them my guide.”
He pockets it, then taps my elbow once, our quiet you made it ritual. “We’ll scorch the earth politely.”
“We’ll irrigate it with cold water and careful words,” I say, and I watch him disappear into a line for hot sugar that christens everyone with the same glitter of caramelized approval. The smell punches memory buttons I didn’t authorize; for a second I hear my mother humming over a thrift-store box of chipped mugs, and then Gray’s good, Leo tramples it with expensive shoes.
My phone buzzes. A message from the clerk: Your petition has been sealed pending review. No timeline. No judge’s initials. Just the halo watermark, clean as a conscience for sale.
Sera calls before I can put the phone away. “How did it go?” she asks. Her voice is hoarse from a night of not believing sleep was an option.
“Performative,” I say. “Muted at ten seconds, sealed by twelve, postponed to after the special.”
She breathes once, hard. “So the machine gets the first bite.”
“Unless we feed it our own menu,” I say. “Jonas is handing the packet to Open Vector now. If they run with it, the tribunal has to watch the comments section become case law.”
She doesn’t laugh. Neither do I. We don’t have time for delight.
Gray’s attorney exits the doors with the satisfied speed of a man whose calendar clicks like a metronome. He passes close enough that I could count the pores the studio air keeps kind to him. “Ms. Vale,” he says, and my name snaps to his rhythm. “We remain available to discuss an off-ramp. Therapy options that won’t—how did you put it on broadcast?—erase you.”
“Therapy that doesn’t inject comfort on a countdown,” I say. “Pass.”
He ticks once more and glides away, unwrinkled by friction.
The blimp above us reroutes again, slow-motion punctuation in a sky the fog keeps erasing and rewriting. Over the wind tunnel at the marina, a drone hiccups, blind to its own course. The city keeps count with the halo rings stamped on everything—receipts, contracts, hospital wristbands—as if purity can be franchised.
I sit on the courthouse steps with my back to the door so the building can’t pose me for a victory I don’t get. I pull up the clip and listen to the ten seconds again in the open air, letting salt and sugar and disinfectant share the space with the chimes. I close my eyes on there and open them on a plan.
“I’m going back in,” I tell the fog and the plaza and my bones. “Not to the hearing. To the audience.” I text the anchor: tribunal punted. can we do follow-up with sealed-audio reenactment—pattern concordance, not truth—+ watchdog analysis? Three dots blink a long time, then: Come at six.
Jonas returns with powdered sugar like snow on his knuckles and a small, feral grin he uses when a door opens nobody expected. “Vector took it,” he says. “They asked for a quote.”
“Give them ‘Pattern Concordance, Not Truth’ and ‘therapeutic discretion is not a shield for live narrative manipulation,’” I say. “No adjectives they can pin to a tone.”
He nods and thumbs the message off. “We can also leak the tribunal’s timetable—‘after the special’—without the file.”
“Leak the clock,” I say. “Make time the scandal.” I rise, wipe hot sugar from the step, and watch it dissolve in fog-wet like nothing ever sticks unless you plate it. “Question,” I add, because questions are architecture when institutions are air. “If I play ten seconds on the six o’clock, reenacted by my mouth and your spectrograms and a screen that says Pattern Concordance, Not Truth, will they move Leo—or will the audience hear the seam?”
Jonas doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The metronome smile is gone from the plaza; its owner is already halfway down the block, counting steps to his next venue. The chair’s velvet gavel knock echoes faintly through the glass behind me, a lullaby for a system that only wakes when the ratings call.
I pocket the pen—a twin now, a decoy—and point my feet toward the Strand, toward the anchor, toward a camera that isn’t mine and a broadcast that will never be kind. The official door closes gently at my back, precise and uninvolved. Ahead, the city’s wind tunnel pipes a note I recognize from the lockers, a cracked flute telling me the air can be made to sing if I find the right seam to blow through.
I ask the fog one more quiet thing, because it listens without trying to own the answer: When I lift my ten seconds onto the six o’clock and say Pattern Concordance, Not Truth, will the chair’s seal crack on its own—or do I need to put the sound where even the metronomes miss a beat?