The pivot board’s heartbeat stops.
My meters go quiet in the way that is louder than sound. The compassion band that’s been pressing on Leo’s breath like a thumb simply disappears, a hole cut from the spectrum. I feel the cut in my gums, metallic, like biting a coin.
“Board flatline,” I breathe into my mic, quick and low. “You’re seeing what I’m seeing.”
A bird-tone alarm chirps in Studio B—one, two, three ascending pips—then repeats with the tired insistence of a smoke detector you meant to fix. The halo stalls mid-gleam, light diffused, no red, no white, only a cold indecision. The host’s smile hangs without power. Gray’s head tilts three degrees. I recognize the angle from depositions: hunter hearing foliage move.
“Stay with their hands,” I tell my feed, and I keep Sera and Leo framed, fingers knit, linen-lapped breaths moving at their pace, not the machine’s.
Gray raises his palm, priestly, to calm. He doesn’t look calm. “Brief calibration,” he says to the room, voice threaded with velvet and current. “We’ll take a restorative pause.”
The floor LED strips hiccup and—like a swallowed gag—the screens behind him snap to black.
Then the first ad hits.
AUTHORIZED BENEVOLENCE™
The letters are so glossy they squeak against the eye. A wristband spins through a sunbeam; the double-ring halo icon kisses a contract margin; a hand signs; a family hugs in powder-blue light. A tagline rolls like a lullaby: “When healing must be guided.”
“You’re seeing sponsor content,” I say, heartbeat steady because I know my quaver would be his proof I’m hysterical. “This is not a break. This is the board routing to loop assets.”
Alarm chirps. Ad again. Alarm chirps. Ad again. The loop is too tight, like a cheap necklace catching hair.
Gray’s jaw flexes. He leans just far enough toward the offstage rail that I can read the command in his shoulder. “Cut. Now,” he hisses. The house tries; cables think about obeying; nothing obeys.
The ad pivots to a clause I photographed weeks ago. Tiny print blooms into a page. The phrase I hated most rotates center:
“authorized benevolence”
“There,” I say, and I drop my overlay beside it: the settlement excerpt Jonas and I pulled, the clause highlighted, the dates aligned to Gray’s shell. “This is your doctrine, Dr. Gray.”
I let his name stick to the feed like salt on lips. The bay below my roof coughs fog up the blocks, a damp that tastes like iron filings and fried dough. The news blimps that had been haloing the studio reroute in the wind tunnel; one wobbles, lights blinking a nervous Morse, then glides away to safer air.
“We apologize for this interruption,” Gray tells the camera, performing a smile that aims to bind the room. “Tonight is a celebration of courage.”
“Tonight is a sales pitch,” I answer the city. I dip the mix so his phrase lands and mine lands after, call-and-response that teaches ears to weigh cadence.
Alarm. Ad. Alarm. Ad. The loop begins to parody itself. The words BENE-VO-LENCE bounce like a nursery rhyme and then fail to soothe because repetition is a form of truth-telling too.
A woman in Row C says, not softly, “Stop showing me the contract.” A man in Row A laughs with the bare teeth of embarrassment. A teenager in the cheap seats says, “Are we in an ad right now?” and others shush him as if shushing could rewind.
“Stay with me,” I tell my viewers, as much to keep my hands from shaking. “Watch how the disclaimer timing hits their lines.”
I roll back three seconds. The ad’s indemnity screen wipes in mid-word—heal—cut—we reserve the right—and the disclaimer spills down the lower third like a hotel shower, too much, too fast, impossible to hold.
The studio smells of citrus and ozone when alarms start; I know that scent profile; I logged it. Up here the city smells like hot sugar from the Strand’s closing hour, sweetness fighting salt, sweetness losing. Elevator screens in my building whisper in the shaft: “Live Event: HALOSTAGE SPECIAL — Technical Pause” in voix-off friendly, the halo icon tucked like a sticker in the corner.
“You all right?” Jonas pings in my ear from downstairs, not on the record, just the small net between us.
“I’m with them,” I say. “Don’t add anything. Let the board confess.”
Gray lifts his eyes to the ceiling rig as if light might suddenly decide to love him again. “This brief interruption is—”
The ad interrupts him. A nurse in fresh blues smiles like she has been told to smile or she will lose her shift. A contract glides across a glass table. A whispered line purls over the image: “Consent, curated for your peace.”
The audience murmurs. Then the murmurs carry consonants. The consonants collect meaning. “Consent?” someone says, incredulous. “Curated?” someone else repeats, and the repetition feels like ridicule, an old, sharp tool.
Alarm. Ad. Alarm. Ad.
“Rowan,” I breathe, not into the mic, into the linen, into my own mouth. “You did it.”
I picture the bunker of Lab 7. White on white. Badges that chirp like dutiful birds. A workstation that never sees sun. Rowan’s thumbs hovering, then pressing the sequence only someone with a key could press. I think of the text they sent: I’ll unlock Pivot Board if Leo is safe. I think of how safety is a verb, not a state, and I try to honor the verb by not shouting their name aloud.
“We’ll return in a moment,” Gray insists, but the ad does not belong to him now. The ad pivots to testimonials. A woman with perfect pores says, “I used to argue with my sister. Now I can heal properly.” The caption beneath registers as a receipt—there’s the double-ring halo next to a QR hash and a microprint line about data rights. Sponsor fingerprints everywhere, suddenly fluorescent.
“Zoom,” I tell the encoder, and I let my viewers read what nobody ever zooms: Data rights retained by sponsor unless contestation filed with tribunal within 72 hours. I pin the clause against the Edit Bible page “Sibling Pivot: Monster Frame.” I stack the stack until the weight is undeniable.
“This is not therapy,” I say, careful not to spit. “This is inventory control.”
Gray turns his head, a smooth pivot that avoids admitting desperation. His eyes rake the audience for the saboteur he needs to name. He is good at naming. He collects names like gold coins. His mouth forms a word he won’t risk saying on mic: find.
The alarm dies.
For a moment the room is naked.
Then the ad restarts, but jagged now, a torn tape. AUTHORIZED BEN—VOL— …lence… —lov— …pe… The sponsorship bed cracks, and the sound underneath—the room’s sound—rushes through. Chair squeaks. Foot scrapes. Breath.
Someone starts to clap, the way people clap when a plane lands hard and doesn’t explode. Another person shouts “Scam!” too loudly for comfort but perfectly for truth. Gray puts his hands up, not surrender, containment. He begins to talk with a surgeon’s concentration.
“We value transparency—”
“Then leave the loop,” I say, and a pocket of audience repeats me without knowing they have; the word loop emerges as its own indictment. Phones lift like flowers toward light; the disallowed filming spreads from edges to aisles despite ushers’ hands.
The bay fog thickens along the marina wind tunnel and blinds the drones; I can hear their propwash change as guidance blips and recalibrates. Blimps peel off, rerouting toward calmer air with sponsor flags half-furled, gossip stalls flickering mid-scroll like old billboards in rain.
“Ma’am,” a floor manager says to someone near the steps the cameras can’t quite catch, “phones away,” and the someone answers, “No,” with quiet that cuts.
A boo begins.
It begins like a cough, then remembers itself. The pitch catches and gathers bodies, a weather system in a room. You can boo a play. You can boo a lie. This boo holds both. It’s not yet rage; it’s a refusal to be lulled. It moves like tide.
Gray doesn’t flinch at the sound; he has lived in noise long enough to stop hearing it. He keeps talking low to the host, eyes never leaving the halo, fingers spelling commands in the air. “Reboot compassion. Kill ad bus. Find ingress.” The host nods the way a subordinate nods in a storm—because nodding is the only thing still his.
“Don’t touch the knob,” I warn myself. The urge to spike the proof—to lace in more overlays, more screenshots, a sizzle reel of every clause—rises like an old addiction. But I remember the question I asked minutes ago: proof you can screenshot, or words you can say with your own mouth. The room has mouths now. I can hear them.
“I’m leaving the ad up,” I tell my feed. “I’m leaving them to hear what the market calls care.”
A wave of booing breaks against the stage. It’s not unanimous. Some people still clap on off-beats, desperate to keep the show polite. Families trade glances like weather reports. I read their lips: red? clear? Code words, tiny, exchanged like contraband. I read another mouth: linen—and my throat closes, not with grief, with charge.
“This outage will be resolved shortly,” Gray announces into cameras that are now less camera than witness. “Thank you for your—”
“Who paid for this?” someone calls. It lands like a thrown fork on tile.
Gray’s eyes narrow one stop. “Generous partners,” he says, and the ad answers him with its endless double ring, halo stamped on a hospital wristband, a checkout receipt, a contract’s corner.
“Generous partners,” I repeat, but I put the wetted edge on it. “Shall we list them?”
I do not list them all. I list two: the clinic affiliate on the settlement, the brand that bought primetime cuddles in Episode Twelve. I keep the names short, the evidence long. I drop the tribunal docket number; I drop the QR hash the ad itself just showed. I anchor it with dates that can be checked because the only antidote to their curated remembering is the kind you can verify without a priest.
Booing grows, the rare kind that unites strangers. The Strand’s edge-recorders text captions into threads; the etiquette against filming at communal tables dissolves as if it were salt. Elevator screens in nearby towers switch from news-bites to sponsor disclaimers, whispering compliance in the vertical dark; the whispers make the boos sound warmer, more human.
“Find the ingress,” Gray repeats to someone I can’t see. He wants a saboteur, a traitor, one throat to close so he can say this was chaos born of malice and not a system telling on itself. He is very good at finding throats.
I decide to give him mine.
“If you’re looking for blame,” I tell the world, voice steady like a metronome I never learned to fear, “blame me. I asked for the loop to stay. I asked for the page to breathe. I asked the room to listen.” I am not lying. I am simply standing between Gray and the person inside his system who just risked everything.
A stagehand tries the ad bus again; the feed stutters to a blank slate labeled INSERT 14 with a stock-field gray that looks like fog trapped in glass. Then the ad claws back, glitchier, as if embarrassed to be seen too long.
“Here come the disclaimers,” I warn, and they do, serifed, officious, useless. Healing outcomes are not guaranteed. Data may be used in aggregate. Participation implies consent to framed recall guidance.
Participation implies consent.
The boos turn to words. “We did not consent!” a chorus from scattered rows. “We bought tickets!” another voice, furious and young. “We brought our kids!” a parent, voice whistling through teeth.
Gray’s smile crystallizes. He is listening again—not to the crowd, to legal. He pivots to the safest phrase he owns. “We’re committed to ethical standards,” he begins.
“Standards like this?” I cut in, dropping a still of the Edit Bible’s pivot map over his shoulder. I keep it up only two beats, enough for recognition, not long enough to numb. I remove it before it eats Sera’s mouth.
The boo-roar rolls then breaks into hisses and shouts. Security hesitates, not wanting to be on camera doing the thing security often does. The studio’s air changes temperature again; the citrus is overwhelmed by the human smell—the wool of jackets heated under LEDs, the salty damp of mouths that have been silent too long.
I taste hot sugar like hope.
“You’ve made your point,” Gray says to the room—dangerous, patronizing, terrified. He wants the pity frame back. He wants to call this a tantrum we will all be embarrassed about in the morning.
The ad shoves the word benevolence in his face.
I let it. I let the ad become absurd. I do not rescue the show with a clean cut. I do not polish the counterstream to look like the truth they expect.
“Strategic pause,” I whisper to the linen. “Stay unpretty. Stay true.”
I lay in one more graphic, not screaming—quiet, corner: SPONSOR FINGERPRINTS DETECTED with a pulsing ring that matches the ad’s double-halo and bleeds into it until their icon becomes our warning.
Gray scans the audience again, the cheap seats, the edges where staff watch with their own phones hidden in their sleeves. He looks up to the grid, where a tech could be. He looks to the booth. He looks everywhere but toward Sera and Leo’s joined hands. He cannot afford to look there. That would be to admit that meaning is happening without him.
“We’re going to transition,” he says, eyes still hunting. “Let’s bring in the equipment that helps people tell the truth.”
My skin goes cold, roof wind slicing through sweat. I know what equipment he means. The chair. The mesh. The euphemism catalog that calls compulsion comfort.
“Jonas,” I murmur down the line, even though he isn’t on this chapter of my life according to any official rundown. “Stand by on the chair interface.”
Gray tips his chin, small nod only the booth should see. The alarm system hushes for real. The ad hiccups to black, then leaves behind a watermark of its halo on every surface like afterimage.
The boos don’t stop. They thicken.
I breathe through cotton, through the scratch of memory that refuses to smooth out, and I ask the night the next right question: how do I hold Rowan’s invisibility while I drag Gray’s machinery into light?
I lower my overlays and center the frame on the spot where the chair will roll. My finger hovers over the switch that will publish its interface the moment a wheel touches stage.
“Come on then,” I tell the machine that erases and the city that sells forgetting. “Show me your care.”