I arrive early because waiting in public feels safer than pacing at home. The tribunal lobby smells like disinfectant over hot sugar from the food hall kiosk downstairs, which breaks the rule about not filming at communal tables by streaming reactions from the edges. I pass a stack of receipts under plex, each stamped with the twin-ring halo icon like a smirk. Outside the glass, the bay coughs fog through the wind tunnel, and the drones hovering over the plaza blink, hesitate, and reroute toward the marina. The elevator doors breathe open and whisper a looped headline between floors: “Hearing Reopened—Uploads Accepted—Secure Channel.”
“Guard your breath,” I tell myself, and I hold the linen note in my pocket the way a diver holds a rope.
My lawyer meets me at the checkpoint with eyes that have memorized every bad clause I’ve ever signed. “We present clean and surgical,” I say.
“We present receipts,” she answers, and she taps the folder marked EXHIBITS in black pen. “Edit Bible first, then implant logs.”
In the chamber I sit behind her, the way I sat behind glass in the studio, except here the lights are humane and the seats are not tuned for crowd shots. Three members form the tribunal, the chair at center with a face like a winter shoreline—erosion and patience together. An aide pours water; the glass sweats; the microphone hums gently with room tone I could identify from a mile away.
The clerk calls the docket. I don’t rise when the network name is read; I already occupy the only posture I own—witness.
My lawyer stands. “I rely on Exhibits 12 through 18,” she says, and her voice doesn’t tremble. “The document colloquially known as the ‘Edit Bible,’ authenticated last night on a public stream, and the live implant logs we captured, which corroborate timed ‘comfort injections’ during interviews.”
I watch the screen split into side-by-sides as ordered: logo pages that morph toward the halo, and a cascading list of timecodes that cleave the night into instrumentality. “We’ve all read press,” the chair says, “but press is not proof.”
“Agreed,” my lawyer says. “So I’ll play you proof.” She cues the segment where Sera says the three storm words and Leo’s breath steadies; the implant log spikes on a separate channel two seconds later, annotated COMFORT: EMPATHY CHIME.
Gray’s attorney leans forward with a predator’s smile. I count my breath: one, two, three. “You’re inferring causation from correlation,” he says. “Ambient soundscapes—”
“Ambient soundscapes don’t map to cranial mesh output,” my lawyer replies before he can finish. “The Edit Bible uses the phrase ‘curated recall guidance’ to describe how staff steer speech. The logs demonstrate guidance deployed to influence live outcomes.”
The chair shifts a stack of sealed envelopes stamped with the halo watermark. “Counsel,” she says to me without looking, “did you undergo similar guidance?”
“Yes,” I answer, because I refuse to put apology inside my answer. “The ambient track matched a clinic file labeled ‘comfort.’ My segment’s room tone and the sponsor’s ad shared the same palette. I documented the modulation.”
“Unverified allegations,” Gray’s attorney says, softer now, aiming for reasonable.
I swallow the taste of lemon cleanser and hot sugar on the back of my tongue. I keep my hands flat against my knees so I don’t drum patterns that could be read as nerves. “I can play you the bed,” I say, because the only way through this machine is sometimes to feed it evidence until it chokes. “But that’s not what you’re deciding today.”
“What are we deciding today?” the chair asks.
“Whether consent covers being moved like furniture during a live event,” I say. My voice surprises me with its calm. “Whether ‘curated recall guidance’ belongs inside informed consent when it’s engineered to push outcomes for ratings.”
My lawyer nods almost imperceptibly and lifts the deposition fragment that named the pipeline from the overseas scandal to the studio. “The same shell companies, the same euphemisms, the same outcome triggers,” she says. “The only difference is the set dressing.”
The clerk scrolls the implant log again. The timecodes tick like a metronome I refuse to dance to. I watch the chair’s pen make a tiny circle beside the word guidance, then slash it and write manipulation in patient handwriting. The room tone changes by half a decibel; people do that when they decide to move.
“We’ll take a recess,” the chair says.
In the corridor, families cluster under the skylight trading reputation scores like weather—green until review, amber due to proximity, red pending—each code a cipher for dinner arguments I know too well. Someone recognizes me and nods, then obeys the food hall etiquette by turning their camera away from the communal bench where two strangers hold hands. I breathe fog from the door crack and the salt stings pleasantly. Jonas texts a single word—listening—and I close my eyes long enough to feel my mother’s linen scratch under my fingers.
We go back in before the drones find their nerve. The chair’s voice has that predecision gravity. “On the record,” she says, and I stiffen because I have worn too many verdicts, “the tribunal deems ‘curated recall guidance’ outside informed consent when used to influence live outcomes.”
The sentence hangs in the air like a bell whose note carries beyond the room. I hear a muffled whoop from the hallway, the kind of sound people make when relief outruns decorum. The chair continues, eyes on me like I am both subject and witness. “We issue a data release order: subjects shall have access to their raw neural scans, including preprocessed patterns, timestamps, and any associated ambient control tracks.”
I grip the edge of my seat, and my heart does the math faster than my head. Leo gets his data. Sera gets hers. I get mine. ShoreWitness can come in from the anonymous edge if they want—we can hash and compare. The elevator down the hall whispers a new headline: “ORDER: RAW SCANS TO SUBJECTS.”
Gray’s attorney stands so quickly his chair snags the carpet. “We appeal,” he says. “Immediate stay. These materials are proprietary and releasing them risks misuse.”
My lawyer doesn’t look at him. She looks at the chair. “Subjects cannot misuse their own bodies,” she says. “That argument is theater.”
“We appeal,” he repeats, louder, trying to put volume where he has no ground. “On constitutional and contractual grounds.”
The chair confers with the two flanking members. One shakes her head once, like swatting a fly of habit. “Denied,” the chair says. “Your appeal is noted and denied. Any stay would cause ongoing harm to subjects, and we will not freeze relief to protect format.”
Relief lands in me the way bay air lands—cleaner than I expected, heavier than I can immediately carry. I swallow twice so I don’t break in public. I was guarded walking in because I know how institutions wait out outrage; I am hopeful now because the order makes waiting expensive.
“We’ll need a timeline, Madam Chair,” my lawyer says, practical now that the shape is cut. “When must releases begin?”
“Forty-eight hours for inventory,” the chair says. “Rolling releases thereafter. Counsel for subjects may inspect logging mechanisms in situ.”
“We’ll need chain-of-custody protocols,” Gray’s attorney says, trying to look like he cares about procedure rather than delay.
“We’ll also need box lunches,” the clerk mutters, not into a microphone, and several of us who have been awake for two days let out the kind of laugh that redeems no one but keeps the ceiling up.
The chair bangs the smallest gavel I’ve ever seen, more ceremonial than forceful. “Order issues now,” she says. “We expect compliance. We will sanction bad faith.”
I exhale through my nose and smell citrus and coffee. I tuck the linen deeper in my pocket to keep my skin awake. The panel files out. For a moment the chamber is the quietest room in New Halcyon. No show, no score, no halo ring to bless a purchase. Just paper, glass, and people who could still choose to do the right thing.
In the atrium, the elevator screens repeat the ruling between floors; every time the doors sigh open, someone new reads and then breathes differently. On the plaza, news blimps circle, gossiping with their propellers about where to point now that the script has shifted. The fog lifts enough to reveal the bay throwing off a skin of light, and the drones that tried to watch us pivot and float away toward better stories.
“You did it,” a nurse tells me, and her badge displays a halo icon she can’t peel off because the hospital controls the template. “We did it,” I say, and I mean the staffers who loaded files into the portal at 3 a.m., the kids who screenshotted contracts, the teacher who redacted a name with black ink instead of highlight.
My lawyer touches my shoulder. “Don’t celebrate too loud,” she says. “He’ll try another forum. Or a friendlier judge.”
“I know,” I say. “I know the market sells forgetting as cure. And I know to be believed I still have to feed this machine the thing it tried to erase.”
“Then feed it careful,” she says. “And eat something.”
I pass the food hall on the way out and watch people honor the etiquette—no cameras at the big round tables where a family argues in code about whether to request their scans. The edges hum like a beehive, phones angled away from faces toward posted instructions someone printed from my guide and taped to a soda cooler: Breathe. Salt. Then file. I buy tea and stare at the receipt—the halo icon is faint, like it knows it’s losing jurisdiction. I tuck it with the tribunal order, which shines with a watermark of the city seal, not the show’s.
On the steps, a teenager calls out, “Miss Vale! Does this mean my cousin can get hers?”
“Yes,” I say, and I open my palm so she can see the order is not magic, just ink. “Yes. With a signature and patience.”
She nods like a soldier receiving a map. I start toward the marina because habit pulls me where the fog remembers. The wind coughs, and I cough back, and the relief in my lungs has room to expand without breaking anything important.
My phone buzzes. I expect handshakes in text form; instead I read a single new message from an unknown number: “release will include ‘ambient assets.’ check for omissions.” I stop at the rail and look at the water turned gray-green under the sky’s belly. I know what omissions mean in this city. I know how a file can be both full and missing its teeth.
“We have the order,” I say to the bay, to myself, to the linen ghost in my pocket. “We have forty-eight hours.”
I look back at the tribunal windows, where my reflection floats on glass beside the chair’s empty seat. I tuck the phone under my jaw like a microphone and speak into the morning: “Who here knows the shape of silence well enough to catch what they try to cut?”