June’s van breathed like a sleeping animal, inverter fans clicking, solder flux tang perfuming the iodine wind leaking through the cracked side door. I rubbed the cut on my shoulder against the canvas of my jacket until the sting reminded me I was not a ghost. Algae-lit glass on the Vance Spire painted a distant bruise against the low cloud, and the hurricane barrier’s arches hunched over us like ribs. Blind zones above, blind faith below. I set my elbows on the workbench and braced for grief with good posture.
“I can stitch it,” June said, hair pulled into a blunt knot that made her look like a surgeon about to work without witnesses. “But you can’t breathe at it or it’ll fall apart.”
“I’ll hold my breath,” I said, which worked for diving and for love. I pretended it worked for loss.
She tilted the second monitor toward me, a field of error logs marching like ants. “They scrubbed the session header,” she said. “Lucky for us, their compliance daemon chattered while it did it. Error reporting with timestamp jitter—classic intern patch. I can rebuild the missing lines from the whining.”
“Do it.” My palms were dry but my tongue tasted metal. The tide clock in the marina, I knew, would read three minutes fast, doing its best impression of control. We were always exactly on time for pain.
She tapped keys with a drummer’s economy, and the black rawness of terminal output gave way to a pulsing waveform and the fragile lace of a transcript. I squeezed the recorder in my pocket—a simple thing, not smart enough to inform on me—and told myself I’d press the red button only when the words earned the cost.
“Ready?” June asked.
“I’m not, but yes.”
She hit play. The van’s speakers coughed, then framed my sister’s voice in a corridor of static.
“—hey, calibration day. Who brought cake?” Lila joked, bright and crooked with the humor she used to skate across thin ice. “Do we get candles or just the standard incense of overheated silicon?”
Sorrow crawled up my spine like cold water and stopped between my shoulder blades. I put a knuckle there and pushed until the feeling had somewhere to go.
A male voice answered, muffled by proximity to a shirt collar mic. “Ha. You’re the candle, Quill. Stand near the sensor and burn little bits of yourself off. Kidding.”
June glanced at me and gave the tiniest shake of her head, the medic’s look that says I’m here but you still have to live through it. The waveform stuttered.
“Okay, again,” Lila said, lighter now, the way she’d smooth a nurse’s worry. “I teach the machine to lie, it teaches me to keep a straight face. Teamwork.”
The tech laughed. It wasn’t amusement; it was spackle. He smothered a crack and hoped no one noticed. The laugh reached for the ceiling and didn’t find it.
I pressed my thumb into the recorder’s red button and held it until the plastic warmed. “Teaching the machine to lie,” I said softly, letting the device drink the phrase. “For later.”
Micro-hook 1
June scrubbed back three seconds and froze a single line: [calib: feature_friction > threshold]. Her lips went thin. “There it is,” she said. “Predictive compliance. Feature set includes friction.”
“Moral friction,” I said, watching the words like they could bruise me from the screen. “They’re measuring the part of a person that won’t go along.”
Lila again, a little breathless, the sound of her shifting closer to hardware. “You want me to… raise baseline empathy response while I review the consent screens?”
The tech coughed. “It’s just a test, Quill. HR loves a compliance angle. We’re seeing if we can predict who—uh, who might bounce off the protocol.”
“Predictive compliance,” Lila repeated. “Cute. Like weather, but for conscience.”
I could see her smile in my head, the one she wore like armor—teeth and humor and the dare: say it’s fine to my face. My hand flattened on the bench to stop a tremor. We had a childhood word for that smile. We called it the anchor.
The transcript hiccupped where a chunk had been stripped. June breathed through her nose and slid a slider. Letters reappeared one by one, italicized by the system to warn us they were a best guess born from error-timestamp inference and checksum consensus.
“Look,” June said, tapping the screen, nail clicking. “They didn’t just test her. They annotated her.”
The reconstructed line blinked into coherence: [note: subject displays friction when exposed to adverse_event narrative + NDA clause coupling].
My throat tightened the way it does right before you lift a too-heavy thing anyway. “She knew,” I said. “She made a joke because she knew.”
“Keep listening,” June said.
Lila again: “If I teach it to lie today, will it lie for the right people tomorrow? Asking for a friend. Named Everyone.”
The tech’s laugh came sharp and wrong. “Don’t get poetic, Quill. Just eyes on the lines. Pulse here.”
June punched up a second pane—numbers throbbing in a half-second rhythm. “They tied a biometric proxy to the interface. Pupillometry, probably galvanics too. They’re looking for resistance, then they’ll design around it.”
“Or design against it,” I said. “If it can predict the whistle, it can pre-empt the whistler.”
The van rocked as a truck rolled past above us on the seawall road. Drone rotors muttered like summer insects with expensive NDAs. I smelled cheap coffee from June’s battered mug and wished it were something that could change a thing other than temperature.
The transcript rolled on. Lila’s voice softened. “Define orchard payouts,” she said. “Do I get fruit or cash when my conscience ripens?”
The tech didn’t laugh this time. He lowered his voice and pinned it with a stapler’s weight. “Don’t put jargon in the log.”
“Oops,” Lila said, and I heard the smile again—guarded now, the anchor with the rope fraying. “You just did.”
June’s eyebrows climbed, then leveled into something predatory. She scrolled back and forged a missing clause from the daemon’s complaints. A line emerged, ugly and clear: [ref: orchard_payouts schedule aligns w/ feature_friction flags + partner shell disbursals].
“Orchard,” I said, remembering the shell companies June had graphed like branches, each bearing fruit with a different tax treatment. “They pay when someone’s conscience ripens.”
June’s jaw worked. “They reward the handlers who prune the branches. Or they buy silence from families when the fruit falls off the tree.”
“Both,” I said. The word scratched. “They do both.”
I hit record again and spoke cleanly, like reading a spell. “Orchard payouts. Predictive compliance. Feature friction.” I let the device blink, then slid it into my breast pocket where body heat makes memory stick.
Micro-hook 2
June kept reconstructing lines like a jeweler setting stones—tweezers, loupe, reverent swearing. I held the van steady by not moving. The seawall arches outside hid us from municipal cameras, the only honest favor the city ever did for people like me. A gull screamed from the park rail, furious it had missed the pastry tide, and the sound squeaked the air between my ears.
Lila again, lightly: “So if I ace compliance by frowning in the right places, do I get a gold star or do I get invited to the resilience festival to wave at the cameras?”
The tech said, “You get lunch,” with a smile I could hear—office-boy benevolence. “And a badge that opens the good hallways.”
“I like hallways,” Lila said. “They tell you what a place is afraid of.”
I put my fist to my mouth and let my teeth crease the skin above the knuckle. Admiration took the lead lane inside me and grief drafted behind it. She wasn’t not afraid; she was never not brave.
June pointed to a sudden spike in the waveform. “There,” she said. “That’s not Lila.”
The tech again, but not to Lila—maybe to someone over his shoulder. The reconstruction gave me every third word: “—flags—moral friction—pull—team—Sable wants—quiet—before they—orchard.”
“Sable wants the quiet,” I whispered. “Predict, prevent, pay.” My fingers walked up and down the edge of the bench because motion kept me from swinging at air.
“Listen,” June said, and I did.
Lila, almost gentle: “Machines don’t lie, we do. But machines can be trained to prefer certain truths. That’s just… gardening.”
The tech’s laugh failed. In the space it left, I heard a door hiss—the specific gasketed breath I’d chased through too many buildings. I filed the sound for later; doors have signatures, and signatures open cases.
June rolled the final seconds. Lila again: “Tell Dr. Kincaid I’ll bring my halo if she’ll bring her saw. Compromise.”
“Calibration complete,” an automated voice said. The log ended with a checksum error that made my teeth grind.
We sat in the fan hum a long half-minute. I smelled solder and brackish air, heard the distant tick of the barrier lights switching to a lower cycle, felt the van’s ribbed rubber mat imprint my palms.
“She knew,” I said finally, and the words steadied me. “She stood at the edge of a machine trained to find people like her and she gave it a nickname so she could hold it in her mouth without choking.”
June turned the monitor away from me, a mercy. “She also left us a leak-proof trail,” she said. “The daemon whined. The error logs tattled. The orchard line is going to hurt someone in accounting.”
“Good,” I said. “I want them to bruise when they sit.”
Micro-hook 3
June pulled up a network map and sketched the route with a fingertip. “Orchard payouts cross the harbor twice before they flower,” she said. “Shells at the old cannery address, then a consulting firm with one employee who owes his house to Vance’s foundation. It’s pretty.”
“Pretty things stab best,” I said. “We’ll need proof that the ‘fruit’ is people.”
“Or their families,” she said. “Remember the clinic. Night migraines. Memory gaps. Imagine getting a stipend to stop asking the wrong questions.”
My skin went cold under the jacket. “Lila’s journal talks about losing hours,” I said. “She wrote the dates like anchors. The clinic nurse’s list of dates matches the bad spikes in this shard.” I touched the screen where June had flagged them. “They didn’t just profile moral friction. They sanded it down.”
June leaned back until her shoulders hit the van wall and closed her eyes. “Predictive models that flag conscience. Profiles that anticipate whistleblowing. A payment lattice for pruning.” She opened her eyes and pinned me with them. “If we move too loud, they’ll scuttle the barge.”
“Then we move like a tide under ice,” I said. “Quiet, cold, insisting.”
I pulled out my tiny recorder again and spoke for future rooms where power pretends not to hear plain speech. “This is Mara Quill,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Key phrases for leverage: ‘orchard payouts,’ ‘predictive compliance,’ ‘feature friction,’ ‘moral friction,’ ‘calibration day,’ ‘teach the machine to lie.’ Associate with Dr. Sable Kincaid, Vance BioLogix infrastructure, barge intake under stern. Cross-reference clinic dates.” I clicked it off and let my thumb rest on the button like a seal.
The van ticked, that small heat-cool noise that means machinery is releasing stress. I envied it the simplicity. Outside, the arches kept their promise of blindness, and a couple drifted past on the seawall path, hand in hand, their breath white in the damp. Harbor Eleven loves resilience, I thought, as long as it can stage it with lanterns and music and the right sponsors.
June tapped the screen again, softer this time. “I admired her,” she said, not looking at me. “Before she vanished. For asking questions that made the room smarter.”
I nodded because my throat had decided to be a lock. I admired her too, and I wanted a world that didn’t punish that feeling with missing.
“Next step?” June asked.
“Two,” I said. “We bottle this shard and salt it where fire can’t find it. And we press orchard until fruit falls with names attached.”
June smiled without teeth. “I’ll start a dead-drop under the arches. Old festival lantern housing—we can piggyback the power.”
“Do it,” I said. “And prep a question for the concierge. I want to see her face when I say orchard casually, like I’m asking about the weather.”
June began encrypting, fingers a small storm over keys. I cleaned the space around me—the only ritual I trust—coiling a cable, squaring the tools, wiping a thumbprint I shouldn’t have left. I opened the van door a little wider and let the iodine wind rake my lungs. Drones thrummed like cicadas counting down the season. The tide clock smirked at its lie.
I slid the recorder into the inner pocket I reserve for truths that could get me killed and felt it settle like a second heart. Purpose sharpened behind my sternum until it drew blood from fear and made it useful.
“One question,” I said to June and the wind and the ribs of the city above us. “Who funds the orchard—and how many names are ripening there right now while we plan which branch to cut first?”