The door unseals with the wounded wobble I memorized, and the room exhales on me like a patient who hates visitors. Machines hum in polite agreement with one another. Algae panels spill a soft green across steel, the color they market as calm at the Vance Spire, but it calms nothing in my blood. I step through, letting the tide’s lift under the hull turn into a thin sway I can ride without letting my boots gossip against the floor.
“Hello, choir,” I whisper to the racks. “Sing me the part you hid.”
The predictive compliance suite stands in two rows like pews—fat servers with breathy fans, a console bank with a temperamental monitor, and a wall screen looping a corporate mural: resilience festivals, smiling patients, the hurricane barrier doubling as a public park, kids racing scooters under arches that create blind CCTV zones and date-night spots for couples who sign NDAs with dessert. I catalog it with a fighter’s superstition: if I can name the lie, it can’t eat me.
My gloves squeak once when I touch the nearest rack. The sound is a pin dropping in a church. Cool air licks my wrists, dryer heat washes my shins, and ozone salts the back of my tongue. The room smells like chilled copper, disinfectant, and the lime of algae light—clean in a way that refuses to admit bodies ever fail.
“Timer,” I murmur. “On.”
The watch in my sleeve hisses back. My fourteen minutes of blind is a river that already spent seven. I slot a fiber into the workstation and wake the terminal. The interface comes up sour-yellow, a designer’s idea of warning. In the corner, a notice blinks with the boredom of a bureaucrat:
Override ethics flag?
I let my breath fall into the space between the words. A digitized conscience. A checkbox at the end of a Hippocratic oath. The cursor blinks like a pulse.
“Not yet,” I tell it, keeping my voice inside my teeth. “You and I are going to dance first.”
I thumb a microcamera from my belt and start with the perimeter—serial plates, rack IDs, firmware stickers, anything an expert witness would ask for when the feed turns into court. Flash stays off. The algae light gives me enough; it paints everything tender, which offends the work it hides. My shutter whispers ten times. My hands forget to shake.
I move to the console and log into a service account June dug like a tunnel—default cred never killed because nothing devours maintenance like governance does. The dashboard loads in blocks: MODEL: PREDCOMP v3.2.7, RISK SURFACE: REPUTATION / LEGAL / THROUGHPUT, INPUTS: COMM LOGS | ACCESS | BIOFEED | HR EVENTS, ACTIONS: COACH | REASSIGN | SEGREGATE | REMOVE.
“Remove,” I say without meaning to, and the word sticks to the roof of my mouth.
The fans rise a half step, keying to workload, or nerves, or my imagination’s cardio. I tab to TRIAL COHORTS, then INCIDENTS. Heat crawls out from under the console shelf. The barge’s heart throws a damp thud into the floor. Outside, drone rotors change key the way cicadas do when the sun slices a cloud; the storm is moving in for real. The tide clock in my head is three minutes fast by design and a lifetime fast by need.
“Search,” I whisper. “Quill, Lila.”
The terminal thinks for a breath, then brings up a record with a scarlet header: FRICTION—HIGH. My hands discover a tremor I didn’t lease to them. The screen shows fields like clean bones:
- SUBJECT: QUILL, LILA MARIN
- ROLE: CONTRACT TECH (TEMP)
- TRIALS: NEURO-AUG FEEDBACK; PREDCOMP CALIBRATION
- ETHICS FLAG: TRIGGERED (ACCESS: WHISTLE CHANNELS)
- RISK PREDICTION: ESCALATING → INFORMAL DISCLOSURE (0.72) → FORMAL DISCLOSURE (0.58) → DEFECTOR (0.31)
- RECOMMENDED ACTION: SEGREGATE → REMOVE
I press my tongue hard to the back of my teeth until taste goes white. The word REMOVE sits there so calmly it feels like a kindness. I scroll. A clip loads—a waveform of the pneumaseal hiss tagged with her badge time stamp, post-termination. The room I stand in listened to her last compliant breath and called it friction.
“No.” The syllable is a nail. “No.”
The grief surge hits like a sleeper wave. Heat climbs my face and tries to blind me with old salt. I keep my nose pointed down, eyes on the live corner of the console where an admin session will flare if I’ve woken a watcher. I let my hands do work because work is the leash I trained for days like this.
“Copy first,” I tell my pulse. “Break later.”
I palm the first drive from my kit—one of June’s carnival prizes disguised inside a stickered shell that claims to be a music streamer. I route through a write-blocker, launch the clone process, and open /models/predcomp/weights/. Numbers bloom like a constellation incapable of mercy. I pull the weights.bin, the config.yaml, and every .onnx export they kept for partners who wanted plug-and-play compliance. A progress bar crawls. The hull shivers and the algae light trembles rain across metal like nervous skin.
I set the camera to timelapse and frame it on the dashboard charts—SHAP CONTRIBUTIONS, INTERVENTION OUTCOMES, AUC—all the performance porn they crow over at conferences that make “ethics” a side panel with free espresso. I photograph the ACTIONS mapping again, because juries love verbs.
“Keep singing,” I tell the machines. “Don’t mind me.”
The terminal blinks the prompt again, patient as a clerk:
Override ethics flag?
The cursor waits like a question I have avoided in men, in contracts, in kisses timed to steal.
“I see you,” I murmur. “I see who wrote you and who flinched.”
A subtab labeled CHANNELS shows a list of monitored routes: PR OMBUDS, UNION REP, CLINIC ADVOCATE, CITY HOTLINE. Next to CLINIC ADVOCATE, a line item: Accessed (QUILL, L.M.) with a tiny icon of a folded ear. The model’s feature importance chart lights that icon like a star. The moment she knocked on a door that promised protection, the machine weighed her a threat. Love makes you strong enough to fight power and becomes leverage for that power. They baked it into math.
“I’m taking you,” I tell the file tree. “I’m taking all of you.”
I launch a recursive copy of /trials/ and /incidents/ to a second drive and the wrist cache stitched under my suit. I dump access_logs.csv, door_events.sqlite, and the pneumaseal hiss audio library June built a fingerprint against. Every beep has a body behind it. I refuse to leave anyone in abstract.
The progress bars climb like careful hikers. I force the grief down and let it consolidate into ice—useful, packable, cold enough to keep.
“Deadman next,” I whisper.
I open a shell and feed in a script June and I wrote drunk on rage and electrolyte packets. It watches my heart rate through the micromed patch, the accelerometer in my watch, the badge’s motion—if they drop to flat, or spike past a threshold paired with the word TAR, it posts everything to a ring of recipients we seeded in unions, clinics, and three low-rent defense attorneys who dislike Sable on principle. It also pushes to a file locker June swears is older than the internet and harder to burn. I set the trigger phrase; my tongue tests it silently. Tar.
“Eat their PR,” I say to the future. “Choke them on it.”
The room answers with a pitch shift only nerves hear. A service light flickers to amber on Rack B—power draw spike. I hunker in the dead zone behind the console and let the green wash slide past me toward the door. The pneumaseal sighs, then shuts itself up again; just the barge breathing. The camera above the corner aims too wide, right where they want polite eyes, leaving my little pocket of un-seen cradled in architectural sin.
I check the clone: 89%… 93%… 100%. I swap drives, label them with nail polish dots only I can decode, and tuck the first one into the dummy seam along my thigh. The second goes onto a magnet under the console ledge in case the meat fails and the room favors scavengers.
“Photos,” I remind myself, voice low and workmanlike. “Then the model cards.”
I step to the wall where a laminated RISK GOVERNANCE sheet hangs under plex. I shoot it twice, then crouch by a side cart and photograph a stack of INTERNAL USE ONLY memos, the top one stamped PREDCOMP—BOARD BRIEF / WEATHER WINDOW OPERATIONS. No signatures, only initials no one will admit knowing. A bullet reads: River weather windows support supply chain rationalization. I taste iron; my molars grind an oath.
I pop the back off a workstation with a tool flat as a curse and slide out a glossy NVMe like a secret tongue. It goes into a Faraday slip that used to be a tea bag envelope. I wipe the drive bay with the towel I brought so my existence stays theoretical.
The dashboard ticks and opens a modal I didn’t ask for:
User idle detected. Override ethics flag? [Y/N]
The cursor blinks at me like a dare. I feel the grief rise again, but this time it carries purpose like a blade. I hit N because I want the log to show refusal next to this user ID. Let them explain that later.
“You flagged her for asking for help,” I tell the console. “You measured compassion and called it friction.”
The copy finishes on the trials folder and the machine chirps a sound that makes the hairs on my wrist rehearse dying. I check the deadman again, set the DTMF backup—two taps on the badge will also trigger. I plant a second script on the rack controller, a quieter snake: if a specific process tree spawns—ContainmentSweep—it will exhale timestamps and hashes into a folder named like a printer cache and dribble them to June in packets that look like weather station data.
“Breathe,” I instruct my ribs. “Two more minutes.”
I take three close-ups of the ACTIONS: REMOVE logic mapping. It’s not a command; it’s a workflow—emails to Security, a soft lock on badge access, a memo to PR about resilience narratives, a repair ticket to Facilities. Harm turned into calendar invites. I shoot the RECOVERY PLAYBOOK tab, where a bulleted list writes storylines: Fatigue | Family Crisis | Sabbatical.
“You made a mercy costume for a knife,” I say, and my voice doesn’t crack where it wants to. “Okay.”
I back toward the door, running fingers under benches for taped spare drives the way mechanics hide money in a garage. I find one—an unlabeled stick tucked by a power strip. I pocket it with the reverence of stolen bread.
The barge shifts. The floor lifts a whisper. Somewhere outside, the resilience festival pops a confetti cannon even though the rain has started in real. Harbor Eleven will dance through knee water and call it character. I steady my stance and listen for footsteps.
A security ping pecks the hall—two quick, one slow—the pattern of a bored guard doing rounds. My timer says I have ninety seconds of blind left. The ethics prompt reappears one last time because persistence is a feature.
Override ethics flag?
“No,” I tell it again, and I let the N land like a tap on bone.
I lock the terminal to a bland status screen and wipe down what I touched. The algae panels hum their placebo. I pocket the last drive, weight of truth tugging at my suit like a new gravity.
“Lila,” I breathe, palm flat to the rack that logged her life into odds. “I have you.”
The pneumaseal breathes; the corridor inhales back. Echo finds me and tests my edges. I slide the override plate into place and tug it, listening for the click that says the door has forgotten me. I give the two taps on my badge—test of the deadman—then cancel with the third because I’m not done yet.
The last thing I plant is a nail-sized reflector under the door jamb—moth-light insurance for the sprint home. I kill my camera, take one more photo for a stranger’s faith—a shot of FRICTION—HIGH with the clinic channel line bold—and then I raise my hand to the seal.
The hallway answers first. Bootfalls. Closer. A radio laugh clipped off mid-syllable. The blind window is teeth now.
“Work’s over,” I tell my hands, letting ice flood me clean. “Now we pay.”
I touch the plate, and the room that predicts betrayal holds its breath with me. The tide climbs my ankles in memory. The storm drums politely on the barge skin. My thumb finds the release.
“Tar,” I whisper to the script that will murder secrets if I go quiet.
I open the door a finger’s width—and stare into a reflection that isn’t mine, lined by a visor and a flashlight’s white coin, waiting to spend.