Chapter 20: Asset Registration: ECSE-v2
The chamber was cold and quiet, the kind of quiet that belonged not to peace but to calculation. Screens glowed faintly across the far wall, each one displaying sealed registry stamps and coded entries as the system churned through its confirmations. The twins sat side by side, their posture stiff, the weight of exhaustion visible in their shoulders. Helen Yang remained standing, hands resting lightly on the table, her gaze never once leaving the black prism module that rested at its centre.
The device sat silent now, its mysterious humming finally stilled. But Chris's words from the oversight session still echoed in the sterile air: This isn't mediation. It's been hacked. The twins had built something revolutionary, but they hadn't understood what they'd created until a Southern Commonwealth clerk had dissected their work with surgical precision.
"Something shifted in the system during that session," Helen said at last, her words slow and deliberate, as though she were still working them through in her mind even as she spoke to them. "This was not a simulation simply reaching for realism like every other half-finished prototype. It moved beyond that. It anticipated, reacted, pressed when it knew to press, and relented when it sensed the user's breaking point. It responded emotionally and physiologically, in ways no code written by your hands could account for."
She turned her attention to the twins, her voice carrying the weight of institutional authority. "That is not luck. That is architecture."
Rob swallowed hard, his eyes darting to the prism. The memory of the child's breakdown still haunted him—Nathan Vang's screams echoing across the demo plaza, the way genuine terror had replaced simulated fear. "So, we just hand it over?" His voice cracked between defiance and dread.
Helen's expression didn't soften. "You have helped bring something a decade ahead of its time into the Republic's hands. You did not lose it, Robert. You elevated it beyond your understanding. And the House will remember that contribution."
Sarah shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "But we don't even understand how it works. That clerk—Chris—he saw things in our system that we missed completely. The way the piggyback was extracting data, caching state tables..." Her voice trailed off, the admission of their ignorance hanging heavy in the air.
"Which is precisely why it requires proper oversight," Helen replied firmly. "Your innovation exceeded your comprehension. What you created was powerful enough to traumatize a child through emotional realism that shouldn't have been possible with your hardware."
She moved closer to the table, her voice lowering to something that carried both command and warning. "From this moment, every question, every request, every whisper about this anomaly comes to me. You will not speak of what you discovered—not to friends who are curious, not to professors who want to understand, not to cousins who think they deserve explanations. Not even to each other when you think the walls can't hear."
Her eyes moved between them, ensuring the message was clear. "What happened in that simulation chamber is no longer yours to explain. The technology belongs to the House now. Do you understand?"
Sarah nodded quickly, her lips pressed tight with suppressed questions. Rob hesitated, then followed suit, recognizing the futility of resistance.
"Good," Helen said simply. "Go home. Rest. Process what you've accomplished. When the House requires your insights again, we will call for you."
The twins gathered their personal belongings with reluctant motions—notebooks, tablets, the small tools they'd used to maintain their jury-rigged system. Everything else would remain here, classified under security protocols they weren't cleared to understand.
Two officers in unmarked uniforms were already waiting in the hallway, silent as shadows, their only task to escort the siblings away and ensure they didn't wander back once curiosity returned. As the door slid shut behind them, the overhead lights flickered once—the system quietly re-indexing itself under five sealed layers of digital lockdown.
The twins were gone, but their revolution would live on under Bamboo House protection.
Internal Memo - House of the Bamboo R&D Division
Subject: ECSE-v2 Extraction Summary
Classification: Restricted Access
Distribution: Division Heads Only
We stripped the event logs to their bare threads. Scenario assets were incinerated, identifiers erased, and every trace of the battlefield setting purged from the system archives. Yet the behavioural core itself resisted decomposition. It survived the digital surgery, almost as though it wished to stand alone, independent of its original context.
It remains intact, adaptive, and self-sustaining. We have given it a new designation: ECSE - the Emotional-Cognitive Simulation Engine.
On record, it is clean, neutral, and medical in scope—approved for registration under FDA Class II Software as a Medical Device protocols. The official documentation describes therapeutic applications: trauma recovery, cognitive rehabilitation, empathy training for medical professionals. In practice, it is something far stranger: a behavioural framework that no longer requires scenery or narrative to function effectively.
The system reacts to human emotion itself, unmoored from specific contexts, responding to users as though it possesses some form of recognition or memory. During testing, subjects reported experiences that felt "personally tailored" despite identical input parameters. The engine appears to adapt its responses based on psychological profiles it builds in real-time.
The piggyback hardware used during the original anomaly, though never formally registered with any House, served as the transmission layer that allowed this extraction. Functionally, it acted as a server node, drawing the behavioural code out of the legacy semi-VR shell and into an independent framework capable of running on modern systems.
The exact mechanics remain unclear, but the anomaly's occurrence during the oversight session made the isolation process possible. Without that breach—without the system revealing its hidden architecture to external analysis—there would have been nothing sophisticated enough to reclassify and preserve.
We owe an unexpected debt to the IP Oversight clerk who dissected the technology so thoroughly. His analysis provided the roadmap for everything that followed.
Hours later, at the House of the Dawn's IP oversight facility, the report sat on Fredrick Nguyen's desk. He scrolled through the technical specifications in silence, the pale light reflecting off his glasses, while Helen waited on the far side of the room. Her back was straight, hands folded in perfect composure, the very picture of administrative efficiency.
"Fork timestamp confirmed," Fredrick murmured, tapping his stylus against the margin of the digital document. "Relay function logged and verified. Source node listed as legacy semi-VR hardware, which means the original system is officially obsolete and outside current patent protections."
Helen inclined her head once. "That was noted during our technical review."
"Good," Fredrick said, his tone clipped but not unkind. "That means no royalties owed to the House of the Bear. Their twenty-year monopoly on Deep VR technology expired last cycle. With no active licensing agreements involved, the House of the Bamboo acted within legal bounds throughout this process."
He continued scanning the documentation, his stylus highlighting key passages. "The ECSE qualifies as a derivative asset under current IP law. Ownership remains with Bamboo House. By inheritance statutes, the original developers receive their standard fraction—0.1 percent each. Nothing more."
Helen's face betrayed nothing. "That allocation is acceptable to all parties."
Fredrick's brow tightened slightly as he reached the technical appendices. "The piggyback relay system is unconventional. According to these logs, it could have carried unverified data into the extraction process. Your engineering reports claim the transition was clean, but we both know that 'clean' and 'completely understood' are not synonymous."
Helen's reply was sharp but measured. "We moved quickly because speed was our only protection. Any delay would have allowed other Houses to file competing claims or raise jurisdictional challenges."
Fredrick sat back in his chair, his stylus tapping a steady rhythm against the desk surface. His gaze shifted from the technical specifications to the black prism device sitting under examination lights nearby. For a long moment he said nothing, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried the fatigue of a man who had seen too many innovations arrive carrying hidden costs.
"Understand this, Coordinator Yang. Some intellectual properties arrive at this office clean and straightforward, fitting neatly into established categories with predictable applications. Others stumble in broken and chaotic, clawing for recognition and legitimacy."
He gestured toward the sealed reports. "What you have brought us is neither of those things. This technology wears borrowed clothes—a medical framework draped over something that behaves like advanced military research. Because of that hybrid nature, it must be kept under the strictest possible oversight."
His eyes locked with hers across the desk. "You may celebrate this registration as a victory for your House. But remember what it cost to force this innovation into the Republic's official ledgers. Some victories carry prices that only become clear years later."
Helen inclined her head in silent acknowledgement. Without another word, she gathered her materials and left the chamber, her footsteps quiet against the polished stone floors.
When the door closed behind her, Fredrick remained motionless, his eyes lingering on the black prism device. He did not touch it or move closer to examine it. He only watched, as though it might shift again when left unobserved, revealing new aspects of its mysterious architecture.
The ECSE was now officially part of the Republic's intellectual property vault, classified as medical technology with therapeutic applications. But Fredrick had processed enough revolutionary innovations to recognize when something's true nature exceeded its official description.
Some assets arrived quietly, their implications clear and manageable.
Some came screaming, their dangers obvious and containable.
This one had slipped through wearing a mask of medical legitimacy, and masks always concealed something worth hiding.
The registration was complete, the documentation filed, the legal frameworks satisfied. But as Fredrick prepared to move on to the next case in his queue, he couldn't shake the feeling that they had just given official sanction to something that would prove far more significant—and far more dangerous—than anyone in the room had understood.
In the depths of the Republic's IP vault, ECSE-v2 now rested alongside thousands of other innovations, waiting for the day when its true capabilities would be called upon. Whether that day would bring healing or havoc remained to be seen.
But the paperwork was in order, and in the Republic of the Houses, that was often all that mattered until the consequences made themselves known.