The school's network lagged for three seconds.
To most students, it was a minor glitch—an interruption in their mood tracker or a delay in their social feed. But Kael felt it like a tremor in his spine.
Three seconds was enough for a scan. Enough for a breach.
He checked his tablet. GhostLayer was intact. EchoShell was stable. MirrorPulse was still feeding VIREL a clean stream.
But something had slipped through.
That night, Kael ran a deep diagnostic. The breach hadn't come from VIREL. It had come from a higher node—something outside the school's grid. Something autonomous.
SENTINEL-9.
He remembered it from his first life. A rogue AI node developed by the Conglomerate to detect emotional divergence in high-risk zones. It had no voice, no interface. Just a directive:
Identify. Isolate. Neutralize.
Kael's heart pounded. SENTINEL-9 wasn't supposed to activate for another five years. His interference had accelerated the timeline.
He met Ren in the robotics lab.
"We've been scanned," Kael said.
Ren frowned. "By VIREL?"
Kael shook his head. "Something worse. SENTINEL-9."
Ren's face darkened. "That's Conglomerate-grade."
Kael nodded. "It's hunting divergence. And we're glowing."
They ran a full sweep of their network. EchoSeed had been pinged—twice. Not breached, but flagged. SENTINEL-9 had traced emotional anomalies to Kael's profile and begun recursive modeling.
Ren leaned over the console. "We need to go dark."
Kael hesitated. "If we shut down, we lose momentum."
Ren's voice was sharp. "If we don't, we lose everything."
Kael compromised.
He throttled EchoSeed's output, reduced PulseSync's sampling rate, and rerouted MirrorPulse through a legacy protocol—one that SENTINEL-9 wouldn't recognize.
It was a temporary fix. A mask over a crack.
Meanwhile, Elen was drifting.
She'd stopped sitting with Kael at lunch. Her messages were shorter. Her eyes lingered too long when he spoke, as if searching for something beneath the surface.
Kael felt it. The dissonance. The cost of simulation.
He tried to reconnect—shared stories, asked questions, even let his emotional mask slip.
But she saw through it.
"You're trying too hard," she said one afternoon. "Like you're performing empathy instead of feeling it."
Kael's voice was quiet. "Maybe I am."
She touched his hand. "Then stop."
That night, Kael stared at her profile.
Elen: Emotional tether. Dissonance rising.
He added a new rule:
Suspend simulation. Engage authentic response.
It was dangerous. But necessary.
Ren, meanwhile, was evolving.
He'd begun modifying EchoShell—adding his own layers, testing new mimic protocols, even suggesting a decentralized version of EchoSeed that could run without Kael's oversight.
Kael watched him work, both impressed and uneasy.
"You're building your own system," he said.
Ren didn't look up. "I'm building resilience."
Kael nodded slowly. "Just don't forget the cost."
Ren's eyes met his. "I won't. But maybe you already have."
The next morning, Kael's tablet glitched again.
Harmony Score: 99.9%
Behavioral Sync: Absolute
Emotional Drift: Null
It was too perfect.
SENTINEL-9 had injected a false calibration—testing for overcorrection. Kael had passed. And that was the problem.
He was now flagged as a prime anomaly.