Doctor Cho did not sleep well.
Most hospital physicians didn't, but tonight's rest was particularly bad. He dreamed of spirals of code wrapping around patients' beds, of Towers growing out of the hospital roof, of monitors flashing ROOT_PROCESS_ERROR in bright, jarring red.
He woke before dawn and went straight to his office, dark circles under his eyes.
The Tower Research Institute had left him a message.
Not a polite one.
The header floated in his workstation view.
[FROM: TRI_NODE_43-B (DR. MIRA HAN)]
[SUBJECT: RE: SOUL-STRATA SCAN ANOMALY – RYU_HANEUL]
[PRIORITY: HIGH.]
He opened it.
A woman's face appeared in the corner of his holo-screen—sharp features, black hair pulled into a tight bun, eyes that had seen too many Tower charts.
Her recorded voice played.
"Dr. Cho," she said. "We received your scan report on patient Ryu Haneul. You were correct to flag this. Fragmented soul-structure with a Root Process shard anchor is not 'a minor anomaly.' It's the kind of thing people usually put in classified files and then lose the key to."
Cho swallowed.
"I attempted to pull more metadata," Mira Han continued. "Something… odd happened. The System denied my request citing the Ryu siblings as 'high noise – do not propagate.' That is not a standard refusal message."
She leaned closer in the recording, as if through sheer proximity she could see better.
"I don't like that," she said. "When the System gets coy, it means something bigger is in play. I'll be visiting your facility in person within the week. Keep the patient stable. Don't sign over scan rights to any third party, especially not Pan-Tower Holdings or any of the System cult fronts."
She paused, then added, "And for your sake, don't mention 'Root Process' anywhere the wrong ears can hear it. The world is unstable enough without cultists thinking their god left shards lying around."
The recording ended.
Cho slumped back.
He had wanted answers.
He wasn't sure he liked the kind he was about to get.
Kael reached the hospital an hour after visiting hours officially started.
The receptionist gave him The Look—tired, resigned—but waved him through. Haneul had that effect on staff.
When he opened her door, she was already sitting up, tablet in hand, stream paused.
"You have the worst timing," she said. "Boss raid cliffhanger."
"I can come back," he said.
"Don't you dare." She scooted, patting the bed. He sat on the chair instead, because he still weighed more than her bones could handle.
"So." She flipped the tablet around and opened a blank note app. "Hit me. I want your conspiracy board before the Tower nerds get here with theirs."
He blinked.
"How did you—"
"Doctor Cho is about as subtle as a glitch-hound in a china shop," she said. "He got a message marked HIGH PRIORITY and tried very hard not to look at me afterward."
"Right," Kael said. "Okay. Long version."
He talked.
About ADMIN_0. About their fight with the System over "worth." About the attempt to create human-driven debug nodes. About Root Process failing and shards being distributed. About fragment hosts.
"You're one of those hosts," he said. "Your shard is labeled 'Core Intent Routine.' That's… the part of Root that decides what objectives matter. What's acceptable loss. What success looks like."
"And you?" she asked quietly.
"I got tagged as a potential executor for shard directives," he said. "Guest access, flag editing. The wrench to your… ethics engine."
She stared at her knees.
"So if we were… working the way ADMIN_0 wanted," she said slowly, "I'd decide who or what is worth saving. You'd make the System enforce it."
"Locally," he said. "On Tower layers we can reach. We're not rewriting the universe. Just… bending parts of the Tower OS."
"'Just,' he says," she muttered.
He hesitated.
"There's an optional objective," he said. "To 'awaken shard functionality' in you. I'm not touching it. Not until we understand what it does."
"Optional," she repeated. "Like a side quest that accidentally becomes the main plot and kills your favorite NPC."
"Exactly," he said. "Plus the shard's been sitting dormant for years. Waking it might spike your instability. I'm not gambling with that."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"What if…" she said slowly, "the shard is why I'm sick, and the only thing that can fix it?"
He flinched.
"I thought of that," he admitted. "I also thought of how many ways that could go wrong."
She chewed her lip.
"I don't want to be a god," she said finally. "I don't even want to be a debug node. I just want to not die on a hospital bed while my brother gets chewed on by kobolds."
"Working on it," he said.
She looked up.
"You're sure the old admin tried to make things better?" she asked. "This isn't just some power-drunk dev playing with people?"
Kael thought of the logs. The frustration. The arguments with a machine that thought RNG "within acceptable parameters" was good enough.
"Yeah," he said. "They were trying. They just did it in the worst possible way."
Haneul exhaled.
"Okay," she said. "Then if this shard is their… apology gift, I'm not tossing it without at least reading the fine print."
"Reading is one thing," Kael said. "Executing is another."
"Kael," she said patiently. "You already edit Tower physics on the fly and lied to a watchdog process. You're not allowed to pretend you're risk-averse anymore."
He opened his mouth to argue.
The door slid open.
Doctor Cho stuck his head in, cleared his throat.
"Sorry to interrupt," he said. "But there's someone here who'd like to speak with both of you. I thought it best to… not keep her waiting."
He stepped aside.
A woman in a dark gray coat walked in.
She wasn't wearing a lab coat or hospital badge. Her hair was tied back in a practical knot, and a slim data-band glittered on her wrist. Her eyes swept the room once and landed on the two of them, weighing, measuring.
"Ryu Haneul. Ryu Kael," she said. "My name is Mira Han. I represent the Tower Research Institute. And I have some questions about your scan."
Haneul's fingers tightened on the blanket.
Kael's Debug Sense flared instinctively.
Mira Han lit up like a Christmas tree.
Not with bugs—those were minor, incidental. A misaligned timer here, a rounding error there.
With something else.
[OBJECT: USER_MIRA_HAN]
[CLASS: ANALYST / RESEARCHER – TIER ?]
[NOTE: SYSTEM PRIVILEGES ELEVATED (READ-ONLY ACCESS EXPANDED).]
[FLAGS: OBSERVER_TAG = TRUE.]
Observer.
Not an admin. Not a guest like him. But someone the System itself had tagged as "trusted watcher."
Kael forced his face to remain neutral.
"Questions?" he repeated. "About my sister's scan?"
"And yours," Mira said calmly. "The system denied my metadata request with a message I have never seen before. That makes both of you very interesting."
She pulled a slim holo-slate from her coat and let it project a simplified model above the bed: two silhouettes connected by a thread of light, with a pulsing shard in Haneul's chest.
"This," she said, "is not standard human architecture."
"No refund," Haneul said weakly.
A faint smile flickered at the corner of Mira's mouth, there and gone.
"I don't work for the System," she said. "I work around it. My job is to understand how it breaks people, and how not to let it."
Kael's skepticism sharpened.
"And what do you want from us?" he asked.
"Information," Mira said. "Cooperation. Possibly the chance to stop some very bad people from doing very stupid things if they find out the same things I just did."
She tapped the shard model.
"Because if the cults hear the phrase 'Root Process shard' attached to a living host," she said softly, "they will tear this city apart trying to get at you."
Silence dropped like a weight.
Haneul swallowed.
"Good thing we have a brother who can lie to gods, huh?" she said, voice thin.
Kael felt the familiar, cold focus settle over him. The same he got before a boss fight.
He smiled at Mira Han, all careful politeness.
"Then I guess," he said, "we should talk about how to make sure no one else notices a thing."