The facial recognition problem kept Zev up until close to two in the morning.
He lay on his back in the dark with the Ghost Protocol screen open above him, reading through everything the system would let him access, which wasn't much. Skills tab, mostly locked. Quest tab, one main quest and two daily quests. Status tab with numbers that didn't tell him much yet. At the very bottom of the skills list, below all the locked entries and the question marks, there was one line he'd missed before.
[ Passive : Scan Area — Active ]
[ Camera positions and sweep arcs visible within 80m radius ]
He already knew about that one. It had unlocked after the first daily quest.
But there was nothing about facial recognition. No skill for it, no hint that one was coming. The system had handed him a new daily quest requiring him to stay off ARGUS facial recognition for four hours, and then apparently decided he could figure out the rest himself.
He pulled up the quest again just to reread it.
[ Daily Quest : Stay off ARGUS facial recognition for 4 hours ]
[ Reward : 50 EXP ]
[ Hint : ????? ]
The hint field just had question marks in it.
"Helpful," he muttered at the ceiling.
Luc's breathing from the other bed was slow and even. Zev turned the problem over in his head. Camera avoidance was physical. He'd done it by knowing which cameras had dead arcs and using them. Facial recognition was different, it ran on the feed from every camera that did have a working arc. Even if he stayed out of a camera's physical line of sight, ARGUS was still pattern-matching against every face it captured anywhere in the district.
Which meant the only ways around it were either to stay completely out of camera range the entire time, which in The Pit was close to impossible, or to do something to make ARGUS fail to match his face when it did see him.
He didn't have any tech for the second option. No signal scrambler, no face-altering tech, nothing in his bag that would do anything useful. He had a toolkit, a spare set of wire connectors, and a protein bar he'd forgotten about for three weeks.
He closed the Ghost Protocol screen and went to sleep thinking about it.
****
The next morning he woke up twelve minutes before his alarm, which never happened.
What had woken him was a new notification sitting in the corner of his vision.
[ Reminder : Daily Quest resets in 4 hours ]
[ Daily Quest : Stay off ARGUS facial recognition for 4 hours ]
[ Daily Quest : Avoid ARGUS cameras for 2 hours undetected ]
[ Tip : Completed quests stack EXP bonuses if repeated on consecutive days ]
He stared at that last line for a moment. Consecutive day bonus. So the system wanted him doing these every day, not just once.
He sat up. Luc was already gone, his bed made with the fast careless efficiency of someone who'd been doing it alone for years. There was a wrapped parcel on the workbench, flatbread again, with a short note written on the paper.
Gone to Feld's early. Back before noon.
Don't do anything I'd have to lie about.
Zev read the note twice. He folded it and put it in his jacket pocket for reasons he didn't examine too closely.
He ate standing up, looking out the narrow window at the street below. The morning crowd was already moving, Hollow residents heading to work shifts, a few kids running between buildings in the gap before their mandatory schooling started. Three ARGUS cameras visible from this angle, their sweep arcs now outlined faintly in his vision from the Scan Area passive. He watched them rotate. Slow, steady, the same arc every time.
Then he had an idea that was either very good or very stupid.
****
An hour later he was standing in the alley behind the old water processing plant again, the same spot where he'd finished the camera avoidance quest the night before. He had his jacket turned inside out. It was a different color that way, a dark greenish-grey instead of the usual worn brown. He'd tied a rag around the lower half of his face the way workers sometimes did in the sectors near the chemical processing lines. And he'd done something to his hair that Luc would make fun of him for if he ever saw it, pushing it flat and forward instead of its usual direction.
He looked at himself in the reflection of a water-stained metal panel.
He looked like a completely different person who had dressed himself in the dark.
"Okay," he said to the reflection. "This is either going to work or it's going to be really embarrassing."
The reflection didn't offer an opinion.
The theory was simple. ARGUS facial recognition matched against registered profiles. Those profiles had photos. The photos were taken in standard lighting conditions with his face at a normal angle. If he changed enough variables, the confidence score of the match would drop below the flagging threshold.
He didn't actually know what that threshold was. He was guessing.
He stepped out of the alley and started walking.
The first camera he passed was the one on Corum street. He kept his chin slightly down, enough to break the angle, and walked at a steady pace. His Scan Area passive tracked the camera's sweep arc as he moved. He timed his crossing for when the arc was pointing down-street away from him.
He passed under it.
No alert. No notification from the system saying he'd been detected.
He kept going.
The market area was the real test. The market had four cameras covering overlapping arcs, specifically designed so there were no blind spots. The whole point was that ARGUS always had a face read on everyone in the market. He'd spent years walking through there thinking nothing of it.
He slowed down as he approached the entrance.
He could see all four camera positions in his vision, their arcs, their overlap zones. There was no physical path through the market that avoided all of them. That had been the whole point of the design.
So he didn't try to avoid them. He walked through normally, at his usual pace, keeping his chin at the same slight downward angle and the rag over the lower half of his face. If the theory was right, ARGUS would see a face but fail to match it with enough confidence to flag it.
If the theory was wrong, he'd find out very quickly.
He walked through the entire market. Past the flatbread stalls, past the parts vendor who nodded at him without looking up, past the cluster of people arguing over the price of something wrapped in brown paper. He came out the other side and turned into a side street and stood there.
His heart was going fast enough that he could feel it.
[ Daily Quest : Stay off ARGUS facial recognition for 4 hours ]
[ Time elapsed : 23 minutes ]
[ Detection events : 0 ]
Zero.
He leaned against the wall and let out a breath that was longer than it probably needed to be.
It was working. Maybe. Twenty-three minutes wasn't four hours and he could still be wrong about the threshold but so far, zero.
He stayed out for the full four hours, working his way through The Pit in a slow loop. He didn't push it. He stayed out of camera range when he could and used the angle trick when he couldn't. By the end of it he'd figured out that the rag alone wasn't doing as much as he'd hoped. The angle change on his head was doing most of the work. ARGUS apparently cared a lot about the standard reference angle and throwing it off by fifteen degrees was enough to drop the match confidence below whatever threshold triggered a flag.
That was useful to know.
When the timer completed, he was sitting on a crate behind the salvage market. He'd found the protein bar he'd forgotten about in the bottom of his bag. He looked at it for a moment, checked the wrapper for any obvious signs of disaster, found none, and ate it anyway. It tasted like cardboard that had given up on life. He finished the whole thing.
[ Daily Quest complete ]
[ +50 EXP ]
[ Consecutive day bonus : +10 EXP ]
[ Current EXP : 90 / 200 ]
[ Camera avoidance daily quest bonus for consecutive completion : +5 EXP ]
[ Current EXP : 95 / 200 ]
He stared at the number.
95 out of 200. Almost halfway to Level 2 in two days. And he hadn't done anything except walk around The Pit being careful about where he looked.
He was still sitting there processing that when footsteps came around the corner of the salvage market and Luc appeared, goggles around his neck, carrying a canvas bag that clinked with every step.
Luc stopped. Looked at Zev. Looked at the inside-out jacket and the rag tied around his face and the hair situation.
"I'm not going to ask," Luc said.
"Good."
Luc sat down on a crate across from him. He opened his canvas bag and started pulling components out onto his lap, sorting them by type the way he always did when he was thinking. Capacitors in one pile, resistors in another, something Zev didn't recognize in a third.
They sat in silence for a bit.
"You're going to tell me eventually," Luc said. Still looking at his components.
"Tell you what."
"Whatever you found yesterday. The problem."
Zev looked at him. He'd been turning this over since last night, whether to say anything, how much to say. Luc was the one person he trusted without having to think about it. But trust and burdening were different things and what was sitting in the corner of his vision right now was the kind of thing that could get a person's social score zeroed if the wrong person found out.
"It's in my head," Zev said.
Luc's hands paused over the components. "You're having some kind of mental breakdown."
"No. Literally. There's something in my head. I touched something yesterday and now there's a..." He stopped. Tried to find a word that wasn't going to sound insane. Couldn't find one. "A system. Like a game system. In my vision. All the time."
Silence.
Luc picked up a capacitor, examined it, set it aside.
"Show me," he said.
"I can't show you. It's in my vision, not yours."
"Then describe it."
So Zev did. He described the screen layout, the stat numbers, the quest system, the Scan Area passive, everything he'd found so far. Luc listened without interrupting, which was unusual for him. When Zev finished, Luc sat with his elbows on his knees looking at the ground.
He stayed like that for a while. Long enough that Zev started to wonder if he'd said too much.
Then Luc picked up a capacitor from the pile on his lap, turned it over once, and set it back down.
"The camera positions you can see now," he said slowly. "That's how you knew about the Seld street blind spot."
"I already knew about the Seld blind spot. Bad motor."
"But you know all of them now."
"All of them within eighty meters, yeah."
Luc was quiet for another moment. "And you think touching that box did this."
"I know it did."
"What did the box look like."
Zev described the skull with the signal crown. Luc's expression shifted slightly when he heard it, something moving across his face that Zev caught but couldn't fully read.
"You know what that is?" Zev asked.
"No," Luc said. Too fast. Then, after a beat, "I've seen that symbol somewhere. Can't remember where. Old stuff."
Zev looked at him.
Luc picked up another component, turned it over in his fingers. "You need to be careful. Whatever got put in your head, if ARGUS scans for unauthorized implant signatures and picks something up, that's an immediate Enforcer call. Hollow aren't supposed to have any implant tech, period."
"I know."
"I mean it, Zev. This isn't a bad social score situation. This is a disappear situation."
"I know," Zev said again. Quieter this time.
They sat with that for a moment. A group of kids ran past the end of the alley, laughing about something. One of them tripped over the uneven paving and went down hard and got back up still laughing. Normal Pit morning.
"How much EXP do you have," Luc said.
Zev blinked. "What?"
"You said it works like a game. How much do you have."
"Ninety-five. Out of two hundred for Level 2."
Luc made a sound that was almost a laugh but not quite. "What happens at Level 2."
"New skills unlock probably. I don't know yet."
"Hm." Luc started packing his components back into the canvas bag. "Well. Let me know when you find out."
That was it. No more questions, no freak-out, no long conversation about how dangerous this was. Just let me know when you find out.
Zev had known him for eight years and it still surprised him sometimes.
He untied the rag from his face and stuffed it in his pocket. The hair situation he couldn't do much about until he got back to the room.
"Luc," he said.
Luc looked up.
"The symbol. If you remember where you saw it."
A pause. "Yeah," Luc said. "I'll let you know."
He stood up and headed back toward the street. Zev watched him go, then looked down at the Ghost Protocol screen still floating quietly in the corner of his vision.
95 out of 200.
He was close.
****
The flag Roth had placed on Drault, Zev, Technician Class, Social Score 41, was still sitting in his personal queue the next morning when he came in for his shift.
He pulled up the archived tracking logs. Two separate sessions from the previous day, both in Sector 3, both timestamped within the same twelve-hour window. The first showed brief gaps in camera coverage that the system had logged as possible sensor error. The second, several hours later, showed something different. Facial recognition data was present, the cameras had captured a face, but the match confidence had dropped below the flagging threshold both times the subject passed through a covered zone.
That was not sensor error. Sensor errors produced data loss. This produced data with a degraded result, which pointed at something interfering with the recognition parameters on the subject's end rather than a problem with the equipment.
Roth sat back in his chair.
Pattern anomalies across two sessions in the same day from the same registered resident. The protocol was clear. He was supposed to escalate.
He looked at the file one more time. Social score 41. Technician. No prior escalation history. Nobody who should know how to do this.
He sent the escalation report.
Three levels above Roth's monitoring station, the report landed in a queue that would reach Commandant Corvain Strahl's desk by morning.