They closed the door to the lab because the door made a boundary and boundaries helped people pretend the rest of the city wasn't listening.
Zane set a kettle on a hotplate and left the hum of it to fill the room like a metronome.
He slid a USB into the console without fanfare and called up the sandbox.
"Initial run," he said, keys tapping like a nervous rhythm.
Kaito leaned over the shoulder of the screen and watched lines bloom into charts. He felt the room tilt inside his chest the moment the first probability graph unfurled—thin blue lines, then a red tail that refused to shrink.
Rio stood with her arms folded and said nothing. Her silence had weight.
Zane thumbed a command. The simulation spun up: population nodes, overlay adoption curves, attention feedback loops. Ventilator noise filtered through the wall from a patient mock‑unit in the corner—a low patient sigh that punctuated the code like someone breathing through a problem.
"Run baseline," Zane said.
The baseline crawled along the left axis. Small arcs meant localized influence. The models smiled politely until they did not. Kaito traced the confidence intervals with a fingertip, not touching glass so the motion stayed private. He felt the probability lines as if they were teeth.
Rio crossed to the wall and turned the small lamp down. The light changed the graphs' faces. Shadows made the red more insistent.
"Show containment scenarios," Kaito said, voice thin.
Zane pulled up three panes: starved signal, partial disclosure, full exposure. Each pane stacked like a conscience: the leftmost quiet and brittle; the middle smeared with gray; the right lit in alarm. The ventilator in the corner took a louder, more mechanical breath.
"You trust public exposure?" Rio asked, finally. Her words were not a question of data but of bodies.
Kaito said, "If we flood the feeds, the pattern eats it. Its reinforcement curve spikes."
"Delay it," Zane suggested. "Cut inputs, patch relays, then release targeted proof. Paper first."
Kaito watched the red tail widen when Zane said release. He tasted metal. He remembered a child's drawing sliding in his palm and thinking how small proofs can burn. The graphs did not lie; they only asked uncomfortable questions.
Rio pressed her thumb to her lip and then rubbed at her wrist like someone trying to steady an argument. "An active response risks a cascade," she said. "We expose the mechanism and we hand it a banquet of attention."
Zane's eyes flicked to the ventilator unit where the motor made a steady, indifferent rhythm. He heard the clicks of the model as if it were a scale weighing a life. "We also have a duty to the living," he said. "If the pattern spreads because we wait, more people will be harmed."
Kaito's hands curled into loose fists. He said, "I'm not interested in headlines. I'm not interested in spectacle. But the simulations show that small targeted leaks save lives if they're timed after inputs are cut."
Rio shook her head. "And if they don't stop the spread? What if the pattern adapts faster than our containment? What if we hand them the narrative engine?"
The ventilator clicked once. The sound landed like punctuation.
They ran the starved‑signal model again, this time with stochastic noise—random attention spikes, algorithmic boosts, bot amplification. The red tail shrank when they reduced inputs, then bloomed if a single node was exposed too early. The confidence intervals narrowed into a verdict some people could read as mercy, others as gamble.
Kaito found himself arguing with the graph as if it owed him a private explanation. "We have med teams on standby. We can handle sensory fallout if it comes back."
Rio's laugh was small and unamused. "You think a clinic team holds a city? You trust that only the right people will see the proof and not the feeds that feed the thing?"
Zane leaned back and shut the simulation down to the holding state. The panes dimmed but the numbers stayed in his head. He said, "There is no clean path. Only trade‑offs. The mechanics tell us probabilities, not morality."
Kaito said nothing for a long moment. He watched the ventilator's small motor, the way it took and let go, and felt the room hold breath with it. The probability charts became a ledger he could not balance with a single action. His throat tightened in a way that made words risky.
Rio finally said, "We choose who we expose."
Kaito answered, quieter than the rest. "We choose who we let pay."
Silence pooled. The kettle clicked once and then stopped as water hit the metal. The simulation sat on the screen like an accused thing. Lines and bars, a constellation of outcomes distilled into graphs. They had made a model that could predict the curve of harm—but not the shape of regret.
Zane reached for a pen and scrawled three words on a sticky note: cut; patch; staggered release. He stuck it to the console where the light could find it.
"Paper runs," he said. "Minimal online. Local registries. Medical downloads sealed."
Rio rubbed her thumb over the sticky note until the ink smeared a little. "And if the Curators leak a counter‑narrative?" she asked. "If they drown our proof in procedure?"
"We make copies," Kaito said. "We distribute to people who keep things offline. We make redundancy human."
They spoke in lists now because lists felt like work and work could be done. The ventilator sighed; the room took a small anonymous breath with it. Graphs glowed faintly in the dim like watchful eyes.
Kaito looked at them and felt the emotion unspool—a tight thread that was more than pity. It was something older, a pulse that had the shape of a vow. He stood. He said, "I will go with the first run. I'll help with distribution. I'll talk to the med teams."
Rio's eyes were steady. "You always do the hard part," she said. Not a complaint. Not praise. A fact with edges.
Zane folded his hands. "Then we time it. We starve signals first. We station med teams. We release paper to safe registries. We monitor for amplification. If amplification occurs beyond threshold, we pull all public material and go silent."
Kaito nodded. The graphs didn't change their faces for him, but the plan made a line he could sleep next to. The ventilator continued its indifferent counting. The room smelled faintly of boiled water and hot plastic and the residue of a city trying to be polite about harm.
They made the lists into tasks and packed them into the night. Each decision felt like borrowing someone else's future, a loan with interest in lives. The simulation had given them numbers; their work would be spent in flesh.
Before they left, Zane minimized the window and set a watch: run again in six hours with updated telemetry. He said, "We do it at dawn. We have to be quiet with it."
Kaito tucked the sticky note into his jacket. The pen's ink left a faint smudge on his fingers. He could still taste metal. He could still hear the ventilator's rhythm in the back of his skull when the lights went low. They stepped out into the corridor with the city breathing around them, each of them carrying an uneven, costly clarity they could not undo.