They were finishing a tired dinner when the first clip leaked.
A feed looped on a neighbor's phone—grainy, handheld, a mother on a couch with a child pressed to her chest. The child looked small and hollow-eyed. The mother's lips moved in a way that made the words come out thin and sharp.
She mouthed into the camera: "He won't stop humming. He wakes and draws the lines. They started after the patch."
People watching in the diner went quiet the way you go quiet when someone drops a glass. The sound of cutlery was too loud for a second. Someone put their phone on the table like it was dangerous.
Kaito stared because there are images that occupy the space in your head like a lodged splinter; the screen burned the posture of the woman into him. Rio folded her napkin slowly with hands that did not tremble but carried the weight of it.
Zane's face was a soft telephone of guilt. He straightened and moved toward the counter where the diner had a second TV over the register. The channel flicked and a newsroom had the clip up, raw and unedited, with text slashed across the bottom—BREAKING: FAMILY FOOTAGE — POSSIBLE LINK TO RELAY SIGNATURE.
The clip spread like spilled oil. Comments stacked like insects in the feed: anger, pity, harassment, speculation. Some wrote in the calm, canned cadence of pundits. Some left messages for the mother: We see you. Some wrote instructions as if a feed could perform a triage.
Kaito watched the comment feed scroll. The words assembled into a new pressure—public attention folding like a crowd. He felt the pull in his chest, the same way the simulation graphs had tugged last night. The city's attention was a currency, and the clip was a bright coin.
Zane's hand hovered over his phone. He did not move to post. He did not have to. The city posted for him. The newsroom played the clip again and tuned the speakers so the child's faint hum threaded the room like a physical irritant.
"This will get loud," Rio said.
"It already is loud," Kaito answered. "We always knew this would be the risk."
Zane tapped his screen once. He looked like someone who had swallowed a stone.
"We close access," he said.
"Close what?" Rio asked, pushing air through her teeth.
"Public portals to the simulation. Pull the window. Stop any further distribution via our channels. Lock archived footage behind restricted access. If this goes viral through official feeds, we can't control the narrative." His voice was quick with the mechanics of containment—procedures he had rehearsed in simulations and nightmares.
"Are you saying we censor?" Kaito asked. The word landed and carried an accusation even before it was shaped.
"No," Zane said. "We limit access to our data. We restrict. We do not remove the clip from public spaces—too late for that—but we stop internal propagation that lets reports be pulled into headlines with our names on them."
Rio watched him for a long breath. "You're acting like the Curators."
"I'm acting like someone who doesn't want the entire city to feed this thing as a spectacle," Zane said. "If every node routes to a trending story, the reinforcement curve spikes. We have to be careful with our own channels."
Kaito leaned forward until his elbows hit the formica. "So we hide evidence while the city screams?"
"We manage what can be managed," Zane said. "We aren't hiding the truth. We're preventing a cascade."
The argument had the brittle logic of people trying to wedge ethics into operations. It was not tidy. It left ragged edges.
Across the diner, the TV showed a scroll of the mother's face alongside a map of the east loop. A pundit spoke in a steady voice and used the word negligence like a tool. Hashtags began to form. A local activist posted the clip to their feed with ten thousand shares within minutes and a caption that read: Mothers deserve to know. Children deserve safety.
"Look at the comments," Rio said. "People are demanding answers. They want names. They want a villain."
"They want a story," Kaito said. "They want to pin a face to their fear."
"Faces sell," Zane said. "And selling attention is the pattern's diet."
The pressure turned private quickly. Zane stepped away from the counter and ducked into the corridor behind the kitchen where the diner chained a service door with a cheap padlock. He slid a call across to his supervisor and kept his voice flat.
"This is Zane. You need to pull external simulation access. Lock the repo. Flag the footage as restricted. No internal sharing beyond executive oversight."
There was static on the line and a delay long enough to feel like a measure. Then a voice answered: "Understood. We have to coordinate. If the clip is public, removal looks like a cover-up."
"Then we don't remove public material," Zane said. "We just quarantine our systems."
"Someone's already scraping," the voice said.
Zane let out a breath that tasted of resin. "Then speed up. Initiate a paper push. Get registrars to hold copies offline. We need distributed physical proof so the narrative isn't only in feeds."
He hung up and leaned against the wall, feeling the legal shapes of his job crumple into moral fog. The corridor smelled of fried oil and cleaner. The hum of the diner filtered in like a distant radio. He pressed his thumb into his palm until the ache receded a degree.
When he returned to the table, Kaito's jaw was set. Rio's eyes had gone glass for a second and then returned.
"You shut our internal access," Kaito said.
"I did," Zane said. "I didn't report the full simulation run to the chain."
"You didn't report it?" Rio's voice was the cool edge that comes before a cut.
Zane's shoulders tightened. "No. I didn't. I closed the simulation window and wrote a terse memo to exec with the redacted summary. The full dataset—probabilities, intermediate runs—stays local."
Kaito felt the air thin in a way that made him taste old solder. "You hid our worst case analysis."
"I didn't hide it to lie," Zane said. "I hid it so we wouldn't give a script to the public that they'd weaponize to make us the villain. If our simulations show catastrophic cascade probabilities, and the Curators leak that, people will panic. Panic feeds the pattern worse than confusion."
Rio's hand went to her mouth and then away. She had been silent but not passive; her silence had been the slow counting of costs. "We have to tell oversight if the probabilities exceed threshold," she said. "We are not just technicians; we are custodians. There are protocols."
"I told exec," Zane said. "I told them enough to get action—access locks, paper pushes. I didn't send them the raw runs. Not until we control distribution."
Kaito's breathing shortened. "You're playing judge."
"I'm buying time," Zane said. "Call it what you want."
They argued in small, clipped sentences because the room was too small for a longer fight. Around them the feed kept spinning; the mother's face became a demand the city couldn't unsee. Comment streams threaded through their conversation like a third presence—voices that claimed to be the citizens yet were anonymous and hungry.
A push notification chimed and all three looked at their phones at once. The clip had been amplified by a regional influencer and now had an overlay of outrage with a million comments piling under it. Some people shared medical advice. Some cast blame. Some made jokes that hardened into cruelty.
Guilt began to pool in Zane like a warm liquid. It tasted wrong. For all his tactical thinking, he couldn't erase the prickle that ran along his spine when he imagined the mother watching the feed and seeing strangers narrate her child's suffering.
"They'll ask for heads," Rio said. "They'll ask for names. They will go to the people they think manage this stuff."
"And if naming causes more nodes to learn?" Zane said. "If naming gives the pattern new anchors?"
"Then we take a different calculated risk," Kaito said. "But you can't withhold analysis forever. Secrets mutate."
Zane's jaw worked. He had been the one to set containment tactics in motion, the calm face in the lab when graphs spat back impossible outcomes. Now his own caution had become a cost. He thought of the ventilator's slow count, of the simulation's red tail that had spread like a stain. He tasted guilt sharp as copper.
"Okay," he said finally. "I'll send the full run to oversight. But we do it encrypted, with a distribution plan and a press buffer. We control the narrative as much as possible."
Rio nodded, but her eyes did not soften. "You better be precise."
He drafted the transmission with hands that didn't trust themselves. He attached the run but wrapped it in a wrapper that required executive keys and a follow-up meeting within the hour. He added a cover note that explained the models and the risks. When he hit send, a small part of him felt exposed in a way he had tried to avoid.
The feed continued to swell. A clip of the mother's face looped on every screen in the diner; viewers left messages to her—some kind, many cruel. The piling comments made a sound that could almost be heard: the soft, relentless patter of attention.
Kaito watched the scrolling text and felt anger come up slow and thick. "We did not make this to be a weapon," he said. "WHOEVER did this—"
"Stop," Rio said. She had both hands flat on the table now, fingers splayed like someone bracing herself against falling. "We will find names. We will make a record. But we shut access because we need to get control of our own leaks. Not because we want to hide culpability."
Zane closed his eyes for a second and when he opened them the guilt was there in plain sight. "I am sorry," he said. "I wanted to keep people safe. I thought controlling our flows would limit harm. Now it looks like hiding."
"It looks like hiding because we're clumsy," Kaito said. "We are clumsy and human and we've been making decisions with incomplete maps."
The clip kept playing. The child's hum threaded through the room like a thing you couldn't scrub. The comments swelled; strangers named harm and weapons and corruption in ways that felt both right and wrong.
Outside, the city shifted. The Curators issued a statement that smelled of procedure and delay. "We will cooperate with investigations," their spokesperson said on the morning feeds. The public demanded more than that. They wanted names. They wanted to be fed certainty.
Zane sat very still. He had pulled a lever and now watched the machinery he had set in motion chew through the city. The ethical choice he had made—constriction of access—had birthed a new guilt. He had hoped to trade worst-case spectacle for containment. Instead he had created a flashpoint.
He wondered if any of them could walk back the way they had come: through corridors of servers, into the cheap diner's humidity, into evenings where the three of them ate rice off paper plates and pretended the world could be repaired with slow work. He did not know.
For the first time since the simulations began, Zane felt the shape of consequence as a personal weight, not an abstract axis on a graph. The viral clip had weaponized human attention. His containment had looked like silence. His silence looked like cowardice. He had to answer that aloud, to his team and to a city that was beginning to demand it.