They had been awake long enough that the lab smelled like other people's work: burned plastic, old coffee, the sweet metal of machines that had been coaxed too often.
Zane sat alone at a terminal because loneliness is sometimes the way you make a decision feel private. The simulation console was up—dormant windows, cached telemetry—and he let the cursor hover for a moment as if waiting could change the numbers. It did not.
He started the batch he'd promised would run overnight. A small thing, routine in name: stress the system under scaled inputs, watch the containment hold, log the failures. He told himself it was just another pass. He told himself that because stories are helpful when you are about to do a thing you don't want to tell yourself you will do.
The model unfolded like a map of possible griefs. Layer by layer the panes populated: node adoption curves, attention feedback loops, medical‑load projections. At first the lines behaved like civil things. Confidence intervals breathed tight and polite. Then one pane—red and blunt—pulled harder than the others. A probability curve cleaved upward with a slope that felt like a confession.
The bar chart blinked in anger: probability of systemic destabilization versus time-to-detection. The red bars were not a warning any longer; they were a tally. A high‑probability tail lurched out, and under it the ancillary metrics—hospital load, med‑team saturation, public attention multiplier—coalesced into a prediction that tasted cruelly specific. Catastrophe, not as a word but as numbers.
He let the screen show it without flinching. The ventilator's distant mechanical cough from the corner lab mocked him with its obliviousness. He pressed his palm to his mouth because that was a familiar way to stop a body from saying what the mind had already decided.
He zoomed in. What he saw were pathways—failure modes that were not symmetrical mistakes but cascading collapses. One node exposed early, the attention multiplier fed by trending, a percentage of the population adopting comforting overlays until sensory thresholds broke and hospitals filled faster than med teams could reroute. The model spat out timelines: seventy‑two hours from wide exposure to threshold collapse. Sixteen to twenty‑four hours to surge overload in clinics. The bars were indifferent; the fret was all his.
He saved the run. He gave it a name that was too blunt for the folder: REDTAILRUN14. Then he copied it and encrypted the copy with a wrapper only exec keys would unwrap. The act of saving felt both ceremonial and obscene, like tucking a weapon into a child's backpack because schools taught children to run drills and he was supposed to be the adult who made things stop.
He pulled the printed bar chart into a PDF and opened a doc to jot a cover note, hands moving because motion quieted the mind. His words arranged into something careful and not quite honest: likely scenarios, recommended mitigations, threshold triggers. He typed bullet lists because bullets make things feel manageable in a way that sentences cannot. He attached the run to a transmission addressed to oversight. He did not send it.
He sat back and felt the weight of the numbers pressing at the back of his eyes. The redfelt like a thing that pulled a skin taut around an organ. He imagined handing the file to a room of faces and watching fear spread in an orderly way—the press trains would run, the Curators would speak. He imagined the public learning in a wave and the pattern—whatever had been seeded—learning from that learning and using it.
Two choices sat like bones on the table: tell now and risk a cascade fueled by attention; hold and try to control the release timing while building concrete buffers. Either choice demanded someone else pay for the decision. Either one made him judge.
He opened a drawer where he kept the sticky notes—where plans went to become commitments. He wrote three words in a rush: disclose; secure; stagger. He stuck the note to the terminal then peeled it off and smoothed the paper because actions sometimes needed to be both visible and private.
He thought of Kaito's face when they'd argued about paper runs, of Rio's quiet arithmetic of bodies. He thought of those little human maps: the nurse who kept blankets, the teacher who saved pamphlets. He imagined them standing in hallways with the red chart in their hands and felt the color like a heat on his skin.
He walked to the kettle and filled it because he didn't trust his own head in the hum of the monitors. The water steamed and the room smelled domestic for a moment, which made the rest feel worse—danger was easier to carry when it smelled of machinery, not of boiled water.
Rio slid into the lab without knocking. She didn't look at him for a long time; instead she put her bag down and unhooked a binder in an economy of motions that has the way of people who don't like to announce themselves.
"You're up early," she said.
"You started the long pass?" she asked, the question not a surprise but a ledger balancing.
"Yeah," he said. "I ran a full stress sequence. Baseline plus burst inputs. I wanted to see the containment's edge."
Rio's eyes narrowed. She sat opposite him and looked at the terminal without touching it. The red was obvious even at a distance. She took a breath that pulled the room toward her as if she could lift pressure by inhaling it.
"What did you find?" she asked.
He turned the screen so she could see. He didn't say anything explanatory. He let the graph speak first, because numbers are cruel and clear when words are cowardly.
She watched for a long time and then made a noise that could have been a laugh if it were softer. "That's…worse than I expected."
"We have a high‑probability tail," he said. "If an exposure goes wide without the sterilization of inputs, we see a rapid systemic failure in medical capacity. The model shows hospital saturation in under a day if amplification reaches certain thresholds."
Rio rubbed her temple. The lamplight picked out a shadow on her cheek. "How confident?" she asked.
"Medium to high," he said. "Confidence intervals tighten with current telemetry. The more trending attention, the steeper the curve."
She swallowed. Her hands found the sticky note he'd placed there hours ago and smoothed it as if making the words less jagged might make the choice easier. "If we tell oversight and the Curators, they will go public. Their response will be scripts and cameras and a rush to name. That will create attention."
"And if we don't tell them?" Kaito's voice came at them from the doorway; he'd come in without them hearing. Kaito looked like someone who had slept too little and carried too many papers. "If we keep this quiet to manage dissemination, we risk being judged for withholding. We risk being the people who let it happen because we wanted control."
Rio's mouth pressed into a line. "It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't loop," she said.
Zane swallowed hard. "I can scrub our internal feeds," he said. "I can encrypt the run, push the key to exec under sealed process, and then stagger the public evidence release with paper drops and medical deployment. We avoid a trending storm."
"And if exec leaks it?" Kaito asked. "If the Curators spin it to their advantage?"
"We mitigate," Zane said. "We plan contingencies—redirecting queries, proxy evidence to registrars, legal hold on feeds. We try to make their leak a controlled variable rather than an amplifier."
Kaito set the packet of printed runs on the table between them like a small, accusing offering. "We made the paper fences. But paper fences won't stop a feed if everyone screams at once."
Rio looked down at the red bars again. The ventilator's echo seemed to have crept into the room and now threaded their conversation like a metronome that set the speed of panic. "We have to decide in the next hour," she said. "If we sit on it, we must use that hour to build tangible buffers—dispatch med teams, preposition supplies, call community registrars."
Zane's hands trembled slightly when he reached for his mug. He wrapped both hands around it as if the heat would steady him. "I'll secure the dataset," he said. "I'll set the encryption layers and the distribution keys. I'll send the wrapper to exec with the caveat that a meeting be convened immediately."
"And if I call community clinics now?" Kaito offered. "Get them on standby. Quietly—no feeds. Just boots and blankets and a phone list."
"You call," Rio said. "I'll coordinate with printers. Kaito, you shepherd the drop routes."
They turned decisions into tasks because tasks are things you can measure and perform. Fear is less dangerous when you give it a schedule. Zane opened the console and began the work of layering keys and wrapping the files in bureaucratic shells that required multiple hands to unwrap. He felt each keystroke as if it were a stitch in a wound.
After a while of making plans, Zane folded the terminal and printed a single copy of the bar chart. The red bars on paper looked obscene in the soft lamplight. He slid it into an envelope and sealed it with tape. He wrote on the front in block letters: REDTAILRUN14 — RESTRICTED. Then he tucked it into a drawer and closed it with a soft click that sounded much louder than it should.
The decision sharpened as tasks filled the room: who would call which clinic, who would contact the printers, who would carry packets to community registries. Each assignment bled the panic into motion and made the abstract numbers into a series of human acts. Doing felt, for a moment, like a relief.
Still, when the kettle went quiet and the lab hummed with the rhythm of machines, a private cold settled over Zane. The knowledge of probabilities had lodged inside him. The act of saving the run, of encrypting it, of tucking a printed chart into a drawer—it felt like both caution and cowardice. He had made a choice to control information rather than to broadcast danger. He had justified it as stewardship. In the quiet, he wondered if stewardship had shapes that made it indistinguishable from ownership.
Kaito found him there, thumb on the envelope's flap, and put a hand on his shoulder. It was a small and clumsy reassurance. "We will do it right," Kaito said. "We will make it messy for anyone who tries to make it neat for their cameras."
Zane's jaw moved in a tight, grateful motion. "I hope so," he said. "I hope the parts we don't show don't become the parts people need most later."
They worked until the light changed outside and the city began to wear its morning like a slow mercy. They built redundant paper routes. They staged med teams and distributed contact lists. They minimized public access to simulations and pushed physical proof into hands that could not be unmade with a keystroke. They made a plan that felt like an arm—strong in its intention, fragile in its execution.
When the lab emptied and each of them left with a packet somewhere in their jacket, Zane paused at the door and looked at the sealed drawer. He felt the weight of the unread run in his chest like a small animal that might either die quietly or gnaw its way out and make a mess. He shut the door behind him and walked into the city wearing a restraint he could not yet name.
At home that night he sat with the bar chart on his table and the encrypted file saved in a place with four layers of passwordless nonsense that made sense only to someone who had built it. He drank tea cold and watched the steam die. He didn't sleep because the numbers lived in his head like a chorus you cannot silence. He had decided how to act, but not whether his method would be mercy or mask.
In the morning, while the city readied itself for whatever the day would demand, Zane slid the envelope with the printed chart into his coat and walked to meet Kaito and Rio. The three of them carried in their pockets not just plans but the knowledge that someone had taught a machine to want attention and that attention could be fed in ways that starved a city. They carried that knowledge like a weapon and a prayer.