The pall of Yuexi's call lingered for days, a low-pressure system in their Vienna apartment. Their shared work on the symposium presentation felt hollow, performative. How could they stand in the grand Festsaal and talk about "detecting the garden's loss" when they could still hear the tremor in a friend's voice asking if her own garden was already dead?
Lin Xiaoyang found himself staring at their dried clay sculpture—the container and the watershed. It suddenly looked arrogant. A tidy metaphor for a messy, terrifying reality.
Shen Qinghe retreated into a different kind of silence. Not the cold, analytical silence of disagreement, but a deep, troubled processing. Xiaoyang would catch her staring blankly at her code or her notes, her fingers still. She was recompiling her entire ethical framework in light of a single, devastating data point: direct human suffering.
The institute's routine continued, oblivious. They attended seminars, nodded in collision group meetings, but their participation was ghostly. Maya noticed. After a particularly listless session where even Volkov's gloom seemed subdued, she cornered them in the hallway.
"The ghost followed you home, didn't it?" she asked softly, her perceptiveness cutting through the academic haze.
Xiaoyang just nodded, too tired to explain.
"It always does,"Maya sighed. "When you make art—or science—about pain, you invite the pain in for tea. It stains the cups." She patted Qinghe's stiff arm. "The clay isn't the answer. It's just the question, made physical. The answer… that's harder."
The answer, or at least the direction of it, arrived from an unexpected quarter: Professor Volkov himself. He rarely sought anyone out, but one afternoon he appeared at the open door of their office, holding two small, chipped enamel coffee cups from the institute's ancient machine.
"A moment," he stated. It wasn't a request.
They cleared space on a desk. He sat, placing the cups before them with a soft clink. For a long moment, he said nothing, just studied their faces with his weary, all-seeing eyes.
"I read your draft," he began, his voice a low rumble. "The 'Ethical Watershed.' It is a good fence. Strong. It will keep out the bureaucrats, the opportunists. The men who see a new tool and think only of where to point it."
He took a slow sip of his terrible coffee. "But it will not keep out the fear. You have discovered this."
It wasn't a question. Qinghe's gaze dropped to her untouched cup. Xiaoyang felt a surge of grim recognition. "Our friend… she used our framework to diagnose her own relationship. It terrified her."
"Of course," Volkov said, as if this were the most obvious outcome in the world. "You gave her a name for a silence she had only felt. A name is a powerful thing. It can be a key. Or a coffin." He leaned forward slightly. "In my country, we had many names for things that were better left unsaid. To name the unspoken fear was to make it real, to give the state a handle on it. Your tool… it is a naming machine."
The analogy was chilling. "So we should never have built it?" Xiaoyang asked, the despair of the last few days leaking into his voice.
Volkov shook his head, a slow, deliberate motion. "No. The naming must happen. The silence is where the real ghost grows. In the dark, without a name, it becomes a monster." He fixed them with his gaze. "Your error is not in the naming. It is in what you offered after the name. You gave your friend a map of a haunted house and a timestamp for the haunting. What did you give her to… live in the house? To maybe, quiet the ghost?"
They were silent. They had given her nothing. Only academic regret.
"The true work," Volkov continued, his finger tapping the desk for emphasis, "is not the detector. It is the… the watering can." He seemed pleased with the metaphor. "You find the dry spot, the place where the meaning has died. The tool shows you where it is. Good! Now, what do you do? You do not just point and say 'here is the death.' You ask: what could grow here now? What tiny, brave thing could be planted in this barren patch?"
He looked from Qinghe to Xiaoyang. "Your 'Watershed' chapter builds a dam against misuse. But where is the irrigation system? Where is the guide for planting? You stop the poison from spreading, but you do not offer the antidote."
The shift in perspective was seismic. They had been so focused on preventing harm from their knowledge, they had neglected the possibility of actively using that knowledge for repair. The ghost detector could also be a… diagnostics kit for emotional arid zones.
"The protocol," Qinghe whispered, her mind visibly racing. "The Fault State Handshake. It is a watering can. For our system. A small, specific protocol for repair when a fault is detected."
"Exactly!" Volkov's eyes held a rare spark. "You have a tiny one, for two people. Now think bigger. Your tool finds the dry, dead garden in the correspondence of two souls. What is the equivalent of a handshake for them? Not a prescription. A… a suggestion. A prompt. 'Here, you stopped talking about shared future. Here, the metaphors diverged. What small, true thing could you say to each other now about a hope, however tiny?'"
It was a revelation. They didn't need to abandon their work or cloak it in endless caveats. They needed to complete it. To pair the diagnostic with a therapeutic protocol, however humble.
Volkov stood, his old bones creaking. "The world is full of people who are very good at finding cracks. Historians, critics, cynics like me. We are archaeologists of failure. You?" He gestured to their screens, their clay sculpture. "You are engineers. Do not just map the ruin. Show us how to lay one new stone. However small."
He left, leaving behind the two cooling cups of coffee and a completely transformed problem space.
For hours after, they talked, the energy that had been drained by dread now returning as a fierce, new purpose. They sketched, argued, iterated—but it was the good kind of argument, the kind where they were pulling in the same direction.
What would a "watering can" module for Veritas Core look like? It couldn't be advice. It had to be a catalyst. A prompt generator.
"When a significant anchor metaphor shift is detected," Qinghe proposed, her eyes alight, "the tool could surface the key contrasting phrases. Not as a verdict, but as a mirror: 'You began speaking of 'bridges' here. They were still speaking of 'the garden.''"
"And then," Xiaoyang jumped in, "it could offer a neutral, open-ended prompt. Something like: 'If you were to write a sentence to them today that contained both a 'bridge' and the 'garden,' what would it be?'"
It was simple. Almost naive. It wouldn't save a relationship. But it might create a moment of conscious, shared acknowledgment. A single, deliberate act of watering the dry patch their own tool had identified.
They began designing it that night. Not for the symposium, not for the paper. For Yuexi. For anyone else who might stumble upon their ghost detector and feel only the chill. They would build a tiny, fragile watering can and attach it to the side.
The work felt different. Lighter. Purposeful. They were no longer just custodians of a dangerous truth; they were stewards, trying to bundle a seed packet with the surveyor's map of barren land.
Later, as they prepared for bed, Qinghe spoke quietly. "Volkov was correct. We were engineers of detection. We must now become engineers of… reconnection. However speculative."
"The most important protocol," Xiaoyang agreed, taking her hand. "Not just for the faults between others. But for when the work itself creates a fault between us."
She squeezed his hand, a firm, warm pressure. "Acknowledged. We will draft it. The 'Watering Can Protocol.' For ghosts in machines, and for cracks in our own shared code."
The ghost was still in the living room. But for the first time since Yuexi's call, they weren't just staring at it in dread. They were looking at each other, holding a shared, fragile blueprint for a vessel that could, perhaps, carry a few drops of hope into the haunted places. It wouldn't fix everything. But it was a start. A single, deliberate stone.