Mira had expected trouble.
She had not expected a boardroom presentation.
TRI didn't really do polished corporate gloss—their "boardroom" was a repurposed lab with too many screens and not enough chairs, and half the people in it were wearing lab coats or stained hoodies.
On one wall, a projection showed last night's triage incident graph: three lines that had not dipped into flatline territory when, by all previous models, one of them should have.
A senior researcher with iron-gray hair, Dr. Kawaguchi, tapped the graph with a stylus.
"Explain this," he said.
Mira resisted the urge to say "it's a miracle" just to see his face.
"Secondary node came online when it shouldn't have," she said instead. "Triage weights shifted transiently. A civilian who would normally be ranked Priority 3 got bumped up to near-parity with the Hunter and child."
"And you didn't trigger it," Kawaguchi said.
"No," she said. "I was observing. Not intervening."
The others in the room shifted.
On the far end, Dr. Rana—younger, brilliant, perpetually pissed—leaned forward.
"Shard influence?" she asked.
"Almost certainly," Mira said. "Haneul's fragment registered a major conflict. So did at least four others, non-local. The system spawned something new to arbitrate."
She flicked her wrist, pulling up Beta's descriptor on the side screen.
"Moral_Auditor_Beta," she said. "A new process. Local scope, for now. Evaluating shard-influenced decisions."
Kawaguchi's eyes narrowed.
"The System spun up an ethics auditor," he said. "Voluntarily."
"Under duress," Mira said. "Conflict noise got too high."
"And you knew about the shard host before this," Rana said. Not quite an accusation. Almost.
"Yes," Mira said. "We were monitoring. Carefully. I recommended observation and slow calibration rather than immediate activation or containment."
"Containment is still on the table," Kawaguchi said. "You have a fractured soul with a Root fragment attached, in a civilian, in a public hospital. That is not a stable configuration."
"No," Mira said. "But neither is trying to rip it out or locking her in a black box until someone 'figures it out.' Admin_0 tried something like that with the Root. We live in the crater."
A murmur ran through the room.
Rana rested her chin on her hand.
"Do you trust them?" she asked. "The Ryus."
Mira considered the question.
"I trust their intentions more than I trust the System's default triage logic," she said. "And more than I trust any cult's. That doesn't make them safe. It makes them… necessary variables."
Kawaguchi snorted softly.
"That sounds like something ADMIN_0 would have said," he said.
"ADMIN_0 also tried to do it alone," Mira said. "Without oversight. We are oversight."
"And if they go rogue?" someone from the back asked.
"Then we observe," Mira said. "We document. We call in people who can stop them. But right now, the only evidence we have is that, given a chance to tilt triage, they chose to save more people, not fewer."
She gestured at the graph.
"You want to punish them for that?" she asked.
Silence.
Kawaguchi shook his head slowly.
"We can't let this spread unchecked," he said. "If shard hosts everywhere start waking nodes and overriding triage, we could destabilize critical systems."
"Or we could fix some of the worst cases," Rana said.
"Or both," Kawaguchi said. "That's what worries me."
He focused back on Mira.
"You keep your Observer tag on them," he said. "Full reports. Full transparency. If Moral_Auditor_Beta flags a negative deviation, I want to know before the bodies pile up."
Mira nodded.
"Understood," she said.
"And Mira," he added. "No more off-the-books field trips. If you're walking into cult warehouses with a shard-linked Executor, I want backups and a plan."
She met his gaze.
"I'll try to schedule my cult encounters in advance," she said dryly.
A few people snorted.
Dismissed, she stepped out into the hallway and leaned back against the wall, exhaling hard.
Her wristband buzzed.
Haneul: Cho says the transit guy is grumpy but alive. I'm calling that a win.
Kael: Beta says we passed the test. For now. Also it keeps calling me a variance source. Rude.
She smiled despite herself.
Mira: Board wanted to know why God's corpse is inventing auditors. Told them the truth: you cheated at triage and nobody died. Keep it that way.
Kael's reply came fast.
No promises, but I'll try to only cheat upwards.
Mira shook her head, half fond, half exasperated.
"You're going to break everything, aren't you," she muttered.
Her Observer tag hummed softly in the back of her mind, feeding her a new flag.
[FLAG: OBSERVER_ATTITUDE – INVESTED.]
"Too late," she added.