The warning came in the middle of the night.
Not a siren.
Not a news alert.
A System tone, low and unfamiliar, vibrating in every UI in the region.
Kael snapped awake in his tiny bedroom, heart racing.
[SYSTEM ALERT: REGIONAL LOAD SPIKE.][SOURCE: UNKNOWN.]
He bolted upright and pulled the overlay fully up.
The conflict map went from quietly speckled… to lit.
Not dots.
Bands.
A wave of events ticking up across multiple Towers simultaneously.
Tower 10, 13, 17, 18, and a cluster in a neighboring city.
[TAG: SYNCHRONIZED ANOMALY.]
Haneul stumbled into his doorway, hair a mess, privacy ring glowing faintly.
"Tell me that's not an evacuation tone," she said.
"Not yet," he said. "It's… processing."
Mira's face popped into a group call before he could ping her.
Her background was dark—her own apartment or the TRI office, hard to tell.
"You're both seeing this?" she asked without preamble.
"Yes," Kael said. "What is it?"
Shards answered before she could.
[FRAGMENT NETWORK: ALERT.][CONTEXT: ROOT-LEVEL GLITCH.]
Haneul clutched the doorframe.
Her shard was fully awake now—not active, not flaring, but every line of it lit in Kael's soul-sight.
[FRAGMENT: STATUS – ALERT (LISTENING).]
"Root-level?" Kael repeated. "I thought Root was… dead-ish."
"Dead-ish can still twitch," Mira said grimly. "I've got flags from three Towers and a city node saying their core controllers just hiccuped. A timing desync on an admin channel we didn't even know still ran."
Joon's sleepy voice joined the call, audio only.
"Why are you all awake," he said. "Did the System patch the concept of 'sleep' out while I wasn't looking?"
"Maybe," Haneul said. "We're about to find out."
The alert refined.
[ROOT_CHANNEL: DESYNC / RETRY LOOP.][EFFECT: EVENT TIMERS MISALIGNED, WORTH FUNCTIONS TIMING OUT.]
Beta flooded their UI.
[MORAL_AUDITOR_BETA: STATUS – ELEVATED.][REQUEST TO EXECUTOR(S): STANDBY FOR MANUAL INTERVENTION RECOMMENDATIONS.]
"Manual," Kael repeated. "You mean us."
"Yes," Beta replied, because of course it did.
[YOU HAVE EXISTING PATTERNS FOR 'EMERGENCY TRIAGE.']
Mira inhaled slowly.
"Okay," she said. "Here's the short version: a really old, really central piece of the System's brain just stuttered. That's going to ripple through Towers and city systems both. Auto-worth evaluations will misfire. Watchdog will be busy keeping things from crashing. That leaves Beta, shards… and you."
"Oh good," Haneul said faintly. "We're tech support for god's BSOD."
Kael checked the maps.
Tower 17 was mid-cycle: several parties on Floors 2–6, a deeper team on 12. Tower 13's sealed floor was quiet. Tower 18 was, of course, running its usual "trial" floors.
City-side, a few critical nodes pulsed: transit, hospital, city fire, power grid.
All of them shared one thing.
[WORTH_FUNCTION: INTERMITTENT TIMEOUT.]
"When a worth function times out," Kael said slowly, "what does the System do?"
"Depends," Mira said. "Sometimes it defaults to baseline. Sometimes it freezes the decision. Sometimes it… flips a coin."
"We are not letting it flip coins," Haneul said, voice sharper than he'd heard it in weeks.
Her shard surged in agreement.
[FRAGMENT: ATTITUDE – "NO MORE COINS."]
Beta pushed a condensed task list.
[PRIORITY NODES REQUIRING MANUAL ETHICS OVERRIDE:]– HOSPITAL_HEALING_NODE (GRAY-3).– TRANSIT_EVAC_NODE (GRAY-3).– TOWER_17 EVENT_MANAGER (FLOORS 3–6).– SECONDARY CITY FIRE NODE.
Unknown_3's ID flickered at the edge of the Tower 18 cluster, active.
[EXECUTOR_UNKNOWN_3: ENGAGED WITH T18 EVENT_MANAGER.]
Other Executor IDs flickered faintly at other points—smaller, less defined, but there.
Kael felt something he hadn't in a long time.
Not fear.
Not exactly.
Responsibility, stretched across more than one room, more than one vending machine, more than one transit worker's HP bar.
Haneul slid down the doorframe to sit on the floor, legs folded, fingers pressed to her privacy ring.
"Okay," she said. "We're doing this."
"We?" Kael echoed.
"You need a shard's vector to lean on," she said. "And someone to yell at you if you start prioritizing Tower drop rates over evac routes."
He snorted.
"Fair," he said.
Mira's voice was steady, even if the tightness around her eyes betrayed her tension.
"TRI will handle as much as we can from the official side," she said. "But our tools still rely on System baselines. You two can reach into the gaps where the math stops."
"And Unknown_3 and friends will be doing the same from their floors," Haneul said. "Fun."
Joon yawned.
"Where do you want me?" he asked.
"On standby," Kael said. "If something goes physically wrong near us, I want you between it and my HP bar."
"Best job," Joon said. "I can do that."
Kael flexed his hands.
"Beta," he said. "You give me the list. We start with the hospital. Then transit. Then Towers."
[ACKNOWLEDGED.][COORDINATION MODE: ACTIVE.]
Haneul let her head fall back against the wall, eyes closing.
"Alright, Root ghost," she murmured to her shard. "You wanted humans in the loop. You got us. Let's see if we can keep your corpse from stepping on people while it spasms."
The shard hummed, not in words, but with a strangely focused resolve.
[FRAGMENT: MODE – CO-PILOT.]
Kael sank into the debugger.
The room dimmed.
The System brightened.
Lines of power, nodes, Towers, city grids.
Broken gods and half-awake shards, rival Executors and nervous Observers.
"Local," he whispered, more to himself than anyone.
"We start local," Haneul echoed.
"And if local keeps expanding?" Mira asked quietly.
"Then we pretend it doesn't," Kael said. "Until the job's done."
Beta logged their intent.
[NEW CASE: ROOT_DESYNC_EVENT_01.][PRIMARY HUMAN AGENTS: RYU_KAEL, RYU_HANEUL.][STATUS: IN PROGRESS.]
The world rumbled—quietly, like a train passing under the floorboards of reality.
Kael reached for the first node.
And the System, for once, reached back.