TRI's "war room" was just a conference room with too many screens and not enough chairs.
Mira sat on the edge of the table, ankles crossed, as replay feeds cycled: hospital triage, train reroutes, Tower anomalies. Beta's summaries floated in a sidebar like clinical ghosts.
Dr. Kawaguchi watched the graphs with his usual disapproval.
Rana watched with barely-concealed fascination.
A few other senior staff sat scattered around—analysts, field leads, one exhausted-looking admin who kept rubbing his eyes.
On the main display:
[ROOT_DESYNC_EVENT_01 – SUMMARY]– NO TOWER COLLAPSES.– CITY INFRASTRUCTURE: DEGRADED BUT STABLE.– CASUALTIES: WITHIN BASELINE RANGE (SLIGHTLY LOWER).– HUMAN / SHARD / AUDITOR INTERVENTIONS: MULTIPLE.
Kawaguchi tapped the screen with his stylus.
"Explain this line," he said, pointing at a cluster around Gray-3's transit and hospital nodes.
Mira knew which line he meant.
"Executor intervention," she said. "Kael and Haneul. Plus shard network push."
"And this one?" he asked, moving to Tower 18's weird spike.
"Unknown_3," she said. "Our 'trial' Executor. Reined in his own floor before it became a massacre."
A murmur rippled.
"So the freaks did good," the admin muttered.
Mira shot him a flat look.
"They kept a bad night from becoming a disaster," she said. "Yes."
Kawaguchi folded his arms.
"The System glitched at its root," he said. "Some old admin channel stuttered, and instead of falling back cleanly, it made the worth functions hang. That is… unacceptable for something holding up half our civilization."
"That's what happens when you run a corpse on legacy code," Rana said. "Admin_0 tried to patch around it. Now their patches have grown opinions."
"Opinions that currently tilt slightly toward 'fewer people suffer unnecessarily,'" Mira said. "I'm not losing sleep over that part."
"You're losing sleep over the part where we don't control it," Kawaguchi said.
She didn't deny it.
"We can't roll back the shards," she said. "We can't un-spawn Beta. We can map patterns, nudge where possible, and make sure the people in the loop aren't idiots."
"Your chosen not-idiots are a kid with 3 HP and his sister with a hole in her soul," the admin said.
"Have you met most Hunters?" Rana said. "They're overqualified."
A couple of chuckles, quickly smothered.
Kawaguchi looked back at the screen.
"Unknown_3," he said. "Your reports flagged him as 'concerning.'"
"Still is," Mira said. "He believes in pain as pedagogy. But last night, he kept his promise. Civilian nodes went untouched. All his meddling stayed inside Tower 18, and he dialed it down when the glitch made things unfair."
"Because of a promise made in a comment thread on an admin relic," Kawaguchi said flatly.
"If the world wants to run on patch notes and post-it fights, I'll take what I can get," Mira said.
Rana leaned forward.
"The important part," she said, "is that we have evidence now. Not just hunches. Shard-influenced interventions improved outcomes more often than they harmed them. The big risk isn't that they exist. It's that we don't have enough people who know what they're doing when they kick in."
"And you propose… training?" Kawaguchi asked.
"Guidelines," Mira said. "For Observers, for support staff, maybe eventually for emerging Executors. What to touch. What to leave alone. 'Don't yank on Root channels during a desync' and 'stop rerouting heal nodes away from clinics because your floor's dramatic.'"
"An ethics handbook for arguing with a god," the admin muttered.
"Working title," Rana said.
Kawaguchi sighed.
"You'll draft something," he said. "Keep it internal for now. The last thing we need is public hysteria about 'secret ethics controllers.'"
"And when cults start bragging that they're closer to the 'true Root' because of nights like this?" Mira asked.
"Then we make sure our results look better than theirs," he said. "People believe graphs more than sermons."
Mira thought of Grayroot's shrine, his broken shard, his smug non-letter saved in a Node somewhere, waiting.
"Graphs we can do," she said.
Beta pushed a small, Observer-only note.
[MORAL_AUDITOR_BETA: OBSERVATION – HUMAN OVERRIDES IMPROVED SYSTEM PERFORMANCE UNDER ROOT DESYNC.][SUGGESTION: ENCOURAGE DEVELOPMENT OF RESPONSIBLE OVERRIDERS.]
Mira didn't say "we told you so."
But she thought it very loudly.