The ambulance rocked gently over a pothole.
Seori sat in the back, checking gear as her partner, Hyun, hummed tunelessly up front.
Oxygen tanks: full.
Med packs: stocked.
Portable node: humming.
[OBJECT: MOBILE_HEALING_NODE_4.][STATUS: IDLE.]
Her new badge pulsed faintly whenever she looked at it.
Hyun glanced back in the rearview mirror.
"You okay?" he asked. "You're doing that stare-at-the-middle-distance thing."
"System pushed a weird permission at me this morning," she said.
"Oh?" he said. "What, like Tower training?"
"City side," she said. "Something about 'manual evaluation' when nodes glitch."
He whistled.
"Wow," he said. "They finally figured out you yell loud enough to make the machines listen."
"It's not funny," she said. "If I screw up, people die."
"If the System screws up, people die," he said. "You? You've got a better track record than most of the UI prompts."
She didn't answer.
Dispatch crackled in their ears.
"Unit 4, respond to Gray-3 Block 9, construction site collapse. Multiple injuries, possible entrapment. Node reports worth-function delay. Fire and Guard en route."
Seori's badge pinged sharply.
[ALERT: LOCAL NODE WORTH_FUNCTION TIMEOUT.][REQUEST: CITY EVALUATOR INPUT.]
Her stomach dropped.
"Of course," she whispered. "First day."
Hyun flipped the siren on.
"Let's make you earn your fancy new badge," he said.
They rolled up to chaos.
Half-finished tower, scaffolding twisted, dust hanging in the air like fog. Workers milling, shouting. A crane cable swung lazily overhead, cut loose from its load: three sections of prefab flooring now lay jagged on the ground.
Fire crews were already there, marking off zones.
A portable barrier flickered around one side where some kind of thaumic equipment had shorted.
Seori jumped out, grabbed her bag, and jogged toward the makeshift command cluster.
The site foreman was yelling at an officer.
"—my best structural guy is under there!" he shouted. "If he dies, we can't keep this project on schedule, the whole block gets delayed—"
"The node is still sorting priorities," the officer said. "We can't just—"
Seori's badge flared.
[MOBILE_HEALING_NODE_4 – REQUESTING PRIORITY INPUT.][QUEUED PATIENTS (SCANNED THROUGH DEBRIS):]
Status windows blinked in front of her.
[P1: Worker, M, 52, structural engineer – CRUSH INJURIES, INTERNAL BLEEDING. PROGNOSIS W/O INTERVENTION: POOR (20%).][P2: Worker, F, 24, laborer – LEG CRUSH, STABLE BUT BLEEDING. PROGNOSIS: FAIR (65%).][P3: Guard, M, 30s, responder – HEAD WOUND, UNCONSCIOUS. PROGNOSIS: MODERATE (50%).]
The node's worth function log was a mess.
[EVAL: P1 ECONOMIC VALUE HIGH, AGE HIGH. P2 ECONOMIC VALUE LOW, AGE LOW. P3 CITY SERVICE VALUE MEDIUM.][ROOT_CHANNEL: UNAVAILABLE (LATENCY).][FALLBACK: …]
Then it hit timeout.
[AWAITING EXTERNAL INPUT.]
Seori felt a strange calm settle over her.
This was what she'd always done, just with a UI now codifying it.
She spoke out loud, partly to ground herself, partly so the officers nearby knew what she was doing.
"Okay," she said. "P1: engineer. P2: young worker. P3: Guard."
Hyun hovered behind her.
"The engineer's boss sure thinks he matters most," he said quietly.
"Everyone thinks their favorite matters most," she said. "Doesn't mean they're wrong. Doesn't make them automatically right, either."
She pictured the building.
The block.
"Engineer goes," she said. "High skill, low redundancy. You lose him, it's not just one person—it's delays, cut corners, potential future collapses."
Hyun nodded.
"Guard?" he asked.
"Best chance of saving him is fast bleed control and clearing his airway," she said. "Fire team can do that with basic kits."
"And the younger worker?" he asked.
"Her risk of death is lower," she said. "But if we ignore her too long, she loses the leg. That's a life changed forever."
Her badge waited.
"Full node on P1," she said, firmly. "Then we pivot to P2 fast. P3 gets basic support from whoever's closest."
She pushed the priorities into the node.
[MANUAL PRIORITY: P1 > P2 > P3.][JUSTIFICATION: SKILL NETWORK IMPACT + SALVAGEABLE FUNCTION + SECONDARY SUPPORT AVAILABLE FOR OTHERS.]
The node accepted.
[ACKNOWLEDGED.]
Healing field indicators flared where firefighters had tagged P1's location. The portable node rolled itself on motorized wheels toward that zone, locking onto the engineer's faint life-signs through the rubble.
The foreman grabbed Seori's arm.
"You picking my guy?" he demanded.
"Yes," she said. "Because he's the one who keeps this whole skeleton from falling down next time. Not because you yelled loudest."
He shut up, chastened despite himself.
She ran with Hyun toward where P2's signal flickered, already shouting for tourniquets and stabilizers.
Minutes blurred.
Shouting.
Dust.
The grunt of effort as workers levered concrete slabs off trapped limbs.
Her badge fed her tiny updates.
[P1: STABILIZING.][P2: BLEEDING CONTROLLED.][P3: CONSCIOUSNESS REGAINING – BASIC FIRST AID SUFFICIENT.]
When they finally loaded the engineer into the ambulance, his HP bar had crawled from 20% to 55%.
He wheezed.
"Didn't… think I'd die under my own building," he rasped.
"You're not dying today," Seori said. "Paperwork's a worse fate anyway."
He barked a weak laugh that turned into a cough.
At the hospital, the receiving node flagged his case with a small, new tag:
[CITY_EVALUATOR_OVERRIDE: PRESENT.]
Beta watched from a distance.
[NOTE: NEW CITY EVALUATOR – DECISION 0001.][METRICS: PRIORITIZED SKILL NETWORK & MINIMIZED LONG-TERM DISABILITY.][VERDICT: POSITIVE – LOCAL STABILITY.]