The undercity Node settled back into dormancy.
Not fully asleep.
Drowsy.
A new comment appended itself in its log, written in an old admin voice that might have been a system echo of long-dead intent.
"Found a local. Good instincts. Leaving more knobs in human hands."
Kael stared at the line, goosebumps rising.
"Mira," he said quietly. "I think the Node… reclassified itself. Less 'controller,' more 'assistant.'"
"Good," she said. "Maybe we can convince more of them to do that."
He climbed back up.
Seori was sitting on an overturned bucket, sipping water, eyes distant.
"You okay?" he asked.
She looked at him.
"You're more than an analyst," she said.
He froze.
"What makes you say that?" he deflected.
She tapped her temple.
"When the Node woke up, it wasn't just me in there," she said. "I felt… other arguments. Other vectors. One of them felt like the pattern from that hospital story with the extra triage. That was you, right?"
He cursed internally.
"Maybe," he said. "I nudge things sometimes."
"Executor," she said, testing the word.
He flinched.
She saw.
"Relax," she said. "If I wanted to file a report, I'd have done it before talking to a sewer Node with you."
He laughed once, shaky.
"Fair," he said.
She looked back toward the hole.
"This is too big for one person," she said. "Or two. Or ten."
"Yeah," he said.
"So we… share the load," she said. "You handle Towers. I handle streets. We both yell at Nodes when they forget kids exist."
He smiled.
"Deal," he said.
They shook on it like normal people making a neighborhood pact, not multi-vector agents negotiating the ethics of a city's underbelly.
Beta recorded it anyway.
[INFORMAL ALLIANCE: EXECUTOR_RYU_KAEL + CITY_EVALUATOR_SEORI.][EFFECT ON FUTURE DECISIONS: TO BE DETERMINED.]
As they walked back toward the cordon, Seori glanced sidelong at him.
"One question," she said.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"How do you… live with it?" she asked. "Knowing the System's watching your every moral flinch?"
He exhaled.
"Short answer?" he said. "I pretend it isn't. And I focus on whoever's right in front of me. Transit guy. Old woman. Engineer. Kids in tunnels."
"Long answer?" she asked.
"Therapy," he said dryly. "And annoying my sister until she yells me back into shape."
Seori smiled.
"I'll settle for the short answer," she said.
That evening, in their apartment, Haneul listened to Kael's rundown and nodded.
"Good call," she said. "Let the undercity Node learn its ethics from a woman who knows where the pipes actually leak, not from you and your Tower trauma."
"Rude but accurate," he said.
Her shard hummed, carrying the new pattern across the fragment network.
[UPDATE: "CITY_EVALUATOR_LOCAL" VECTOR – TRUSTED.]
In ADMIN_0's long-dormant legacy Node, the EVAL_SHARD_DECISION method quietly added a line:
// If decision involves undercity / infrastructure: // consult CITY_EVALUATOR vectors when available.
Another tiny weight.
Another small shift.
Worth, still imperfect, kept evolving.
One decision at a time.