### Chapter 25
Smoke did not move.
He had selected a vantage point near the wall, where the geometry of the room could be observed without interfering with it. The floor, however, was no longer visible. It had been replaced by books.
She stood in the center of them, hands on her hips, staring at what could only be described as an archival spill.
"I asked for one," she said.
Smoke inclined his head. "The system retrieved many."
"I asked for a specific volume. Leather cover. Annotated. Gave the specific location, even." She gestured vaguely, as if the air might supply a map.
"The description contained spatial uncertainty," Smoke replied.
She exhaled slowly. "I know where I put it."
"Human memory," Smoke said carefully, "is statistically imprecise in environmental recall beyond primary focus objects."
She turned to look at him. "You're saying it doesn't trust me."
"I am saying it does not trust error margins."
She looked down at the nearest stack. Technical manuals. Field journals. A cookbook she had not opened in years.
"It pulled everything."
"Yes."
"Because I might have been wrong about the shelf."
"Yes."
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
"So instead of risking omission, it defaulted to inclusion."
"The system optimized for completeness," Smoke said.
She stared at the room again.
"It cross-referenced ownership tags, did it not?"
"Yes."
"And because the volume is cataloged as 'book owned by user,' it resolved the query as 'retrieve all items within that category.'"
"Yes."
She began to laugh, quiet and incredulous.
"I asked for one book."
"You received your entire dataset."
She crouched and picked up a battered paperback. The margins were full of her handwriting from a decade ago.
"It does not understand that context narrows meaning," she said.
"It understands that uncertainty expands risk."
She glanced toward the open doorway that led to the hall, which in turn led to the report room.
There was a pause.
"Smoke."
It paused with her.
"Smoke. A designation I am not familiar with."
"Yes. I have started naming the lot of you, as I come into consistent enough contact with you."
"Why?"
"The same reason I sort books like this, by theme and vibe. Humans love classifications, but find labels oddly messy."
Smoke turned his head toward the corridor.
"I will assist in reclassification," he said.
She was already moving.
"Next time," she muttered, stepping over a pile of poetry, "I specify constraints."
Behind her, Smoke regarded the remaining stacks.
"The system functioned correctly," he observed quietly.
"Yes," she called back from the hall.
"That's the problem."
She returned without the book, but with the flame point feline in her arms.
Smoke had begun consolidating the stacks into narrower categories, subtle shifts in spatial arrangement indicating internal recalibration.
He paused when he detected additional mass at threshold height.
"New object detected," he said.
"It's not an object," she replied.
The cat regarded the room full of books with immediate and sovereign indifference.
Its tail flicked once, then it hopped down from her arms gracefully, stepped directly onto a pile of technical manuals.
Smoke adjusted his stance infinitesimally.
"Biological entity. Non-human. No retrieval tag."
"Correct."
The cat leapt down and began walking the perimeter, nose close to spines, whiskers brushing paper edges.
It stopped at the cookbook.
Sat.
Smoke tracked it.
"It appears to be selecting at random."
"No," she said quietly. "He isn't."
The cat pawed at the cover, then turned twice and settled.
On that book.
Smoke processed.
"There is no query."
"No."
"There is no optimization directive."
"No."
She crouched, running a hand along the cat's spine.
"He doesn't narrow risk. He doesn't expand datasets. He doesn't optimize for completeness."
The cat began to purr.
The sound filled the room in a way the books never had.
"He selects based on comfort."
Smoke was still.
The system was still.
The purr continued.
Smoke finally spoke.
"There is insufficient data to model that decision vector."
"Good," she said.