There was no debrief after the shattered road.
Finch had simply dismissed them with a terse, "Remain on standby for re-calibration." The message was clear: Kaito's new "Critique" ability was as concerning as it was useful, and he was to be kept in a box until a specific use for it could be determined. The unsettling question Finch had posed—*what stops you from unraveling ours?*—hung in the air of Kaito's construct like a bad smell.
For a subjective week—time being a fluid concept in the Interstice—there were no directives. No drills. Just the sterile, humming quiet of his replica apartment and the oppressive weight of his own thoughts. The grey bowl on his counter, which held his official Resonance, shimmered at a low, steady level. The emerald splinter and Thorne's secret chip sat beside it, inert and accusing.
This was the curated afterlife: periods of surreal, high-stakes violence interspersed with stretches of profound, empty *waiting*. It was in this waiting that the cracks began to show.
It started as an itch. Not a physical one—his body was a memory, a phantom limb of the soul—but a resonant one. A faint, skittering sensation along the edges of his self-perception. He'd be staring at the static painting of the brick wall, and for a fraction of a second, the mortar lines would seem to *twitch*.
He blamed it on fatigue, on the residual shock from the "Neuron" critique. But the itch persisted. It migrated. He felt it in his shoulders, a sense of tiny, unseen pressure points, like grains of sand trapped under his spectral skin.
Then came the dream. Or rather, the **intrusion**.
He wasn't in the apartment. He was on a vast, dark plain under a starless sky. In the distance, he could see the glowing, geometric outlines of other memory-constructs, silent and tomb-like. He was walking, though he had no destination. A profound, existential conflict raged silently around him—not a battle, but the low-grade, perpetual war of the Interstice itself: the Gold Fire'hunger gnawing at the edges of order, the SNIP's curation straining to contain it, the Foundry's scavenger signals pinging in the dark.
And on the dark ground, he saw them. **Ants**. Not real ants, but impressions of movement, of relentless, mindless industry. They were shadows that crawled, forming lines and patterns up the invisible walls of the world. They were marching toward the distant memory-constructs.
He looked down at his own shoulders. From the seam between his soul and the constructed idea of a shirt, small, dark shapes were emerging. **Cockroaches**. Symbols of resilience, of infestation, of something that thrives in the cracks of order. They didn't hurt. They just *crawled*, a silent, living exodus from his own being.
He woke up on the sofa in his apartment, a silent scream lodged in his throat. The room was still. The brick wall was static. But the crawling sensation remained, a phantom limb itch now burned into his resonance.
He was infested. Not by the Gold Fire, not by a Foundry splice. By the **ambient wrongness** of this entire place. His Director's Sight, overused and stressed, was now perceiving the fundamental, insectile busywork of the afterlife—the countless background processes of maintenance, decay, and petty theft that kept this false world running. And it was reading that data as a physical sensation crawling out of *him*.
He needed an exorcist. He needed Thorne.
***
The University quarter was still cloaked in its perpetual autumn. Kaito bypassed the main lab, using a spectrum-code Thorne had quietly added to his slate after their first meeting. It led him to a sub-basement archive, a cavernous space of humming server stacks and floating holograms of dense resonance-pattern analysis.
Dr. Aris Thorne stood before a large holoscreen displaying a magnified image of Gold Fire filament. She didn't turn. "I felt a dissonance ping on my private alert. A signature of unstable perceptual overload. I assumed it was you."
"Something's wrong with me," Kaito said, his voice rough. He didn't bother with pleasantries. "I'm seeing things. Feeling things. Crawling things. After the Childhood Commute."
Thorne turned, her scanner already active. She ran it over him, and her eyebrows lifted. "Resonance bleed. Not external. Internal. Your perceptual layer—the part that runs your Director's Sight—is hyperactive. It's interpreting low-level system noise as sensory data. You're not infested, Santos. You're **over-clocked**."
She gestured to a hard chair. "Sit. Finch has been pushing you too hard, too fast. The Sight isn't a tool; it's a new sense organ. You've strained it. Now it's feeding you garbage data. The 'ants' are likely the endless, repetitive loops of low-level Backgrounder maintenance scripts. The 'cockroaches' are probably fragmented data packets—lost memories, discarded emotions—being recycled through the system's waste management protocols. You're seeing the plumbing. And it's disgusting you."
The clinical explanation was a relief, and somehow worse. "How do I make it stop?"
"You can't unsee it," Thorne said bluntly, powering down her scanner. "But you can learn to filter. Your mind is trying to assign a narrative—'infestation'—to raw data. You need to consciously downgrade the narrative. See it for what it is: infrastructure." She handed him a small data-crystal. "This is a white-noise algorithm. A resonant filter. It won't fix the Sight, but it'll dampen the 'crawling' feedback loop. Use it sparingly. It's a cognitive painkiller, not a cure."
Kaito took the crystal. "And the cure?"
Thorne's expression was grim. "Understanding. You're not just seeing system noise. You're seeing the **cost**. The Gold Fire burns bright. The Foundry makes a mess. But the SNIP… the SNIP runs on this." She pointed at the holoscreen, which now showed a schematic of the ants—countless tiny programs moving data. "Quiet, constant, draining labor. Every curated memory, every stabilized ghost, every enforced narrative requires an ocean of this minute, insectile work. Finch doesn't fight fires; he's a foreman for a termite colony. And you," she looked at him, "are developing the ability to see the termites. It's no wonder he's afraid of you."
The truth of it settled into Kaito, cold and heavy. His Howl disrupted stories. His Bind enforced temporary order. His Critique attacked illogic. And his Sight revealed the cheap machinery behind the scenery. He was becoming a walking threat to the illusion.
"Why are you helping me?" he asked.
"Because the illusion is a cage," Thorne said, her voice dropping. "And because the 'ants' you see… they're not just maintaining the cage. Lately, they've been changing direction. They're not just maintaining. They're *building* something new. And my instruments can't see what. But your broken, over-clocked Sight might."
She pulled up a new hologram—a vast, interconnected map of the Interstice, with the Memory Quarters glowing like cities. "The Foundry's 'Neuron' project is a visible tumor. But there's a deeper shift. A re-routing of fundamental processes. The ants are marching. I need someone who can see where they're going."
Kaito pocketed the filter crystal. The crawling sensation was still there, a constant buzz at the edge of awareness. But now it had a purpose. He wasn't just infested. He was a canary in a coal mine built on lies.
"What do you need me to do?"
"Nothing yet," Thorne said. "Go back. Use the filter. Rest. Let your Sight adjust. The next time Finch sends you out, don't just look at the mission. Look *beneath* it. Look at the ants. Report any unusual patterns to me. Not through official channels. There's a dead-drop resonance node in the 'Lost & Found' of the Central Commute hub. Tag it with this signature." She transmitted a subtle, complex resonance pattern to his slate.
As Kaito left the archive, the filter crystal already softening the jagged edges of the crawling feeling, he realized the shape of his war was changing again. It wasn't just SNIP vs. Gold Fire vs. Foundry. He was now a spy in the walls, listening to the termites, wondering if their new construction was a stronger cage, or the supports for something yet unimagined. The conflict was everywhere, in everything, even in the quiet. And he was no longer just a soldier in it. He was becoming a symptom of it.