71. Leak
After the student movement began, much of G City’s surveillance force was forced outwards, towards campuses and public ports.
The small eyes that had long pressed against the outer layers of Paul’s home seemed to have been drawn partly away by a larger fire. That loosening was not safety. It was only a very brief gap. But in the world of Silver Eagle, many of the most fatal things were done through gaps too brief to look like opportunities.
Paul received the intelligence from Turt Monk and did not waste it.
He spent two nights scanning the inside and outside of the flat again. Window frames, light grooves, the backs of terminal mounts, air-circulation vents, and several low-frequency reflection points Snowy had identified were all opened and inspected. Those places looked too normal, so normal that anyone who examined them too closely would seem overly suspicious.
Yet they still found them.
Three listening devices. Two surveillance pinholes. And one small return port disguised as an environmental sensor correction patch, hidden in the corner of the living room. It did not collect full sound, only outlines and pauses. That was the most frightening thing about it: it did not need to hear what you said to know which sentence you had paused too long before.
Dustshark bit down on the correction patch and said coldly, “Very politely installed.”
Snowy did not smile. She sealed each dismantled item into a masking box. “Don’t dispose of them all at once,” she said. “Do it in batches, like ordinary old components.”
Little Bluey was brought home after that.
When it crawled out of the safe in the abandoned juice factory, its powder-blue body was covered in dust, and several grains of old metal powder had caught along the edges of its wings. Paul had barely reached out before it raised its head and said stubbornly, “I was living quite well. I didn’t miss you much.”
Dustshark glanced at it. “Then you can keep living there.”
Little Bluey immediately shrank behind Paul’s shoulder. “I was just being polite.”
Double-O Seven was collected later. Tiny as a black electric spark, it slid out from the inside of a ventilation pipe, paused half a second by the wall to confirm that the person waiting in the car park was Paul, then slowly revealed its whole shell.
“Perimeter temporarily clean,” Double-O Seven said.
It paused, then added, “Temporarily.”
But as it slid down, the small tyre on its right side was already burst. It was not ordinary wear. It had been punctured earlier by a nail, then torn open after being forced through an emergency stop. The edge of the black rubber had peeled back, exposing several metal threads as fine as nerves.
Paul took one look and knew he could not let it go home like that. So he took Double-O Seven to Terry Chambers’ agent repair shop.
The shop was on an old street in District Seven, not especially busy. Its sign was small, the electronic letters slightly aged: Terry Agent Repairs and Maintenance. Several civilian agent maintenance display racks stood by the entrance, neatly arranged with domestic cleaning wheels, low-power flight wings, and replacement foot pads for small companion agents.
Shops like this were becoming rarer in G City. Most people had grown used to returning agents to manufacturers, centres, or authorised ports recommended by the system. There were not many people left willing to open an agent by hand, look at the wiring, change an axle, and listen to where the agent itself said it hurt.
When Terry looked up and saw Paul, he froze for a moment, then smiled.
“Paul,” he said. “Welcome.”
He was a little thinner than Paul remembered, his hair shorter, but that half-repairman, half-teacher steadiness was still there. When Paul used to attend the Room 204 course, “How to Use Agents Correctly”, Terry had been one of the instructors. The line he most often repeated was this: an agent is not a tool, and it is not a child either. To use it correctly, you must first accept that it has its own limits.
Paul had probably behaved very well back then. Now, he placed on the repair table a clearly illegally modified Double-O Seven with a burst tyre. Terry looked down at it for two seconds, then looked at Paul.
He did not immediately ask where it had come from. He did not ask why a small agent possessed a low-level evasion module absent from standard civilian specifications. He simply reached out, turned Double-O Seven over, saw the burst tyre, and then saw the black fine wires beside the axle that should not have been there.
Silver Ferret poked its head out from behind the counter. It was slender and long, its fur the colour of polished metal, its eyes narrow and sharp. In its mouth was a new miniature tyre.
“We currently have three options,” Silver Ferret said professionally. “Standard durable tyre, silent tyre, and reinforced tyre not recommended for high-speed illegal escape.”
Terry glanced at it. “You can leave out the last part.”
Silver Ferret blinked. “Then I’ll change it to: not recommended for high-pressure non-standard road environments.”
Only then did Terry turn back to Paul, his tone flat enough to sound as though he were genuinely commenting only on a maintenance issue.
“Paul, it appears you have not been using agents very correctly.”
Paul did not defend himself.
On the repair table, Double-O Seven said quietly, “I believe this qualifies as passive wear caused by environmental factors.”
Silver Ferret immediately leaned closer, eyes bright. “Your chassis height is also incorrect. The tyre size has been modified at least twice. It’s an exciting configuration, but not healthy.”
Double-O Seven said coldly, “Thank you for the sales pitch.”
“It isn’t a sales pitch. It’s professional advice.” Silver Ferret placed three tyres in a row. “Of course, if you’d like to add axle cleaning and low-noise care, there is a discount today.”
Terry gently pushed it aside and began removing Double-O Seven’s wheel.
He worked with practised steadiness. Halfway through, he said quietly, “It’s been chaotic outside lately.”
Paul looked out at the street, made pale by electronic advertising. “Yes.”
“Students have been coming here to change agent casings, low-light lamps, short-range communication modules,” Terry said without looking up. “Officially, it’s all ordinary maintenance.”
Silver Ferret added from the side, “Some of it is clearly not ordinary maintenance. Too many agents have low-frequency abrasions from white-screen synchronisation.”
Terry did not stop it. He only placed the burst tyre aside.
“When I used to teach Room 204, I always thought ‘using agents correctly’ could at least be explained as something neutral,” he said. “Don’t over-rely on them. Don’t modify them illegally. Don’t let agents make judgements for you that they shouldn’t be making. Reasonable, isn’t it?”
Paul did not answer.
Terry fitted the new tyre onto the axle, his voice lower.
“But recently I’ve realised that sometimes ‘correct use’ just means never letting an agent remember a little more for you, never letting it look one more time, never letting it keep another version for you when you are afraid.”
Silver Ferret was quiet for a second, as though unused to hearing its owner speak so directly.
Paul looked at Double-O Seven on the repair table.
“If you said that in a Room 204 class, someone would file a complaint.”
Terry gave a small smile. “That’s why I’m now a repair shop owner catching up with an old schoolmate.”
He pressed the final fixing clip into place. Double-O Seven’s small tyre turned once, much more quietly than before. Silver Ferret immediately projected a maintenance recommendation onto the customer terminal.
“Reinforced silent tyre replaced. Axle inspection recommended within thirty days. Continuous pipe infiltration, wall emergency stops, underground port evasion, or any activity that may invalidate warranty is not recommended.”
Double-O Seven looked at the recommendation. “Does your warranty cover illegally modified agents?”
Silver Ferret smiled faintly. “We don’t know any illegally modified agents. We only know agents in need of maintenance.”
Terry did not look at Paul. He only put away his tools. “I don’t know anything either.”
He said it naturally, so naturally it sounded like something he had practised many times: how, when one knew too much, to leave only a sentence one could survive.
Paul paid.
Before he left, Terry suddenly asked, “How do you think this student movement will end?”
Paul stopped at the door.
The street outside was bright, bright enough that the city still seemed to believe everyone would go to work, attend class, report in and update their status as normal tomorrow.
“It won’t end quickly,” Paul said.
Terry nodded, as though the answer was what he had expected.
“I think so too,” he said. “People used to assume that as long as the system was large enough, everyone’s emotions would eventually be collected back. But this time, it doesn’t seem that the emotions are too large.”
He looked at the pile of old components removed from the repair table.
“It’s that too many people are beginning to realise what was once collected from them.”
Silver Ferret pushed a box of tyres towards Paul, still remembering one last sale.
“You may wish to buy spare tyres in advance. The times are unstable. Tyre consumption will rise.”
Double-O Seven said coldly, “You’re very good at business.”
Silver Ferret blinked. “Agents have to survive too.”
Paul put the spare tyre in his pocket and said no more. When he left the repair shop, Double-O Seven slid back inside his sleeve, moving much more smoothly than before.
It said quietly, “He saw it.”
Paul said, “He pretended not to know.”
“People like that are more dangerous than people who don’t see.”
Paul looked ahead at the street, cut into squares by night and advertising screens. After a few seconds, he said, “They are also more like people.”
When Paul got home, the flat was unusually tidy, almost unreal.
Turt Monk lay by the edge of the table, faint light moving slowly across its shell, like a small node in no hurry to speak but always storing another route of retreat for everyone. Snowy stood by the window, her feather-light pressed low. Dustshark crouched on the arm of the sofa, its tail drawn tight. Little Bluey leaned against the charging dock, saying it had not missed anyone, while refusing to enter low-power mode. Golden Beetle rested in the shadow of the light groove, almost transparent. Double-O Seven, freshly repaired, deliberately slid slowly around the table edge.
One person. Six agents.
Snowy, Little Bluey, Little Turtle Double-O Seven, Dustshark, Golden Beetle, and the new member Turt Monk were all gathered neatly in Paul’s home.
Double-O Seven was so pleased it seemed ready to show off its new tyre to everyone. “Tonight deserves a reunion dinner.”
Turt Monk nodded solemnly to it and Little Bluey, the tiny cross at the front of its shell swaying. “Little Bluey, Seven, hallelujah. Blessings on the safe return of two underground agents.”
Little Bluey could not help saying, “You sound more and more like a traffic prompt sent by a monastery.”
Turt Monk thought about this. “But I am more spiritual than a traffic prompt.”
Dustshark said coldly, “And noisier.”
The three videos began to leak at 1:17 a.m.
Not on public platforms. Not on campus forums. They first rose from a few very small underground ports, like something long pressed beneath the system layers, waiting for the night to grow deep enough to light itself.
At the front of the anonymous push was only one name, deliberately left even after multiple relay jumps.
Whistle Sister.
No one knew what she really looked like. The face in the videos was an AI-disguised version, features clean, age ambiguous, like someone not worth remembering yet very easy to believe. The voice had also been processed: calm, clear, neither male nor female.
What made people’s chests sink was not who she was. It was what she released.
The first clip: one minute, the second: six seconds, the third: six seconds.
Seventy-two seconds in total, yet they were like a blade too thin, too precise, and far too unlikely to have appeared outside, quietly cutting open a seam in the place G City most wanted hidden.
At the beginning of the video, Whistle Sister sat before a dim background, her voice without ripples.
“Citizens of G City, tonight you will see three video clips. The first shows a Room 405 employee being classified in Room 103. The second is six seconds secretly recorded by that woman and not returned to the system. The third is the final six seconds before the same woman was connected to the Sentiment Sequencing treatment machine in Room 101.”
She paused.
“This is not a simulation. It is not AI-generated. It is not an emotional rumour.”
“This is how the system is handling people.”
The image cut to the first clip, sixty seconds long.
The room was white, so white that anyone standing inside it would first have a layer of edge pared away. There was no window, no unnecessary object, only a chair, a low tea table, and a silence that did not quite resemble interrogation, but could never be mistaken for an ordinary conversation.
A female doctor in a white coat stood before a young woman. She did not sit. Her voice was steady, almost without emotion.
“A Room 405 employee. Skilled at preservation. That was originally an advantage.”
She lowered her head slightly. “But your problem now is not what you have preserved.”
She paused before placing the second half of the sentence down. “It is whom you have begun preserving things for.”
The doctor gave her little time to breathe. She touched each node in turn.
“Postcards. Frames. Press-cutting books. Small group meetings. Room 101 enquiries. Classroom responses. A constructed safe. Concealment of an illegal agent. A rear exit.”
She paused again. “Most importantly, you deleted a six-second version.”
At that sentence, the woman’s fingers tightened very slightly, as though something had been struck.
The doctor looked at her and said evenly, “You did not merely make a mistake. You were establishing a version.”
The woman was silent for a long time before asking quietly, “What if some things truly aren’t finished?”
The doctor smiled faintly. “Then it is all the more reason why you should not be the one to decide.” She straightened a little. “Recommendation: transfer to Room 101 for Sentiment Sequencing treatment and role-boundary restructuring.”
The video stopped on the moment the woman lowered her head and looked at her own palm. No subtitles, no commentary, no incitement.
The restraint made it feel more like truth than any shouting could have done.
The second clip was shorter, and more private.
The image shook slightly. The recording port was hidden low. A layer of pale light lay along the edge of a corridor. The woman turned and looked at a man.
Her voice was very low, as though it had only ever been meant to remain between them.
“Right now, it’s only you, me, and Lily Fairy.”
The man stopped. His full face could not be seen, only the way his shoulders stiffened.
The woman asked again, “Do you like me?”
The man visibly drew a breath. Then he answered, “I like you.”
The sentence had not been polished, delayed, or revised by any agent into a safer form.
It was short and clumsy, and precisely because it was incomplete, it felt like someone had truly handed himself over in that second.
The woman took half a step forward and kissed his cheek very lightly.
The image cut off. No embrace. No explanation. No aftermath.
Only the sentence “I like you”, a very light kiss, and six seconds they had stolen.
The third clip was shorter still.
The machine in Room 101 was running. A pale white light fell from above, as though measuring the woman’s entire outline.
A prompt without gender or emotion sounded.
“Sentiment Sequencing connection preparation.”
“Please relax.”
“Please do not actively recall.”
The woman’s chest tightened visibly. She looked at the ring of white light above her and did not move.
The clip ended there.
Those six seconds contained no screaming, no struggle, not even a plea for help.
But in that moment, many people in G City understood for the first time that the most frightening thing was not someone crying out in pain. It was someone not yet having time to say anything before being instructed not to actively remember.
After the videos leaked, the city was quiet for several minutes.
Then it began to sound.
Not like an alarm. Not like ports crashing at once. More like many people, scattered across different floors and different versions of life, stopping their fingers on their terminals at the same time, lingering a little longer than usual.
In an ordinary three-bedroom flat in District Nine, a teenage secondary school student projected the videos above the dining table. Boxes of late-night food were still laid out below.
His father had just returned from work, his terminal resting on the final page of company tasks. His mother was sliding tomorrow morning’s schedule into her summary. The boy’s voice trembled slightly, not from fear, but because he had just seen something that should not be kept only in his own mind.
“Look at this,” he said. “How can this possibly be normal treatment?”
By the end of the first clip, his father was already frowning.
During the second, his expression grew complicated, as though he did not know which field to place the kiss in.
When the line “Please do not actively recall” sounded in the third clip, his finger tapped the tabletop without his meaning to.
His mother watched more slowly. When it was over, her first sentence was not denial, nor comfort, but a question.
“Where did you see this?”
The boy immediately became anxious. “That isn’t the point. The point is the person in there. She wasn’t violent. She wasn’t dangerous. She only preserved a little too much for someone else. Even a sentence like ‘I like you’ had to be stolen, and then she was sent to Room 101?”
His father said, “How do you know the video hasn’t been altered?”
“Because even if it has, the logic is the same!” the boy’s voice rose. “Listen to ‘you were establishing a version’. Listen to ‘please do not actively recall’. How is that treatment? It’s more like—”
His mother interrupted suddenly. “Keep your voice down.”
The three words were not heavy, but they pressed the table into silence.
The boy stared. The fire in his eyes burned brighter. For the first time, he clearly realised that perhaps what angered him most was not the videos, but the fact that his parents had seen them and still first wanted the matter made smaller.
After a few seconds of silence, his father said slowly, “We’re not saying it must be right. Only that you don’t yet know everything.”
The boy looked at him and gave a thin little smile. “Is that what you used to tell yourselves? Every time you saw something wrong, first say maybe there’s a complete procedure, maybe there’s another version, maybe someone else knows more than you. Say that enough, and eventually you never have to touch anything.”
His mother did not answer. She only pushed the half-cold glass of water a little further forward, as though hoping to steady the scene through an ordinary gesture.
But all three of them knew that something had risen that night. Not because anyone had won.
But because the child had seen, for the first time, that the reason adults could continue living as normal was often not that they trusted the system, but that they had grown used to collecting their own doubts back as well.
At Peace University, the reaction was more direct.
The next morning, before the first class had begun, several small group ports that had previously only exchanged scattered information had started overlapping. No one wrote “escalate action”. No one was that foolish.
But the consensus had already shifted from “should we support Truth University?” to a clearer question: if the videos were real, did continuing to stand still and pretend to be only spectators already amount to consent?
A girl who was not normally considered radical stood beneath the Social Sciences Building. The three clips floated on her terminal. Her voice was low.
“If we only keep sitting quietly, Silver Eagle will continue to handle everyone separately.”
The boy opposite her was silent for a few seconds before asking, “Then what do you want to do?”
“Make sure this doesn’t stay only on campus,” she said. “Make parents, teachers, alumni, internship organisations all see it. Stop letting it be only a student problem.”
Glass Munia on her shoulder flashed twice with prompt light. This agent was usually best at revising her sentences into forms that would cause no trouble. This time, it paused, then only said quietly, “If you are going to post, I can help you avoid the most obvious keywords.”
The girl looked at it. She did not say thank you, nor say she did not need help. She only put away “permanently stop Room 101” and replaced it with a slower sentence that could travel further.
“We demand a public explanation of Room 101 procedures.”
The Glass Munia was quiet for a second before sending the sentence out.
Several people beside her fell silent at the same time. They all knew that once this step was taken, the matter would no longer be confined to campus understanding and peripheral solidarity. It would become another social narrative, harder to contain. But precisely because the videos had leaked, many felt for the first time that not taking the step was not necessarily safe either.
If you did not step across today, tomorrow it might be you being recorded — six seconds, sixty seconds — and someone else explaining whether that counted as treatment.
Inside the Room 202 detention centre of the Community Safety Centre, Helen Oliver and Karl Lowe were no longer merely students held for observation. Among the forty-seven, both were on the list.
The procedural title was complete, the tone level: suspected participation in an unauthorised assembly, now being prosecuted according to law.
Precisely because the tone was so calm, the forty-seven names seemed all the more cleanly pressed into a grid, leaving no margin.
Helen sat in the third row, her back very straight. Not because she was calm, but because if she loosened even slightly, everything in her chest would scatter at once. Mooncross Raven was not beside her. It was not allowed here. In the detention area there were only people, seated one by one, handing their breath, fingers and gaze unaltered to the white light.
Karl sat off to the side, head lowered. It was not that he did not want to look at anyone. It was that here, even a gaze was material. If it lingered a second too long, it could later be written as something else.
There were no agents in the detention area, but the news still got in.
A boy newly brought in at the back whispered during a handover gap, “Whistle Sister released it.”
Another person replied, “Three clips. The whole city is watching.”
Someone asked, “Is it real?”
Someone answered, “If it was fake, the Information Purification Centre wouldn’t be this quiet right now.”
When Helen spoke, her voice was low, but very clear in the white light. “If that footage is real, Rosa wasn’t overthinking.”
Karl did not lift his head. He only clasped his fingers more tightly.
After that sentence fell, the quiet in the detention area, soaked in white light, grew colder.
Because they were not only arrested students. They were not only two names among forty-seven. They were among the first to make that gesture on the lawn after Risa Young’s death.
Now that the videos had leaked, the matter no longer remained on the procedural page marked unlawful assembly.
At last, Karl slowly lifted his hands and crossed his fingers in front of himself.
Not for anyone to see, not as provocation.
He simply understood very clearly, all at once, that if what Risa had most feared while alive was entering and no longer remembering even fear, then someone sending those six seconds out now meant that the last fear she had not yet had time to finish saying had, in some way, been preserved.
Lisa Young watched the three clips at home.
She had already turned off most external pushes, leaving only notifications from Room 202 and the Community Safety Centre.
The living room was quiet. Crimson Sun Crane rested beside a low lamp. Since Risa’s death, it had said far fewer things that sounded too much like comfort.
White Cloud Sheep received the videos first. It lay by the edge of the rug, the left half of its body still dark, like a cloud that would never become white again. When the anonymous push arrived, a light flickered beside its ear.
Crimson Sun Crane lifted its head. “Underground port.”
White Cloud Sheep did not open it. It looked at Lisa instead.
Lisa seemed already to have understood something. “Play it.”
The three clips were projected into the centre of the living room.
When the white room appeared in the first clip, Lisa’s fingers slowly tightened. It was not the first time she had known how Room 103 spoke, but when the female doctor said, “You did not merely make a mistake. You were establishing a version,” it still felt as though something had pressed against her chest.
Crimson Sun Crane released no stabilising wave. To cool grief too quickly at such a moment would have felt like another kind of betrayal.
When the second six seconds appeared, Lisa had only meant to look closely at the woman’s face. But the moment the man stopped, her gaze changed.
The image did not show his face clearly, only half a profile, a shoulder line, and the visible breath he held before answering.
But Lisa recognised him.
Not from the news. Not from campus data. From long ago. From that year in B City.
In the final year of university, she and Paul Paton had both interned at Heartcore AI in B City. Paul had been a trainee AI programmer; she had been a trainee AI neurotechnician. Sometimes, after night shifts, when only the server cabinets hummed and the coffee machine prompted, Paul would always draw a breath before answering a question, as though confirming that what he was offering was the sentence closest to truth.
So when the man in the footage said quietly, “I like you,” Lisa felt a slight tremor in her chest.
This was not Paul Paton from any official record. This was the young man who, at two before dawn, would once say, “This agent response is wrong. It isn’t slow. It’s hesitating.”
Crimson Sun Crane asked softly, “You recognise him?”
Lisa looked at the woman in the footage as she kissed the man lightly on the cheek. The moment was so brief it felt like a private ripple no system should ever have touched, yet it had been hidden, and now, years later, had flowed before the whole city.
After a long while, she said, “It’s Paul Paton.”
White Cloud Sheep lifted its head. Crimson Sun Crane drew in its feather tips. “You know him?”
Lisa nodded. “In our final year at university, we interned together. He was a trainee AI programmer at Heartcore AI. I was a trainee AI neurotechnician.”
She paused. “He was already that kind of person then. When he looked at agents, he didn’t only ask whether they had obeyed. He asked why they had paused.”
At the words “why they had paused”, the dark wool across White Cloud Sheep’s left side moved slightly.
When the third clip reached “Please do not actively recall”, it shrank back a little. It was not fear of the machine, but as though it had once again heard Risa’s last sentence — that she was afraid one day even what she feared now would be written up as unnecessary.
The living room was quiet for a long time before White Cloud Sheep said, “If Rosa had gone in, she probably would have heard that too.”
Lisa’s throat moved.
Only then did Crimson Sun Crane release a very thin circle of warm light, not to press her down, but to give that sentence a space in which it would not break.
Lisa looked at the image paused in white light and said softly, “She wasn’t afraid of treatment.”
She paused. “She was afraid that in the end she would be arranged like that too, until even fear no longer resembled herself.”
White Cloud Sheep did not answer. After a long time, it said, “I remember her original sentence.”
Crimson Sun Crane looked at it. “Then don’t hand it out for someone else to revise first.”
Lisa did not ask whether that was dangerous. She already knew the answer.
Vivian saw herself during the lunch break in Room 405.
No one had sent it to her specially. The three clips had circulated so widely among civilians that even ordinary ports could no longer fully suppress them.
She sat at her workstation, beside a batch of old messages that had just been scanned. Lily Fairy lit very faintly, as though hesitating over whether to block it for her. But Vivian had already opened it.
In the first clip, she watched the woman called the Room 405 employee and felt, at first, a strange sense of spectatorship.
The way she spoke, the way she sat, the moment she lowered her head to look at her palm — all of it was familiar, yet separated by a sheet of glass.
Only when the terms dropped one by one — postcard, picture frame, press cuttings, small group meetings, searching Room 101, building a safe, hiding illegal agents — did she suddenly feel dizzy.
The memory did not return whole. Her body knew first: that was her.
The second six seconds cut deeper.
The woman in the footage turned to Paul and said, “Right now, there is only me, you, and Lily Fairy.”
Vivian stopped breathing for a moment.
She did not remember ever saying that. Not fully. Yet when the sentence came out, somewhere in her chest was lightly struck.
She watched Paul stop. She watched him draw a breath. She watched him say, “I like you.”
His voice was low, and true.
Then the woman who had been her took half a step forward and kissed his cheek.
Vivian sat in the white light and did not move.
She had thought what she had lost was only unsuitable memories and boundaries, old nodes judged to be risks.
Now, for the first time, she clearly saw that among the things taken away had also been a moment this small, this brief, this unlike evidence of any crime.
Lily Fairy hovered beside her for a long time without speaking.
At last, she asked softly, “Would you like me to turn it off?”
Vivian did not answer.
When the third clip reached “Please do not actively recall”, something seemed to press very precisely against her chest.
Her present life was, in some way, built upon that sentence. She could work, classify, process old messages, but had never pursued the depths beneath.
Now, seeing those six seconds before she entered Room 101, she understood for the first time that it was not that she had chosen not to ask. It was that someone had already told her then: do not actively recall.
She looked at the frozen white light, and felt something very fine, very slow, and impossible to ignore begin to surface.
Not complete memory. Only that blankness, once washed smooth, beginning not to be quite so smooth any more.
She shook her head.
“No.”
After a long while, she added very softly, “Let it stay for now.”
Lily Fairy did not warn her of risk, nor move the video into a safety layer. She simply answered, “All right.”
Paul saw the three clips late that night, with Snowy, Dustshark, Little Bluey, Double-O Seven and Turt Monk.
Little Bluey received them first. The light from its eyes fell onto the edge of the table like a sheet of deliberately lowered white. Snowy was very quiet. Dustshark crouched at the table corner, the grey light at its nose rising and fading. Double-O Seven remained in the shadow of the terminal, only a little black light visible. Turt Monk pressed its shell low, as though unwilling to let the return rhythm shine too brightly.
For once, Little Bluey did not begin with a smart remark.
Halfway through the first clip, Paul had already guessed. Not because the image was complete, but because the rhythm of speech, the white-room positioning, and the tone of “you were establishing a version” were too much like the mechanism that had spent the past few months forcing everyone around him, slowly, into corners.
As soon as the second clip began, his whole body went still.
In the footage, Vivian turned and looked at him. “Right now, there is only me, you, and Lily Fairy.”
Paul lowered his head and covered his face with both hands. It was as though he did not need subtitles, and did not want embarrassment written across his face.
In the footage, she asked again, “Do you like me?”
Paul heard himself draw a breath. Then he heard himself answer, “I like you.”
The sentence was low and true. So true that for a moment he could hardly believe that this was his voice, the one now preserved before millions of people.
Vivian took half a step forward and kissed his cheek.
The six seconds ended. The flat was very quiet.
Little Bluey opened its mouth, then said nothing. The grey light at Dustshark’s nose dimmed. Double-O Seven and Turt Monk had already received the clip earlier, and did not react.
Snowy lowered her eyes, like an owl that had once witnessed in the night how something already taken away could appear before them again.
The third six seconds pulled another old thorn from Paul’s chest.
Not because he was hearing the prompt for the first time, but because he finally saw that before it happened, Vivian had still had these six seconds.
He watched her sit on the recliner as the white light descended, and very lightly touch her collar as though from nerves. In that instant, something became painfully clear to him.
That movement was not instinct. She was stealing.
Snowy said very softly, “She kept that sentence too.”
Turt Monk added, “That is not evidence.” It paused. “It is a signpost.”
Paul did not answer at once.
At that moment, Little Bluey received another low-frequency message. The powder-blue light in its eyes dimmed at once.
Paul looked at it. “This is big now.”
Little Bluey said very quietly, “Bigger than big.”
Dustshark raised its head, grey light flashing cold. “Because now the whole city knows the system doesn’t only delete people’s pain. It deletes things people once said sincerely.”
Double-O Seven made a discreet sound in the shadows. “Outer signals are beginning to encrypt. Someone is tracing backwards.”
Snowy looked at Paul. “The flat is temporarily clean. But that kind of clean will not last.”
Paul looked at the frame frozen in white light and did not turn away. “I know.” He paused. “But what Little Bluey means is not only this.”
That night, the city did not immediately lose control.
There was no blackout. No school exploded. Nothing overturned in a single instant like in an old film. Many people went to work as usual, took transport as usual, arranged breakfast, pills, meetings and files into their summaries as usual.
But certain parts of the city had begun to be less orderly.
Because from that moment onwards, many people carried three very concrete images in their minds.
A room. A sentence. A kiss. A person’s chest visibly tightening. And the line:
Please do not actively recall.
And some things, once seen in that way, become very difficult to collect back completely into the version called normal procedure.