2. Silver Eagle
Before entering that meeting room, I had already done something even less compliant.
When I returned home on Christmas Eve, the flat was very quiet.
The door closed behind me. The ballroom’s overly bright lights, overly cold air, and overly proper laughter seemed to be shut away into another world by that single panel. Only I remained in the entrance hall. My soles crossed the floor, the sound hollow and faintly bright.
From the entrance, the kitchenette and cleaning module were on the left. On the right stood an integrated wall of cupboards, hiding clothes, daily supplies, spare terminals, and storage compartments behind handleless panels. Further in were a single bed, a work desk, and a projection wall that could pull up home records, work interfaces, and city notifications. Through the window, I could see the identical rows of windows in the tower opposite, most of them lit at night with the same kind of glow, as though many people were all sitting inside their own little boxes at once, yet no one was truly touching anyone.
Snowy first disabled my outdoor mode.
“Evening mode activated,” she said softly. “Indoor temperature slightly low. I have raised it by one degree.”
I did not answer. I only took off my coat slowly and hung it on the sensor hook by the wall. A faint ring of blue light came on automatically: ultraviolet disinfection, facial recognition, return-home timestamp, synchronised evening routine suggestions. Usually, these functions were convenient. Tonight, they all felt excessive.
The corridor lights came on one after another, then slowly went dark behind me. The strip of light was narrow, as though it only permitted one person to walk forwards along a pre-approved direction. The walls and floor were coldly white, like glass wiped too many times, faintly reflecting my hesitation until it looked thin.
I did not turn on the main lights. The room became even quieter, like a place unsuitable for telling the truth.
Snowy settled beside the work desk and automatically entered low-power mode. I had set her breathing sound very low, like a lamp already extinguished, with only a trace of warmth left in the wick. She was not entirely asleep. She simply understood that, sometimes, the best form of company was not to reach a conclusion before I did.
Only after checking that the door lock was secured did I pull the home record panel in front of me.
【Home Security｜Night Entry Record】
Status: Normal
Notice: Recommended to maintain lighting
That line remained suspended on the screen, like a very polite form of surveillance. I raised my hand and closed it, the movement so light it felt like forcing a cough back down my throat.
At the deepest part of the drawer were several agent peripherals. Beside them lay an old portable battery shaped like a piece of cheese, its edges worn pale. It had long been obsolete: no cloud access, no synchronisation, none of those monitoring functions attached in the name of safety. Its only use was to leave no trace.
I crouched beside the wardrobe and lifted an inconspicuous wooden board from the floor.
Beneath it was a hidden compartment. Inside the compartment was a small safe, cold to the touch, like a piece of old-world metal that should no longer exist. I spoke the passphrase. The safe door sprang open with a soft click.
Curled inside was an artificial intelligence hamster.
Its fur was a very pale powder blue. Its body was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, with round ears, a tiny nose, and an even tinier mouth. It looked more like a toy than Snowy did, and even more like something the system ought not to take seriously.
But I knew very well that its appearance was only camouflage.
Hidden beneath it were an offline node, an underground relabelling module, a short-range masking programme, and a set of grey technologies never registered with the company.
Its name was Little Bluey.
Most of the time, Little Bluey slept inside this hidden compartment: disconnected, silent, leaving no signal that could be traced. I only woke it when there was something I truly did not want the system to know.
I plugged in the cheese-shaped battery. As soon as the small yellow light came on, Little Bluey’s body trembled faintly, like something slowly rising back from deep underwater. First it curled tighter into itself. After two seconds, its eyes lit up. Even that glow had been suppressed to the lowest level, as though afraid of disturbing the whole tower.
Its voice was low too — so low it felt as though sentences should not exist in this room at all.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
I did not answer. I only projected Snowy’s record file from that night.
The light screen rose into the air like a thin sheet of glass: transparent, cold, its edges almost cruelly neat. There was not much in the footage. She stood by the bus doors and turned back. I sat where I was and looked up at her.
Two seconds.
Then the numbers.
83%.
78%.
Little Bluey stared at the figures for several seconds without speaking, as though waiting for the alarm to sound by itself. The silence was thin, yet it pressed the whole room lower.
“I won’t delete it,” it said at last.
“I know.”
“I can only make it look a little more reasonable.”
It raised its front paws, as though pushing an invisible slider. The tags on the light screen began to shift. They did not disappear. They were not erased. They were rearranged, renamed, and returned to positions the system could accept.
Like something that once had a name being taken apart, separated into colours, then filed into several harmless drawers.
Holiday scenario.
Group atmosphere.
Social courtesy.
Non-targeted gaze.
Collegial concern.
Post-holiday emotional residue.
Return-journey environmental warming effect.
83 began to fall.
Little Bluey stopped.
“Any lower would look unnatural.” It looked at the number, voice flat. “Too clean, and it looks tampered with. The system doesn’t like perfection. It trusts things with a few flaws.”
I nodded.
At that moment, I suddenly understood that what we were doing was never resistance, nor overthrow. We had not even touched the rules themselves.
We were merely changing the name of one thing inside the rules. Finding an acceptable way for a feeling to circulate.
Just as the city did every day.
Calling anxiety fluctuation.
Calling surveillance care.
Calling a closeness that was not permitted risk management.
Little Bluey did not withdraw at once. It looked up at me, the faint light in its eyes glowing quietly, as though watching someone who already knew the answer but refused to say it aloud.
“The score isn’t what you want to change,” it said.
I said nothing.
It continued, “You don’t want those two seconds to be named.”
After that sentence fell, the flat became so quiet that only the slow hum of the heating remained.
I did not answer. Snowy was silent in low-power mode, as though she too had heard, but had chosen not to translate. Little Bluey waited a while. When I still said nothing, it lowered its head and adjusted the final few tags into the positions the system would find easiest to swallow.
“Be careful,” it said. “The first time, it’s correction. The second time, it becomes habit. If you keep relying on me to rename things for you, eventually even you will forget what the original name was.”
I gave a bitter little smile, but even that smile never quite finished.
“I just don’t want Room 103 coming for me.”
“Is that all?” It looked at me, voice light as fur brushing against glass. “Looks like more than that to me.”
I remained crouched there and said nothing more.
The projection wall was dark now. The scattered lights from the distant towers outside came through the window, making the whole flat look like a small box forgotten by the city. In places like this, it was especially easy to mistake secrecy for safety.
It was not.
A secret was merely something that had not yet been classified.
Little Bluey shut the safe. The door closed with a soft sound, like a full stop too small to matter. The wooden board was replaced. The floor returned to its original state, as though nothing had ever been there.
But I knew very well.
Once the full stop had fallen, once the holiday ended, the testing system would treat it as a comma and continue reading.
On the first workday after the holiday, Mia and I were still summoned by Beef Tripe for a warning.
“Holiday scenario fluctuation, amplified group emotions — I’ve seen all those reasons,” Beef Tripe said. His voice was held very level, which somehow made it more uncomfortable than real anger. “But you are both training specialists. You know exactly what kind of data causes trouble most easily.”
Snowy reminded me quietly in my ear:
“Recommend reducing explanation ratio.”
I only nodded.
Bull Demon suddenly spoke, its tone even colder than Beef Tripe’s.
“You are not the first people to believe you can alter only the labels without altering the substance.”
I looked up at it for a second.
But it did not seem to be speaking only to Mia and me. It seemed to be addressing an entire category of people. The feeling was strange, as though the meeting room contained not merely the two of us, but countless others who had once tried to preserve a little ambiguity for themselves.
“You do not wish to be flagged by Silver Eagle, sent to Room 103, and placed under observation at the Emotion Stabilisation Centre, do you?”
Room 103 of the Emotion Stabilisation Centre. Its official name was the Emotional Observation Room.
The name sounded gentle, as though it were merely somewhere to let people calm down.
But in G City, anyone who had truly heard of it knew it was no ordinary department.
People sent there had not necessarily committed any serious wrongdoing. Very often, it was simply because their emotions were too unstable, because they were too attached to someone, too unable to let go of a relationship, or because the system had determined that certain things inside them had begun to deviate from “normal”.
The most frightening thing about Room 103 was not punishment.
It was adjustment.
It would not treat you brutally. It would only speak with you gently, soothe you, rename your emotions for you, then slowly guide you back within the stable range.
When you came out, you were usually still yourself. You still went to work, still spoke, still lived.
Only certain places inside you — the places that used to hurt, to become messy, to want to turn back — seemed to have been smoothed down.
That was why people feared Room 103.
Not simply because they feared going in.
What they truly feared was coming out as someone who had learned to grieve in a compliant way.
After the talk ended, Mia and I walked out.
The corridor was still white. Still bright.
So bright it seemed anything could be seen clearly, and nothing was worth remembering.
At lunchtime, Mia, Kakashi, Elaine and I sat in the corner of the canteen.
The corner seats were always quieter: farther from the serving hatch, closer to the surveillance lenses.
Like the most typical form of consideration in this age — leaving you a little quiet, while capturing you more completely.
On Kakashi’s tray there was only one apple, a box of salmon salad, and a cup of water. It looked as clean as a demonstration meal issued by a hospital.
“On Christmas Eve, Bangbang Bird determined that my blood sugar was too high,” he said, lowering his voice as though discussing something both embarrassing and inescapable. “The system activated a health intervention straight away. Worse, after Beef Tripe read the report, he called me in for another talk.”
He picked up the small knife and cut the apple into eight pieces. Every cut was neat, as though he were slicing some form of deviation back into standard values.
“For the next twenty-eight days, I’m only allowed to eat this sort of thing.” He looked up at me, a dull kind of anger in his eyes. “This isn’t management. It’s reconstruction.”
Elaine gave a small laugh but did not reply. She only placed her spoon back into her bowl.
She was always very clean. Clean collar, clean nails, clean ends to her hair. Even her expression had the kind of smoothness cultivated by long-term obedience to rules. That cleanliness made it difficult even to approach her; there was no gap where one could place a hand.
I smiled too, though it felt more like a smile meant for myself.
Then I looked at her and kept my tone very light, as though joking, as though testing.
“Are you already in a relationship?”
“Yes,” she answered quickly.
I paused for half a second before tossing out the next sentence, making it sound as casual as possible.
“That’s a shame. Otherwise I’d have suggested a compatibility test, just to see whether we’re compliant.”
Elaine only smiled.
The smile was complete, rounded, leaving nothing that could be misunderstood.
Mia lowered her head and drank her water without looking at me. The transparent wall of the glass cut half her face into something pale, as though she too were leaving herself blank within some invisible rule.
And the instant that sentence left my mouth, I already heard what was wrong with it.
Even when I wanted to draw closer to someone, I instinctively borrowed the system’s language first, as though without wrapping it in compliance, I had no right to admit that it was a form of closeness.
What we taught agents most was never how to comfort a person.
It was how to send a person steadily back into the rules.
In 2074, even dating was no longer something that could be decided by a single sentence.
A truly legal relationship could only be born from Silver Eagle Intelligence.
Silver Eagle was not a single AI, nor an independent matching programme. It was closer to an entire social operating system, a net spread above the city while seeping into every person’s daily life. It had never managed only security or order, but emotions, relationships, risks, and things that should never have been quantified.
Who you liked.
Who you wanted to approach.
Whether you thought of someone too often.
Whether you lingered too long in places where softness was not permitted.
All of it could be translated into indices, labels, curves, and recommendations.
By this age, love was no longer considered a private matter.
It was a social risk requiring governance.
To establish a legal relationship, there were usually only two routes.
The first was to apply voluntarily for a Silver Eagle Intelligence compatibility test. The system would assess both parties’ emotional stability, past records, compatibility, and risk weighting. If the compatibility score reached the standard and both parties confirmed, the relationship would be established.
The second was to wait for allocation by the Silver Eagle Core. The system would proactively issue a one-time match. If both parties agreed, the relationship would be established.
Both sounded civilised. Efficient, even. As though something once vague, chaotic, and liable to hurt people had been reorganised into a clear procedure.
From matching to maintenance, from conflict to separation, every step had standards, evidence, and follow-up handling. No one needed to guess.
And no one could truly escape.
Once a relationship was established, the rules afterwards came into effect automatically like a contract: no pursuit of others; no termination without approval; all emotional consequences subject to tracing, evaluation, and settlement.
I knew those clauses very well.
So well that sometimes I felt they were not written in the system at all, but had already been written into everyone’s body.
The moment an emotion deviated, some internal notice would light up automatically. The moment you looked at someone for a little too long, lingered on a sentence for a little too long, sat in the warm glow of a holiday and softened for a little too long, somewhere would record it for you, waiting to deliver it to a higher desk at the appropriate time.
And the reason I remembered all this so clearly was not only because I was a training specialist.
It was because I had once been the subject.