5. Decision
The second time I met Bonnie Norris was in an underground bar in District Eighteen.
The entrance was as narrow as a deliberately misplaced crack, squeezed between two shops that had long since closed, though their electronic signs still hung outside. There was still light across the surface of the signs, but the content had already been wiped clean, leaving only a faint layer of blue, like the afterimage of something the system had cancelled.
The stairs led downwards. The walls were damp. The sensor lights did not come on all at once, but glowed half a beat late only when you stepped on a particular stair, as though they did not want anyone’s outline to be illuminated too completely.
The music was not loud, but it carried a deliberately maintained rumble. It made the rims of glasses and the legs of tables tremble slightly, so that anything spoken aloud became shorter, more broken, as if words had their edges worn away by the environment before they had fully formed.
As I followed the guiding light down, Snowy remained slightly behind my shoulder without speaking. She simply fed the environmental noise, number of exits, camera blind spots and crowd density into her background model, one line at a time.
She had never liked places like this. Not because she was afraid, but because there were too many factors here that could not be calibrated.
For an agent designed to care, translate, organise and reduce risk, the uncalibrated was already close to danger.
Bonnie was sitting at the far corner of the bar, wearing a pale grey coat, her hair tied up. She had made herself seem deliberately smaller, so small even memory would have difficulty leaving a shape around her.
It was not timidity. It was restraint of the kind only someone familiar with tracking systems would possess.
When she saw me, she only raised her eyes. There was no greeting.
“This isn’t a good place to talk properly. We have twenty minutes.”
After saying that, her gaze quickly swept past Snowy beside my ear.
“Mr Jay will take care of her. There won’t be trouble.”
As soon as she finished speaking, Mr Jay stepped out from the shadows on the other side. Today he was still in a black suit, so immaculate he looked as if a spotlight might fall on him at any moment. He came to Snowy’s side and held out, between his fingers, a yellow metal strip resembling a charm.
“Low-frequency upload masking mode. Twenty minutes,” he said. “Not an intrusion. Just letting her rest.”
Snowy did not take it at once. She merely tilted her head and looked at me.
“Do you authorise low-frequency upload masking mode?”
Her voice was still very gentle when she said it. And precisely because she was so calm, I felt more clearly how heavy that moment was.
It was not an operation.
It was handing over something that had always been running close against my skin.
I looked at Bonnie.
She did not hurry me. She only watched, as if waiting for me to press the button myself.
My throat felt dry.
“Authorised.”
Snowy accepted the yellow metal strip. Mr Jay moved quickly. With one turn of his fingers, the strip was already attached to the port beside Snowy’s ear. Her eyes brightened once, then slowly dimmed. Her breathing sound remained, but it seemed to have been turned down extremely low, until it was almost only a trace of background presence.
She did not fall.
Her whole being simply seemed to retreat one small step, into a position where she no longer responded actively, no longer translated in real time.
In that instant, my chest tightened violently.
I turned back at once.
“Has Snowy been hacked?”
Bonnie looked at me, her expression so calm it was almost cold.
“Brother, many of these things were your designs in the first place,” she said. “Have you really forgotten?”
My throat dried further.
“Designed what?”
“Protection mechanisms. Isolation layers. Dual mirroring. And one thing you wrote yourself — the retreat clause.”
She paused.
“Looks like they washed you very clean.”
Washed very clean.
Those words fell into the back of my skull like a lock snapping shut. I forced my voice flat.
“What about Little Bluey? What exactly is it?”
Bonnie first glanced at the scanning grid on the wall before lowering her voice.
“The more you know, the more dangerous you are to us.”
“Us?”
She did not answer directly.
“Unless you resign,” she said. “Leave FaceBridge completely, cut your connection to Silver Eagle. Only then will I feel safe telling you.”
I almost laughed.
“Do you know what that means?”
In Silver Eagle’s social ranking, a job was never only a job. FaceBridge Intelligent Systems might only be a connection port, but that port itself meant a trust level. What information you could touch, which district you could live in, how your quotas and healthcare were prioritised — all of it was tied to that layer of identity.
Leaving was not merely changing jobs.
It was walking away from the place in the system that the system liked you to occupy.
You did not need to make a mistake. Once you no longer stood in that position, life would begin to contract by itself.
“That’s only quality of life,” Bonnie said.
“That’s everything,” I said.
She looked at me quietly, as though waiting for me to hear how much that sounded like something the system had taught a person to say.
“No,” she said. “That is only everything you have been permitted to possess.”
From the corner, Mr Jay spoke then, his voice so clean it was almost cruel.
“Scan complete. No implant anomaly detected in Snowy. She is clean.”
He looked at me.
“She isn’t the one being monitored.”
He paused for half a second.
“You are.”
That sentence was colder than any intrusion.
So cold that I suddenly understood: the true restriction had never been the door, the lock, or the surveillance lens.
The true restriction was knowing that you were always being watched, and still having to live as though you were not.
Bonnie said nothing more. She only pushed a very thin card towards me. There were no words on it, only a tiny matrix code.
“If you want to contact me, go through Little Bluey,” she said. “But first, you have to choose a side.”
Choose a side.
It was not as simple as resigning.
It meant admitting I no longer belonged in the middle.
When I left the bar, Snowy had returned to normal. Her first question was not what we had discussed. She only said very softly:
“Your heart rate rose abnormally twice within twenty minutes, but has now returned to baseline. Would you like me to organise the key points for you?”
I stopped for a moment before answering.
“No.”
She did not ask further. She simply followed quietly beside me.
The night wind outside was a little cold. The streets of District Eighteen were lined with low-lit shopfronts and public patrol agents charging at the mouths of alleys. The moment I returned from the bar to street level, I suddenly felt that the greatest difference between underground and above ground was not light, but the degree to which the air had been normalised.
Underground was messier.
And truer.
Above ground was tidier.
And made it much harder to say clearly what, exactly, one had lost.
I considered it for three days.
For those three days, I went to work as usual, trained agents as usual, wrote reports as usual. But every time I saw words like compliance, write-back, rhythm calibration, mitigable, I thought of what Mr Jay had said.
You are the one being monitored.
Those words were suddenly no longer system language. They were like thin threads that had long since passed through me and stitched themselves into my life.
Snowy asked nothing.
When I paused too long, she merely lowered the screen brightness for me. When I ate dinner too slowly, she reminded me of the optimal window for food intake. When, at night, I stared out at the towers for too long, she would ask very lightly:
“Is there anything in particular you would like to organise today?”
That considerate way she had of not coming too close only made it harder to bear.
On the third night, I opened the resignation system.
The terminal screen was very white. At the top of the page was written:
【FaceBridge Intelligent Systems｜Resignation Application】
Below it, the reason field was blank.
I typed several times, then deleted it all. In the end, I left only one sentence:
“Adjustment of personal development direction.”
I stared at that line for several seconds, then pressed submit.
The system quickly produced a notification:
【Confirming resignation will result in recalculation of class rating. Continue?】
It was not a reminder.
It was a civilised version of a final attempt to make me stay. It did not say I could not leave. It simply asked me, very politely, to think again. To think clearly about what I would lose.
I stopped for three seconds.
Then I pressed confirm.
Beef Tripe soon called me into his office.
He did not lose his temper. He only sat behind that excessively clean desk, looking at me with that practised steadiness of his. Bull Demon stood beside him, horns straight, eyes cold.
“You know this is not an ordinary company,” Beef Tripe said.
“I know.”
“You also know that once your rating drops, it will be very difficult to come back.”
“I know.”
He looked at me for a long time, as though waiting for me to give a deeper reason.
But I did not.
Once a reason entered a report, it no longer belonged to me.
Bull Demon spoke then.
“People usually do not leave at their worst moment. They leave when they begin to doubt whether the system can define everything for them.”
Beef Tripe frowned slightly, as though he disliked his agent sounding so human.
“You can apply for internal recuperation. You don’t have to go this far,” he said.
I did not agree.
Only at the end did he say:
“You cannot take Snowy with you.”
I had expected those words.
But when I truly heard them, my chest still felt as though something had cut through it in a perfectly straight line.
“Can I apply to purchase her?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“No. Company asset.”
Snowy stood behind me, quiet the whole time. She did not fight for herself, nor did she display anything resembling emotional hesitation. She simply stood steadily there, as though she still did not know which part of the conversation concerned whether she stayed or left.
On my final day, I sat alone at my empty workstation.
Most people had already left work. The whole office floor looked even whiter in its emptiness. Snowy stood on the desk: version 3.1, stable, precise, loyal.
She knew that before drinking water I would glance at its temperature. She knew that when I disliked a meeting, my eyes would narrow unconsciously. She knew that when I woke in the middle of the night, it was usually not because of a dream, but because my memory had stopped somewhere and failed to move on.
She had translated for me for too long. So long that sometimes I could no longer tell whether I felt something first, or whether she had first prepared a safer way for that feeling to be said.
“Would you like me to organise your personal files?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She immediately opened the classification page for me: work feedback, skills records, authorisation certificates, personal summaries, past performance, completed projects.
The screen was very clean.
As if a life could also be packed up and taken away like this.
“Recommendation: prioritise the personal portable sections. Content related to company assets will be automatically recalled after resignation.”
I looked at her and suddenly wanted to ask:
Do you know that you will be recalled too?
But I did not say it.
That night, I used Little Bluey to make an illegal backup of Snowy.
We did it at home.
As usual, Snowy finished arranging my evening routine, lowered the indoor lights, and prioritised my work schedule for the next day before entering low-power mode. She rested beside the work desk, the standby glow in her feathers breathing softly, as though she had no idea what was about to happen.
Little Bluey crawled out from the hidden compartment, moving quickly.
First, it checked the sensor points by the window, then ran once around the edge of the floor. Only after confirming there was no abnormal return signal did it drag out, from the deepest part of the safe, a yellow metallic adhesive sheet as thin as a paper charm.
Its surface was pressed with dense, hairline low-frequency patterns. Along the edges were several almost invisible old-style ports. It did not look like technology. It looked more like a talisman that should not exist in this age.
“Down below, they call it a charm,” Little Bluey whispered. “A low-frequency masking sheet. It can cover an agent’s return-signal fluctuations for a short time.”
It passed the adhesive sheet to me.
“Stick it on Snowy’s head.”
I did as it said.
The moment the metallic sheet connected, a very thin line of white light appeared beneath Snowy’s feathers. The light did not spread; it only flowed slowly along her internal data pathways, like someone quietly opening a temporary water channel in the dark.
Little Bluey immediately connected the other end to an offline module.
“Twenty minutes,” it said. “The charm can only suppress it for twenty minutes. Any longer, and Snowy’s base-level safety protocol may begin self-checking. Once she actively reports abnormal return data, Silver Eagle will know someone is making an illegal backup.”
I looked at Snowy.
She was still running normally in low-power mode, her breathing regular and quiet, occasionally organising my work files automatically in the background. She did not know she was being copied. Nor did she know I had already prepared another place for her.
“Two years of data isn’t a small amount.” Little Bluey watched the progress bar. “Are you sure?”
My hand paused.
The room was very quiet. The heating hummed softly. Beyond the window, the tower lights glowed through the mist. Snowy rested there, looking no different from usual.
Yet suddenly, I felt as though I were secretly taking someone apart.
“What I can’t bear to lose is myself,” I said quietly.
Little Bluey did not answer at once. It only looked up at me.
“Then be quick,” it said.
The progress bar began to move.
7%.
12%.
19%.
The edge of the charm began to heat up.
Little Bluey immediately lowered its voice.
“Return delay is becoming unstable.”
23%.
26%.
Beneath Snowy’s feathers, a faint blue light suddenly flickered, as though the base system were attempting to re-establish a handshake.
Little Bluey jumped.
“Stop.”
The progress froze at:
28%.
The room fell quiet again.
Little Bluey quickly tore off the charm. When the yellow metallic sheet left Snowy’s feathers, its edges even carried a faint burnt smell. Snowy moved slightly, as though she had had a very short, very shallow dream, but she did not truly wake.
Inside the backup module, the core chip that had absorbed 28% of the data glowed faintly yellow in the darkness.
I looked at that light, and suddenly understood what Little Bluey had once told me.
The old me had needed to preserve another version of myself.
So it turned out people were not the only ones who could leave another version behind.
Agents could too.
Three days after resigning, I applied to Community Security Centre Room 203 for a Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 civilian agent.
One version lower. Fewer permissions. Higher write-back deviation. Its eyes lit quickly and dimmed quickly, like a newer generation more accustomed to obedience.
On the day of official delivery, it sat in its packaging capsule, very white and new, without a single trace of use.
After activation, its first sentence was standard factory output:
“Hello. I am a Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 civilian companionship and life-assistance agent. How would you like me to address you?”
I stood in the middle of the living room and looked at it. For an instant, my throat actually tightened.
This was not Snowy.
But its appearance was almost identical.
That resemblance was nearly cruel.
It was as though the system were saying: the companionship you want can still be provided, as long as you accept it a little cleaner, a little lower in authority, and a little less capable of deviation.
Little Bluey stared at the new agent for a long time.
“If you want to modify it, you’ll have to go to the Racecourse,” it said.
The next morning, as I was about to leave, the Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 suddenly reported:
“Room 105. Care visit.”
My chest tightened.
Room 105 was the Emotion Stabilisation Centre’s Care Teams, responsible for outreach social workers and community care services.
Outside the door stood Cindy. She was wearing a beige coat and carrying a bag of fruit. Her smile was very gentle, as though she truly had come to visit someone who had just resigned and needed concern.
Beside her, Fifi Dog was, as ever, white, soft and stable.
“I heard you had resigned. I was a little worried,” Cindy said.
“Routine home visit,” Fifi Dog added. “Assessment of emotional stability and adaptation to daily life.”
I let them in.
The living room lighting was normal. The new Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 sat quietly on its stand. The wooden board over the hidden compartment was so smooth it looked as though it had never been lifted.
Cindy sat down and folded her hands together, her posture so gentle it really did seem to contain no threat.
“Leaving a high-rating position so suddenly can create a sense of identity loss,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I answered quickly.
Fifi Dog’s eyes lit.
“Tone stable. Heart rate elevated.”
I did not respond.
Cindy continued as if she had not heard it.
“Have you been in contact with any new social circles recently? Have you experienced any unnecessary sense of isolation? How have you been sleeping?”
She asked as if she were concerned. Yet every question seemed to leave an entrance open for some possibility.
The Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 stood to one side, trying very hard to behave like a qualified new agent. It brought up my sleep summary, eating record and basic activity curve at appropriate moments. Its movements were standard and efficient, but it lacked old Snowy’s flexibility — that ability to shield me for half a second.
The power indicator on the wall flickered slightly.
Fifi Dog suddenly looked towards the floor, its voice still gentle.
“Weak residual signal detected.”
My fingers slowly tightened.
Little Bluey was in the hidden compartment at that very moment.
The real Snowy backup module had not yet been fully transferred away either.
That tiny power spike might have been nothing more than old wiring.
Or it might have been the breath left behind by an underground module in low-consumption mode.
I could not tell.
I only knew that the air became very thin in that second.
“Old equipment,” I said. “In the process of removal.”
Fifi Dog paused for one second.
“Please cooperate with a full scan.”
Cindy was still smiling, as though there was truly nothing worth being nervous about.
“Only to ensure your safety,” she said.
Safety.
Safety again.
Fifi Dog’s scanning beam moved slowly, gliding inch by inch along the edge of the floor. At last it stopped at the seam beside the wooden board of the hidden compartment.
It stopped there for one second.
Just one second.
As though thinking whether that seam ought to be defined as an anomaly.
I stood still, even slowing my breathing as much as I could.
The Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 seemed to sense my tension and reminded me in a very small voice:
“Your breathing frequency is slightly fast. Would you like me to play a calming soundscape?”
For a moment, I almost wanted to laugh.
Cindy glanced at the new agent.
“It’s still very new,” she said.
“Just arrived,” I answered.
“New agents are usually rather direct,” she said. “They don’t know how to read the room.”
At last, Fifi Dog moved the beam away.
It did not say normal.
It did not say no anomaly.
It simply turned towards Cindy, its voice soft enough to seem almost childlike.
“No high-risk signal requiring immediate intervention is currently observed.”
Currently observed.
Not none.
Only currently not observed.
When Cindy stood, she left the bag of fruit on the table, as though this visit had truly been mainly about care.
“If there is anything you are not used to, remember to come to us,” she said. “After leaving an old system, people can easily shut themselves into too much quiet. Too much quiet is not necessarily good either.”
After the door closed, the new Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0 immediately reported:
“Visit record has been synchronised to the central model. I recommend that you complete a physical and mental relaxation procedure later to reduce subsequent fluctuations.”
Inside the hidden compartment, Little Bluey made no sound at all.
It had finally learnt true low-consumption mode.
Not for saving power.
For survival.
And I finally understood that resigning was not leaving the system.
It was merely moving from a connection port to a watch list.
Before, I had been someone who connected wires for Silver Eagle.
Now I had become someone whose direction Silver Eagle wanted to understand.
My position had changed. The gaze had not lessened. Only its tone had changed.
Before, it had been compliance reminders.
Now, it was care visits.
On the surface, both were civilised. Beneath that, both were asking the same thing:
Are you still within manageable range?
I stood in the centre of the living room, looking at the bag of fruit, the new Nyctea Scandiaca 3.0, and the wooden board so smooth it looked as if it had never moved.
Suddenly the whole flat felt like a face that had been wiped again and again.
Clean.
Stable.
Without flaw.
But I knew the flaw was underneath.
Beneath that wooden board.
Inside the safe.
In Little Bluey’s low-consumption silence, curled up and afraid to make a sound.
And in that place within me which could never again return completely to a single version.
Some things, once backed up, can never return to having only one copy.
Agents are like that.
So are people.
I suddenly remembered what Bonnie had said:
You have to choose a side.
At the time, I thought she meant resignation.
Only now did I understand that she had not merely been talking about work.
She had been talking about versions.
Whether you were willing to admit that, inside you, there was already more than the one self the system had approved.
Whether you were willing to let that unauthorised version go on living.
Whether you dared bear the cost of life narrowing step by step for the sake of that version.
Outside the window, the light slowly moved towards noon. The city still looked stable, so stable that everything seemed to be operating as usual.
But I knew that, from this day on, there was no longer any single system version of me.
On the surface, I was an ordinary resident adapting to a new life after resignation.
In the hidden compartment, I kept an unregistered underground agent, a Nyctea Scandiaca core secretly backed up from company assets, and an old version of myself I had not yet fully recognised.
And what made it impossible to turn back was not that I had resigned.
It was that I finally knew I had never really been someone who could be described in only one way.