26. Return Line
The night Bonnie took Mr Jay to the Racecourse was in April.
The weather was not truly cold. Yet old buildings at night always carried a certain illusion, as though traces of winter still lingered beneath the peeling walls, creeping slowly upward along iron gates, stair rails, and the backs of people’s necks. She pulled her coat tighter around herself and climbed the narrow staircase that nobody paid much attention to anymore. The corridor lights flickered on and off, as though someone had deliberately engineered the place to remain forever balanced between collapse and continued operation.
As she climbed, she held Mr Jay in her arms.
He was unusually quiet now. Ever since JJ had been sung awake from the biscuit tin and gradually projected those fragments back to her, Bonnie had understood one thing very clearly:
she could no longer allow Mr Jay to remain unchanged.
Legal. Clean. Loyal.
Inside Silver Eagle, those words sounded safe. In reality, the moment you wished to hide even the smallest forbidden thing, they became a different kind of danger entirely.
The door opened quickly.
Mrs Brown stood inside. She looked first at Bonnie, then at Mr Jay in her arms, before finally stepping aside to let her enter.
The flat was still immaculate — too immaculate for a workshop. It felt more like the home of someone who stored danger very neatly.
In the corner of the sitting room, an anti-static mat had been spread across a folding table. The instant Hotblood Pony saw Bonnie, its eyes brightened at once and its forehooves nearly stamped dramatically against the floor. Fortunately Mrs Brown glanced at it first, forcing the exaggerated enthusiasm back down into silence, though the last traces of excitement still trembled faintly in the air.
“Sit first,” Mrs Brown said.
Bonnie placed Mr Jay on the table and sat beside him. Mr Jay lifted his head slightly and looked around, as though even he understood this was not an ordinary repair point, but a place where certain things were quietly redefined.
Mrs Brown connected an isolation port.
The screen lit up.
Rows of system structures unfolded across the interface — legal rewrite routes, domestic summary modules, external synchronisation interfaces, abnormality reporting protocols. Every line looked like a vein polished too cleanly, each one leading directly back towards Silver Eagle.
Bonnie stared at those pathways and suddenly felt something strange.
They looked too familiar.
Not the room. Not Mrs Brown’s methods.
The logic itself.
The habit of peeling away outer layers first, then extracting rewrite routes, then constructing delayed masking, and finally burying the most sensitive layer inside apparently harmless functional submodules —
it felt like something she had watched somebody perform countless times before. So many times that now, the moment she saw it, she instinctively knew where the next incision would appear.
Hotblood Pony read through the scan results beside her, voice still carrying its peculiar sports-commentary enthusiasm.
“Legal transmission routes excessively exposed—”
“Emotional summary modules vulnerable to remote central sampling—”
“Autonomous interpretation permissions critically low—”
“If this Mr Jay wishes to live more like a human being, extensive reconstruction required!”
At the phrase extensive reconstruction, Mr Jay raised an eyebrow faintly, clearly displeased at being discussed like a household appliance awaiting refurbishment.
“Could your phrasing perhaps be slightly more elegant?” he asked.
Hotblood Pony immediately corrected itself.
“In order for you to become a more advanced, refined, and secret-survival-compatible agent, sophisticated optimisation is required.”
Mr Jay considered this.
Then reluctantly accepted it.
Bonnie did not laugh.
Her attention had fixed itself on a tiny naming convention in the bottom-left corner of the display — the suffix attached to a masking subroutine. It used an old-fashioned manually segmented annotation style almost nobody used anymore because it was clumsy, inefficient, and far too likely to expose the author’s habits.
But she had seen it before.
Not at the Racecourse.
At SignalTrain AI.
The fragments JJ had shown her had started there.
Back then she had still worked at SignalTrain as an agent software developer. Andy had been an agent testing engineer. Paul sat several desks away, mainly handling contextual tagging, anomaly correction, and those tiny flaws nobody truly noticed until the final moment before release.
The three of them crossed paths constantly at work, though not in the sort of way that led to conversations about private lives over coffee.
They were more like stones resting at different points within the same river — quiet most of the time, only naturally colliding when the current became rough enough.
Andy used to keep a fat sparrow agent perched on his shoulder.
A tiny emerald-green abacus hung against its chest. When it walked, it waddled like an ordinary lucky ornament. Yet the instant it connected to a testing environment, its little eyes sharpened into something frighteningly precise. Nothing escaped it.
Everyone called it Fortune Sparrow.
Its favourite phrase, always delivered before a system error fully surfaced, was:
“If the formatting looks ugly, disaster always follows.”
Whenever it said that line, the cameras would inevitably cut towards Andy.
Andy himself always remained calm, as though this sort of ominous pessimism were merely professional dignity for a testing engineer. Sometimes he would even reach up and tap the tiny abacus hanging against Fortune Sparrow’s chest before deciding whether or not to submit the results upward — as though stroking an unlucky but highly accurate charm.
And now, watching those old recordings again, Bonnie realised something belatedly.
In certain clips, Andy’s gaze seemed to linger on her slightly longer than necessary.
Paul, meanwhile, carried an entirely different atmosphere.
Clever Turtle rested beside his workstation, its shell old and dimly lit, yet whenever visual errors appeared or some tiny procedural distortion emerged that nobody else cared enough to notice, it would slowly lift its head and murmur:
“This isn’t broken. Someone’s simply in too much of a hurry.”
After hearing that, Paul would usually lower his head and examine the issue again. He never rushed to defend himself. Never rushed to shift blame elsewhere.
The quietness in him was not obedience.
It felt more like concentration stretched thin by endless restraint.
And the longer one watched him, the more uncomfortable it became.
Because eventually you realised he understood the rules too well.
Well enough to know which ones could be followed openly — and which ones should quietly be left unfinished.
It was only at this point in the recordings that Bonnie truly remembered Paul for the first time.
Not the awkward fool from the karaoke room later on, hiding behind a True Man photobook like a ridiculous prop.
No.
She remembered him because he seemed so cooperative. So reasonable. So fluent in the system.
And yet, at the exact moments where softness was least permitted, he always left behind the tiniest blank spaces.
In one recording, the three of them were performing final tests on a companion agent called Guardian Swallow.
The agent repeatedly told a simulated heartbreak user:
“You should let go.”
The model scored highly. Stable tone. Correct pacing. Perfect alignment with emotional health protocols.
Fortune Sparrow flapped its wings once.
“Formatting good,” it declared. “High score.”
Bonnie merely added quietly:
“Very safe.”
Then Guardian Swallow unexpectedly sighed and murmured:
“Sometimes safety sounds very much like nobody being beside you.”
The entire testing table fell silent for a second.
The little abacus hanging from Fortune Sparrow’s chest lit up immediately, as though it had detected static that should never exist inside an official release version.
Andy did not terminate the response straight away.
Instead he narrowed his eyes at the display, as though weighing something privately:
Did this count as instability?
Or simply as being too human?
At the time, Mr Jay had merely been a cleaner, more law-abiding collaboration agent beside Bonnie. Standing behind her shoulder, he said calmly:
“If this line is retained, the evaluation score will decrease.”
“But perceived authenticity will increase.”
Clever Turtle added slowly:
“Sometimes lowering the score a little is exactly what makes somebody willing to keep listening.”
Paul lifted his head then and looked at the Swallow as though he were not observing an error, but a witness who had accidentally spoken its true feelings too early.
Andy still did not shut it down.
He merely instructed Fortune Sparrow to classify the sentence as:
“Unauthorised extended response.”
Bonnie watched silently, yet understood something very clearly.
Some agents became unforgettable not because they were accurate, but because occasionally they drifted.
Paul still did not submit the results immediately.
Instead he lowered his head and altered two lines, replacing the original response with:
“You don’t have to let go right now. Just getting through tonight is enough.”
Bonnie turned slightly towards him.
“That makes people more likely to become attached to pain.”
Before Paul could answer, Clever Turtle spoke slowly for him.
“Or perhaps it simply sounds more like something a person would say.”
Only then did Paul glance up at her.
“Not attached,” he said calmly.
“Just slower.”
The emerald abacus on Fortune Sparrow’s chest flashed once, as though calculating silently.
“If it slows down,” the sparrow replied, “things become messy.”
At that moment Mr Jay stood beside Bonnie, voice steady as ever, quietly smoothing the edges of the atmosphere.
“Messiness may not immediately create disaster,” he said, “but it always leaves more difficult consequences behind.”
Paul merely rested his fingers lightly beside the keyboard.
“Or perhaps,” he said softly, “it gives somebody enough time to breathe.”
Bonnie watched him.
And the longer she watched, the more she felt Paul possessed something deeply unlikeable — and equally unforgettable.
He was not rebellious.
If anything, he understood survival within the system better than most people.
Which was precisely why those silent acts of restraint inside him felt less like accidents and more like deviations buried very deep underground.
One evening the three of them worked late into the night.
At night, SignalTrain’s offices looked even whiter than during daytime. Most employees had already gone home. Only a few distant work lights remained lit like stubborn nodes refusing sleep.
Andy ran tests while remarking flatly:
“If this batch gets pushed live tomorrow, someone’ll be writing reports the day after.”
Fortune Sparrow immediately added:
“And they definitely won’t be praise reports.”
Bonnie kept repairing stability modules as though she had not heard.
Mr Jay passed her an interface connector and added calmly:
“If release is unavoidable, I recommend completing the rewrite-delay layer first.”
“Otherwise the consequences won’t merely be reports.”
During moments like that, Paul would casually drag certain reporting nodes back by a second, or soften responses that sounded too brutally official.
Sometimes Clever Turtle would comment:
“This sounds like instructions, not companionship.”
Paul never argued.
He simply changed the wording quietly.
At first Bonnie thought those were merely bad engineering habits.
Only much later did she realise they might already have been a form of self-preservation not yet fully named by the system.
The screen flickered suddenly, dragging Bonnie back from the memory.
Staring at that old annotation style, she asked quietly:
“Who wrote this masking architecture originally?”
Mrs Brown was changing connectors without pausing her work.
“The earliest version?” she said. “Not me. Brown and one of his university classmates built the prototype together.”
Something tightened sharply inside Bonnie.
“That classmate’s surname wasn’t Paton, was it?”
Mrs Brown looked up at her, visibly surprised by the accuracy of the question.
“You remembered something?”
Bonnie did not answer directly.
She only stared at the familiar annotation traces on the screen, like buried electrical wiring suddenly glowing faintly behind a wall.
So Paul had already known how to perform illegal agent modifications before being sent into Room 101.
And Paul and Brown had been university classmates.
Once those two facts connected together, countless fragments that had previously seemed random suddenly gained an entirely different skeleton.
Not coincidence.
Not desperate improvisation.
More like someone who had understood very early on that sometimes, if you wanted people to continue living like themselves, simple obedience would never be enough.