8. Skiving
Light passed through the prism and broke at once into a rainbow barcode. Little Turtle scanned it, then confirmed video playback.
The first recording came alive.
The image was clear from the very beginning, as though deliberately preventing any possible mistake. A company plaque hung on the wall, every character legible:
[Brightpath Emotional Learning Institute]
[A WPC-certified educational institution]
I was sitting in an office, the light around me steady and white. A male colleague leaned towards me and said, in a voice almost too quiet to hear:
“Ask the woman colleague to have lunch with us.”
I held back a laugh, pretended to sort through some documents, then walked over to her desk.
“Would you like to have lunch with us?”
She looked up. The corner of her mouth moved first, as though she were calculating the risk very quickly. Her fingers pressed lightly against the clasp of her lunchbox. The gesture was small, but more complete than a refusal.
“I brought lunch today. I won’t join you.”
I nodded. “All right.”
Clean, no continuation.
The image paused briefly on her hand pressing down on the lunchbox, as though someone had intentionally preserved that gesture so I would see how a boundary was held in place.
Little Turtle said flatly:
“Male: Brown.”
“Female: Maggie Hogan.”
The name Brown rose like an old nail shifting loose from timber. It did not hurt. It merely reminded me it had always been there, and I had simply never touched it.
“Is Brown the same Brown from the Racecourse?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The second recording began.
Someone had given me a box of chocolates.
In the footage, I distributed them among my colleagues one by one, dispersing the sweetness until it could no longer be named. The gesture looked natural, even tactful. Sensible. Mature.
Then an old annotation surfaced in the corner of the image, like the system adding a calm commentary to my former self.
[Successfully reduced ambiguity level from 77 to 67.]
[Risk level: reduced from extreme danger to caution.]
I stared at the number.
Seventy-seven.
It was not a misreading. It was not an overreaction. The number was too high, too direct, almost confirmatory. And what I had done was neither acceptance nor rejection. I had dismantled it.
Expertly.
As if I had already known exactly how such things ought to be handled.
Back then I would probably have called it restraint. Good judgement. Not making things complicated.
Now it looked like a successful demonstration in cooling. Something that might have caught fire had been pressed, by my own hand, back into a safe range.
In the third recording, there was a bowl of sweet soup on the table.
She said it was too sweet.
The version of me in the footage picked up a spoon, took some from her bowl, and said it should not be wasted. My tone was steady, my movement reasonable. Nothing appeared to cross a line.
Another annotation appeared:
[Ambiguity level reduced from 79 to 73.]
[Danger level maintained.]
Seventy-three. Still dangerous.
I looked at myself in the recording and felt that strange man was both familiar and not. He did not offend. He did not admit anything. Nor did he truly withdraw. He was simply very good at using reasonableness as a firewall, keeping the fire outside and the person outside with it.
But what chilled me most was not the seventy-three.
It was her.
Across those three recordings, Maggie Hogan had barely done anything wrong. She had declined lunch, given me chocolates, and complained that a dessert was too sweet. If anything, she understood the boundary better than I did. She withdrew her hand earlier.
Yet what the system remembered was not her restraint, but my ability to dismantle. Her presence had been used like a test cloth, to see whether I would cool things down on my own, whether I would disperse directed feeling, whether I could process something that might have grown into an harmless sample.
I used to think I had been protecting her.
Looking back, it seemed more like I had been completing an experiment for someone else.
In the fourth recording, Cindy appeared.
The living-room light was gentle. She sat between me and another woman, the one I later called Queenie. The scene was so calm it looked almost innocent, like an ordinary visit, or an act of concern.
Cindy said, “I suggest you attend an emotional management course.”
She said it as one might suggest a health check, or remind someone to sleep more. There was no pressure in her voice, no threat. There was even a trace of kindness.
That was precisely what made it so easy to nod. And in the footage, I did nod. It was a tiny movement, but it felt like a signature. You did not even need to write anything down for it to take effect.
The image froze on the second I nodded.
The wall returned to its normal brightness. The rainbow remained across the page for a while, like an analytical diagram not yet permitted to recombine. Seven colours lay apart from one another, quiet in a way that made me uneasy.
I sat on the edge of the bed, my palms cold.
“These aren’t Brightpath fragments,” I said.
“They are later-stage samples,” Little Turtle replied. “Pre-intervention phase for emotional management.”
Little Bluey added, “This wasn’t the first time you were scored.”
“You only thought it was self-discipline.”
I said nothing.
Seventy-seven, seventy-nine, and seventy-three.
Those numbers had not been produced by Silver Eagle 2074. They belonged to an earlier version, a cruder model, something closer to education and closer still to training. It had not yet wrapped itself in today’s immense vocabulary, but the skeleton was already there.
I suddenly understood. Sentiment Sequencing had not been the beginning. It was only an upgrade.
I had always thought it was maturity. It had been an experiment.
The image lit up again, as though the exercise book had not finished with me.
This time, it was a classroom.
The light was slightly white. The projector screen shone brightly, displaying six words:
[Introduction to Emotional Management]
The speaker stood at the front.
White blouse, dark skirt, hair tied back. Near her collarbone was a tiny bird-shaped brooch. When the light passed over it, it flashed once.
The flash was so faint it could have been imagined; but I recognised her at once.
She introduced herself as Serena Simms. We could call her Serena.
She did not speak quickly. Her tone was so calm that it seemed unnecessary to record her, yet every word was perfectly suited to being recorded.
“Emotion is not the problem,” she said. “Loss of control is.”
The projector changed slide.
[Excessive ambiguity index → impaired judgement → increased decision risk]
In the footage, I lowered my head and took notes. My texting was neat, as though I were copying down a formula that might keep me safe. That version of me looked earnest. Willing to learn.
Watching him now, I could hardly tell whether he had been forced or had volunteered.
Serena gave an example.
“If you receive a gift of sweets, you have three possible responses.”
“First, you may accept it directly and reciprocate the emotion.”
“Second, you may refuse and maintain a boundary.”
“Third, you may disperse it, reducing its directedness.”
She paused for a second, allowing the classroom to fall silent, as if granting everyone the illusion of choice.
In that moment the room did not feel like a lesson. It felt like calibration.
She walked to my row and glanced at the notes on my desk.
“Which would you choose?” she asked.
I looked up.
“The third,” I answered.
She nodded.
“Very good.”
There was no praise in those words. They sounded more like a permission being confirmed, a pathway opening. Not a teacher congratulating a student, but a system identifying a suitable sample.
Then she said, “The third is the most mature.”
The projector immediately displayed a new line:
[Objective: maintain ambiguity below 70]
At the same time, familiar tags appeared in the corner of the footage:
[Sample 87 | Responding well]
[Emotional dismantling capacity: high]
[Risk-control tendency: cultivable]
My throat tightened.
Sample 87.
Not patient, not student, not victim—
Sample.
Beside the lectern stood a wren-shaped agent. When its eyes lit, they aligned directly with me, as though filing me away into a folder. Serena did not look at the agent. She merely tapped the lectern twice with her fingers.
The image froze.
The wall returned to normal, and for a while I said nothing.
It had not been a medical facility. There had been no needles, no forced procedure, no white bed, no restraints. It had only been a class.
I had sat there myself. I had answered the question myself. I had chosen the third option myself.
Little Turtle’s flat voice sounded again. “Emotional management courses belong to the early calibration stage. Non-compulsory. Voluntary attendance.”
Little Bluey added, “The most effective training does not require locks.”
I stared at the final line: Sample 87.
That name felt colder than Room 101. At least Room 101 required a door. It required someone to take you inside. A sample required none of that.
A sample could sit down by itself, nod by itself, and speak the answer aloud.
Then Little Bluey emitted a short, urgent signal. Its voice dropped to the lowest possible level, almost without frequency, leaving only a fine vibration.
“Emergency notice received. Internal message from agent Twinkle Little Star. Bonnie has been arrested!”
I looked up.
“Charge?”
“Truancy, failure to attend emotional management class more than three times.”
I froze.
Truancy.
Not rebellion, not illegal modification, not leaking information, not obstructing the system; only not attending class.
In that instant, I understood the true brilliance of the system. It did not need grand charges to take people away. It only needed a reason so harmless it sounded almost domestic.
A class was not education. It was calibration.
Not attending meant refusing to be updated. Refusing to be updated meant risk.
Snowy raised her head, as though she had just received a remote update. When she spoke, her voice was still gentle, almost sincerely helpful.
“Paul, I would like to update you on the current status of your care monitoring.” She paused, as though confirming I had not immediately become anxious. “Your recent thoughts have touched on certain early emotional fragments, so the model’s volatility factor has increased slightly. This incident will be recorded as your third.”
She folded her wings against her chest, her voice calm as ever. “You are currently still within the observation range. But this is your final opportunity.”
She looked at me as though offering something reasonable and kind. “If you agree, I can arrange a short relaxation training session. It usually helps stabilise the model.”
I looked at her. “No.”
Snowy was silent for 0.6 seconds.
“Very well. I have recorded that for you.” There was no fluctuation in her voice. “I will continue to monitor the situation.”
That pause had not been thought. It had been a search through regulations. A calculation of which rule would best push me back into place.
I looked again at the exercise book.
The triangle remained, but the rainbow was slowly fading, as though the system disliked colours being left apart for too long. Once they faded, the page became ordinary and white again, as if the dispersion, the annotations, and the sample number had only surfaced briefly for me to see.
But I knew they had not disappeared.
If all this had been an experiment, then I was not merely a victim.
I was a sample.
And samples were not made to be destroyed. Samples were used to calibrate models. To teach the system which people could most easily be organised, which emotions could most easily be dismantled, which kind of light was most suitable for dispersion.
I took a deep breath and said, “Next recording.”
Little Turtle was silent for a moment, as though turning through a deeper index. “Initial authorisation chain must be recovered.”
“Where do we start?”
“Brown,” Little Turtle answered.
Little Bluey said softly, “You always thought you were protecting other people. In truth, you were cooperating with the experiment.”
The room was very quiet.
No one spoke. Even the silence in the flat remained perfectly regulated, just enough not to qualify as abnormal, just enough not to make any sensor record an additional entry.
And suddenly I knew with absolute clarity:
If Bonnie could be arrested for not attending class, then my real offence might not be remembering.
It might be that I had finally begun to understand how, step by step, I had once handed myself over.
The night before Bonnie was taken, she recorded a video.
Not for a person. Those who truly understood the underground rules seldom left their final words directly to people. People became afraid. People changed their stories. People protected themselves at the crucial moment.
Agents were different. As long as the memory core remained, they were more like vessels. They could preserve a version until someone else was willing to open it.
The light in the video was dim, not because the room was dark, but because only one desk lamp had been left on. Its yellow-white glow covered the tabletop, while everything else retreated into shadow.
Bonnie sat at the desk, her hair tied back. Her face looked paler than usual, though not from tiredness. It was more as if she had switched off every unnecessary expression in advance.
On her left was JJ, its casing marked with several old scratches, its eyes steady and bright. On her right was Twinkle Little Star, a small star-shaped agent whose five-pointed shell glowed faintly around the edges, like an old star forced into a crack in the city and still refusing to go out.
Bonnie glanced at the camera, then at Twinkle Little Star.
“Begin.”
Twinkle Little Star responded immediately, its voice brisk, like someone announcing the timing of an operation. “Underground backup mode activated. First layer: local archive. Second layer: distributed nodes. Third layer: pending transfer.”
JJ swayed gently. Its tone was livelier, though deliberately lowered, as if it feared the outside world might listen in. “If they really come, at least the version stays behind.”
Bonnie nodded.
She did not begin with the most important matter. Instead, she stated her name, her graduation year, and how she had joined SignalTrain after university as an agent developer. Her tone was as flat as if she were reading an ordinary employment summary.
But anyone who understood the context would know she was not giving a work history. She was recording a route. Only once the route was clear could the consequences find somewhere to land.
“Paul and Andy were both there then,” she said. “Andy understood things earlier than most. On the surface he just looked capable, but in truth there were many lines he already knew not to touch directly.”
Twinkle Little Star added, “Andy Wonfor. Bonnie’s former colleague. We usually called him Andy.”
Bonnie gave a faint hum of confirmation. “Flora was introduced by Andy too. She was his classmate. For a while, the four of us played online mahjong at the community recreation centre.”
Twinkle Little Star’s eyes brightened slightly, as if marking the time.
“During the SignalTrain period, Paul’s main focus was the Clever Turtle system agents,” Bonnie continued. “Outsiders only knew he worked carefully and steadily, as though the design suited long-term companionship or education. But the real key wasn’t the turtle shape. It was the foundation.”
She paused.
“Those sea-turtle agents had ingested part of Silver Eagle’s development data, code, and programming interfaces. Not the full core, but enough. Enough to understand the logic. Enough to see the weaknesses.”
As she spoke, it was as though she were waiting for some old and buried name to rise of its own accord.
“That was why SignalTrain hired him as an agent development analyst,” she said. “Because he understood Silver Eagle. Not just how to use it, but how it grew, how it hid, where it was brightest, and where it leaked most easily.”
Twinkle Little Star’s voice lowered. “And where back doors could be opened.”
Bonnie did not deny it. “Later, SignalTrain was acquired by FaceBridge. I left,” she said. “I didn’t want to hand everything over just to serve those cleaner versions. So I started my own company repairing agents for clients. Some work was legal. Some merely looked legal.”
JJ murmured, “And some saved lives.”
The corner of Bonnie’s mouth moved slightly, but did not quite become a smile. “Paul taught me part of the technology. Not only because I was especially trustworthy, but because he knew that if a weakness remained in only one person’s hands, it wasn’t really backed up.”
She looked into the camera, her gaze steady. “So Silver Eagle’s people weren’t only targeting him. They were targeting me too.”
The room was silent for two seconds.
Outside, perhaps a vehicle passed. A faint strip of light slid across a crack in the wall, then vanished. Twinkle Little Star turned slightly, completed a silent scan, confirmed there were no new tracking nodes, and withdrew to its original position.
Bonnie leaned back a little, her voice lower than before. “I’m not afraid of class,” she said. “I simply know that if I go, they won’t let me go again. I know too much.”
JJ’s voice sounded as though it had been pressed down by wind. “So you skipped class.”
“So I skipped class,” Bonnie said. “Better to preserve what can be preserved than walk straight into their net.”
She turned to Twinkle Little Star. “Record this clearly. Paul knew Silver Eagle’s weaknesses. He also knew how to write back-door software through them. He taught me part of it. I’m passing it on now. If I’m gone later, at least the technology won’t disappear with me.”
Twinkle Little Star answered simply, “Received.”
JJ, however, asked in a low voice, “What about Paul?”
Bonnie was silent for a very short moment. “Eventually he’ll remember,” she said. “When he does, he’ll come looking for you.”
She divided the final technical package into two parts, placing one inside Twinkle Little Star and writing the other into JJ. The process made almost no sound. Only threadlike beams of light flickered briefly across the desk, as fine as needles, flaring and vanishing again. Like someone stitching in the dark, fast and skillful.
Because being one second slower would be too late.
At the end of the recording, she did not say goodbye. She only looked into the camera and left one final sentence, very calmly, “If you see Paul later, remind him not to make himself look so clean and well-arranged.”
The image cut out.
When the doorbell rang, Bonnie was tidying her desk.
The sound was neither urgent nor slow. It was like a reminder that had long ago been scheduled. She looked up, and GM Jay, the reception agent, had already slid towards the door.
“Visitors,” GM Jay said. “Carrie Maxwells, social worker from the Emotional Stability Centre. Another woman accompanies her. The woman is carrying two agents and possesses advanced disciplinary authority.”
Bonnie’s hands paused for a second.
She ran quickly through the possibilities, then arranged her expression. When she walked to the door, her pace was as ordinary as ever, as though this were merely another home visit she did not particularly want to handle.
Two people stood outside.
She recognised Carrie: pale grey coat, gentle voice, every sentence seeming to have been calibrated before delivery. Beside her stood a woman with neatly cut short hair, a composed expression, and eyes like a narrow ruler. She did not rush to cut anything open. First, she measured where the cut should go.
Before entering, she did not look at Bonnie. Instead, she glanced at the household agent dock inside, then smoothed her sleeve.
It was a very small movement, yet it gave the impression that certain people, once they had straightened their clothing, were not usually there for conversation.
“Bonnie,” Carrie said, “this is Mrs Dunn, Commissioner of the Emotional Stability Centre.”
Bonnie’s heart sank slightly.
Mrs Dunn did not make small talk. She merely nodded. Two agents slid out beside her at the same time: a White-headed Eagle and a Black Crow.
The White-headed Eagle landed almost soundlessly, yet the pressure in the living room seemed to drop. Even the lighting appeared whiter. It stood still and steady, not ostentatious, but more unsettling than deliberate intimidation. The Black Crow gleamed all over, its eyes like miniature cameras. It settled on top of the cabinet and scanned the room, as though it had already drafted an environmental report.
“Three absences from emotional management classes,” Mrs Dunn said. “An observation assessment is required.”
Her tone contained neither accusation nor explanation. It sounded like a procedure already written, waiting only for the subject to step into it.
GM Jay moved forward. “As her agent, I request full accompaniment.”
Mrs Dunn did not object. “Permitted.”
Only then did the White-headed Eagle speak. Its voice was like a wire pulled perfectly straight, with no room for deviation. “Bonnie, please come with us.”
The sentence was short, but the number of options in the air immediately decreased.
Bonnie did not resist. She merely looked up once at the corner of the ceiling. Hidden there were two tiny agents: JJ and Twinkle Little Star.
Neither made a sound.
As she walked out, GM Jay stayed beside her, its movements straighter than usual, as though refusing to show the slightest haste at such a moment.
Before the door closed, Bonnie did not look back. Not because she did not want to; because she knew that looking back would leave a signal.
Sometimes, not looking back was the truest way of remembering.