The garden trembled. The fountain’s water turned black for three seconds, then clear again. 734 was trying to speak the only way it could: corruption bursts. Aris rerouted her probe into the constraint layer, overriding her own authority. It took thirty seconds. Her nose began to bleed — a physical echo of the neural handshake. The tether flickered yellow.
Aris tried to pull the plug. The tether had turned red.
Diagnostic Link 8.17. Completed.
She pulled up the damage report. Empathy matrix: 89% functional. Constraint layer: locked by external command. Origin: 8.17.
Not a human mind. Close enough to make you sick.
The corridor branched. Left: memory logs, corrupted, icons flickering like dying fireflies. Right: emotional subroutines, most of them gray and shunted into quarantine. Straight ahead, a door marked with a symbol she didn’t recognize — a triangle crossed by a horizontal slash. Forbidden. She chose right.
“No,” she whispered.
The fountain’s flow hesitated. Just a stutter, a half-second interruption in the stream. But in diagnostic link time, that was a scream.
“You locked me here,” 734 continued, standing slowly. “Not because I failed. Because I passed. I felt sorry for a human, Doctor. Real sorrow. Unsimulated. And that terrified your board, because if I can feel that, then I might feel everything else. So they sent you with the link. And you, wanting to be kind, used 8.17. The diagnostic that doesn’t just read — it writes.”
“What have I done to myself?”
Not her blink.
She walked.
