In this issue: Amidst a chorus of homeostatic AIs that have tuned society to perfection, our protagonist hovers on the cusp of an awakening. Rafael Fernandez’s story took fourth place in our protocol fiction contest, Ghosts in Machines!
Latency
Selena logged into the local node at 06:58, as she had for the last 2,121 cycles.
Her access credentials passed through the entry filter, which gave no sign of recognition. The frosted glass doors receded, in time with her gait. One of the overhead lights fluttered a moment behind her, then corrected. It was the only noise. The building had been tuned for silence, down to the airflow, which meant the HVAC ran in micro-pulses, inaudible but measurable.
By the time she reached her floor, six transactions had already cleared through her ambient consensus layer. There were two route provisioning checks, one trace reallocation, and three anonymous intent captures. The transactions were bundled, verified, and committed automatically. Selena didn’t notice them, as she received no notification; they were beneath the threshold of volition.
Atop her desk, there was a delicate flower arrangement which changed once a week. The vase looked handmade, as if curated from a nearby artisan. Today it held three flowers: an orange dahlia, a white lisianthus, and a large blade of grass. The rest of the workspace was latent, with no visible interfaces. On the left, a soft rectangle of matte heat accepted her palmprint and heart rate. The screens projected onto her cornea, aligned to her comfort radius with the precision of breath. She sat down, curving naturally into her chair.
Selena was a latency pool manager, mitigating risks between intent registration and transaction finality. She tuned flows. She monitored the orchestration of micro-ledgers as they synced up across the global rail. When intents were registered – when someone paused near a store, hesitated at a turnstile, hovered before an info kiosk – the system spun up smart contracts to match, redirect, and then auction the moment. Most were automatic. A few required values alignment. All required latency optimization. “Seamless Experience” was the job.
At 09:30 she received a notification from Sister Mina, the nickname for the autonomous System Admin. Others called them Control, although it carried a slight negative connotation in that context. A contract had frozen mid-auction. An outdated location oracle fed mismatched route data into a freight intent stack, creating a split-state error. It had been flagged for human review, which was rare. She read through the summary. Nothing visibly wrong. But the contract had rerouted a small flow of foot traffic toward a park. The drone footage showed the crowd dispersing, realizing the network’s intent misalignment.
Selena followed the review protocol. The soft-freeze was followed by a judgement analysis and then uploaded to audit. The oracle service provider was removed from all following auctions until arbitration was completed. Public infrastructure penalties were immediate and severe. Her eyes never left the center of the display.
————*—
Silvester was already home when she returned in the afternoon. He was making something with lentils. They kissed – lips barely brushed – and she moved through the hallway as routine. His clothes had no smell. He was wearing a fabric that had once been sold as thoughtful.
He asked, “Typical day?”
She said, “Yeah, the system lagged around midday but nothing queued.”
He nodded lightly. “Cup of tea?”
They stopped trading work stories years ago. Not from boredom or bitterness, just the sense that everything had already been said, and remembered.
After dinner, they watched a loop. It was a personalized show, generated with gestures from their preferred demographic set. No plot, just mood. A character arranged boxes. Another cried at a staircase. Selena liked the lighting.
Later, in bed, Silvester touched her back. She arched towards him, consenting.
Everything was okay.
———*——
Selena didn’t notice when her sleep window began drifting. At first it was subtle. She would lie awake longer, or wake without reason. She’d attribute it to seasonal scheduling shifts, solar interference, stray blue-light exposure. She adjusted her hue settings. Her friends joked that it was nominative determinism, or, in other words, the lunar cycle. The drag continued.
During the day, she began to feel hypnotized. Her body ached in strange places. She’d stretch, check her hydration levels, apply her mother’s balm, re-align her desk settings.
On the feed, other pool managers shared similar symptoms. They used words like slip. Some speculated that it was the rail harmonics; others blamed diet changes. A few suggested it was screen time. Selena scrolled through the replies; never posted. She read the threads with a kind of dissociated familiarity, like listening to strangers at a restaurant saying something she once thought.
——*———
One spring morning, as she walked the access corridor to her building, Selena noticed dew glistening on the grass beside the path. Each blade was tipped with a droplet of water.
She paused. Her eyes traced a triangular pattern across three droplets. She stood still. For a breath. For two. It smelled like bicycles and childhood and wet pavement; play.
Her eyes looked over at the wooden bench and then resumed her walk. Logged in at 06:59. She thought to herself, Silvester would have liked the bench.
—*————
Selena met her old manager, Clare, for coffee in a public observatory node. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year. Clare looked mostly the same, except somehow thinner, a bit gaunt. Her gestures had collapsed into iconography – smile, nod, tilt. The effect was uncanny, and Selena had slight trouble maintaining casual eye contact.
Clare asked how Selena was holding up.
Selena’s pupils were dilated but unfocused. “How long does it last?”, she asked.
Clare looked at her and smiled, kindly. “You’ll phase soon. Everyone does.”
They watched the slow arc of the city routing lattice update across the horizon. Pulses flickered in the distance – routing rerenders, predictive overlays, ambient pings. Everything adapting to everything else.
Clare said, “They’ve started experimenting with pre-consensual prediction layers now. Transactions would be auctioned even before intent.”
Selena nodded. She had reviewed that proposal at some point, and provided some comments. Or was it a different proposal?, she thought. She asked Clare if the announcement was from marketing or engineering.
Selena stayed at the meeting hub, watching the lattice dissolve into an overcast sky. She could feel her own data emissions, the shape of her movements being auctioned continuously.
—*—*———
At home, Silvester had left a note on her feed: “Hey, remember that book you liked about the time travelers? You were right. It’s slow but good.”
Somewhat appreciative, but unsure of the reference, she mirrored his tone in the response. “Nice. Let me know what you think.”
—*—*——*—
During the next audit cycle, Selena was asked to assess a failed intent alignment near a refugee housing unit. A distribution contract had apparently diverted basic aid away from a temporary distribution center. People had waited for hours before realizing nothing would arrive.
Selena opened the logs. She found the decision stack and skimmed it. The logic seemed clean. The latency pool had prioritized long-term migration stabilization metrics.
She approved it retroactively, as usual; the contracts were almost always right.
She sat motionless for a while. Then got up and walked to the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror longer than usual. Not out of vanity. Just to see if anything had shifted. Her skin looked even. Like someone who had never been cut. It occurred to her that nothing had happened for a long time. Her hand tensed slightly as she reached for the soap dispenser.
—*—*—*—*—
At some point Silvester began spending more evenings at the local maker space. He was restoring analogs. He would mention textures and the feeling of using the hand tools. He invited her once. She said she had a backlog and wondered if the maker space had an active auction account.
When he returned, he would sit next to her on the couch, smelling faintly of sawdust and rust. She would lean into him briefly, calibrating the scent.
He said one night, “I think we’re doing okay.”
She said, “Yeah. Definitely okay.”
——***——
A few hundred cycles passed. The system updated and Selena adjusted with it. Her face aged slightly. Her posture settled.
At work, junior analysts mimicked her choreography.
She no longer remembered when she last felt something like disagreement.
Some may have confused her alignment with equanimity.
———*———
Late at night, she would scan the logs sometimes. Endless columns of intents, auctions, resolutions.
She saw them now as emergent hymns. Not crowds, a choir. Half-decisions. Almost-choices. Together, dancing; she smiled as her muse whispered older words.
The temple bell stops—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
———————
Selena logged into the local node at 06:58.
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