Juy-947 Extra Quality -

"JUY-947," he hissed. "What did you do? The system is… weeping."

Red light. Shrieking sirens. The stomp of Enforcer boots. juy-947

Kaelen didn't run. He stood in the center of the golden echo, smiling. His hands, for the first time in 1,247 days, were still. "JUY-947," he hissed

He finished the lubrication in silence, but his mind wasn't on the spinal coupling. It was on the cracks. He had spent 1,247 days looking for them—the tiny fractures in the system. A camera that spun left for 0.8 seconds before right. A door lock that misfired during the second siren. A maintenance tunnel that wasn't on any schematic because the drone that mapped it had been decommissioned in year three. Shrieking sirens

Kaelen looked past him, through the small, reinforced window of the chamber. Far down the central corridor, he saw a Harvester Drone stop moving. Another. Then three more. They weren't harvesting. They were just… standing. Waiting.

Instead, he peeled back the false panel in his pod—the one behind the toilet—and pulled out his collection: a sharpened piece of floor plating, a roll of conductive tape, a data chip he'd wiped clean from a dead supervisor's console.

The supervisor's face went pale. Because behind him, the alarms stopped. The red light bled back to blue. But the hum of the servers didn't return to its cold, efficient pitch. It wavered, stumbled, and then—softly, impossibly—began to hum a tune.