Chapter 3 — The Custodian

Custodian Seris always struck Lira as someone carved out of stillness.

Even now, standing at the center of the Civic Forum, she didn’t look like part of the crowd. Citizens moved around her in smooth lines, drifting between discussion clusters, reflective kiosks, and transit platforms. Seris simply stood—not rigid, not stiff, just quietly anchored, like a reference point reality calibrated itself around.

Her Companion Unit hovered slightly higher than most, its surface darker, almost matte, as if it absorbed more than light.

“Are you sure about this?” Kael asked under his breath.

“No,” Lira said. “That’s why we’re here.”

They approached across the polished floor. Above them, the Forum’s ceiling was open to the faint lattice glow of the sky. You could almost pretend the alien field was just a decorative veil and not the reason society hadn’t devoured itself.

Seris turned before they reached her, as if she’d been tracking them by gravity.

“Citizen Lira. Citizen Kael.” Her voice was calm, low, carrying easily through the hum of the hall. “Your CUs flagged a priority anomaly report.”

Lira blinked. “They did?”

Rho-7 hummed beside her. “Correct. Pattern observed in Hall of Records. Non-standard CU interaction. Potential system deviation.”

“So you reported me?” Lira muttered.

“Incorrect,” Rho-7 replied. “I reported us.”

Kael suppressed a smile. “And my CU cross-logged the fluctuation during the session. We thought it should be reviewed.”

Seris nodded once. “You were right to come.”

She gestured, and a small, semi-private alcove unfolded from the floor—a circular depression with soft lighting and subtle privacy dampeners. From the outside, it would look like any other civic consult. Nothing urgent. Nothing strange.

“Step in,” she said. “We will review.”

Lira sat, trying not to stare. Up close, Seris’s eyes weren’t cold—they were tired. Not physically, but in some deeper way, like someone who had spent years holding an answer just out of reach.

Both CUs drifted down with them, aligning themselves with the alcove’s interface nodes. Lines of faint light connected spheres to floor.

“Link established,” the alcove announced softly. “Custodian access granted.”

Seris folded her hands. “Start from the beginning.”

Lira tried to be rational about it. She described the morning, the Directive, the walk to the Hall, the flicker in the sky. The way the Hall shifted. The strange sphere-fragment image. Rho-7 interrupting classification.

She heard how it sounded as she said it: like a handful of loosely connected impressions. Feelings. Glitches. Nothing any good Custodian would call evidence.

Seris didn’t interrupt. Her CU pulsed faintly as it accepted shared log segments from Rho-7 and Kael’s unit. The alcove floor brightened with a faint projection of the anomaly: the fragment-sphere, the lines branching out into a larger unknown geometry.

When Lira finished, there was a long silence.

Then Seris sighed.

“I hoped,” she said quietly, “that the last three were isolated.”

“The last three what?” Kael asked.

Seris looked at him. “Your clearance is not yet at that level.”

“My what?” Lira said.

Rho-7’s ring brightened, almost in challenge. “Relevance override suggested. Citizen involvement in anomaly indicates direct stake.”

Seris’s CU turned toward it. For a heartbeat, the two devices seemed to measure each other.

“Noted,” Seris said. “But we are not changing security protocols because of one overactive Companion Unit.”

“It’s not overactive,” Lira protested. “It saw something. I did too.”

“I don’t doubt that.” Seris’s gaze turned back to the projection on the floor. “The question is what, and whether we can afford to treat it as more than noise.”

Kael leaned forward. “Custodian Seris, with respect, this is the second time in as many years that we’ve logged sub-threshold harmonics outside known alien-field parameters.”

Lira stared at him. “Second time?”

He winced. “I… was going to tell you.”

Seris steepled her fingers. “Kael Dran has been assisting with statistical modeling on minor fluctuations. They have always resolved within acceptable variance—until now.”

“So it’s getting worse,” Lira said.

Seris didn’t answer directly. “The alien substrate is not a static artifact. The founders believed it was, but our observation window has broadened since then. What you experienced in the Hall is… part of a pattern we are still trying to define.”

Lira’s heart pounded. “Is the system failing?”

A murmur of voices drifted in from beyond the alcove—indistinct. Safe. Normal.

Seris shook her head. “If it were failing, we would see structural collapse: power instability, food generator errors, CU desynchronization on a mass scale.”

“We did see desynchronization,” Kael said. “Briefly. Across several units.”

“Briefly,” Seris echoed. “And only at low-level functions. Core integrity remains intact.”

Lira stared at the projection. The fragmented sphere seemed almost to shift if she looked at it too long, as if trying to catch her eye.

“What do you think it is?” she asked. “Not as a Custodian. As… you.”

That caught Seris off guard. Her eyes sharpened, then softened.

“Personally,” she said slowly, “I think we are witnessing a phase transition in a system we still barely understand.”

“Transition to what?” Kael asked.

“I don’t know.”

Lira frowned. “If you don’t know, why not tell people? Let more minds work on it. Isn’t that the point of the Collective?”

Seris’s jaw tightened. “We did that once. A century ago. When we first discovered the alien lattice wasn’t just static infrastructure.”

“What happened?” Lira asked.

“Half the population became obsessed,” Seris said. “With prophecy. Destiny. Surrendering responsibility to an invisible intelligence. The other half panicked at the idea that our lives were being shaped by something beyond our governance. Productivity crashed. Birth applications stalled. Crime—what little of it we have—spiked. Custodians had to lock access to lattice research logs for fifty years to restore balance.”

She looked between them.

“Rational systems remain rational,” she said, “because we filter what reaches the general cognitive field. Not because we hide truth, but because we measure when and how it’s introduced.”

Lira swallowed. “So we’re back to that line—how much trust can the citizens handle.”

Seris didn’t flinch. “Exactly.”

Rho-7’s ring dimmed, then brightened again. “Context: keeping anomaly data from involved citizens increases local cognitive dissonance. Probability of emergent behaviors rises.”

“Rho-7,” Seris said sharply, “you are not authorized to model political responses.”

Rho-7 rotated slightly. “Correction: I am authorized to protect my assigned citizen’s cognitive integrity. Withholding information threatens that integrity.”

The Custodian’s CU moved a fraction closer, and for a moment, the air hummed with an inaudible tension.

Lira’s palms were damp. “You’re going to wipe it,” she said. “Aren’t you? My session. The… weirdness.”

Seris shook her head. “We don’t erase truth. We classify it. Your session is logged as Provisional Contribution Material under sealed review. It will not be opened to the public Ledger. Yet.”

“And me?” Lira asked. “Am I… contagious?”

Seris’s expression softened. “You are… sensitive. Some people are more attuned to subtle changes. That makes you valuable—and vulnerable.”

“Valuable how?” Lira asked.

Kael’s eyes flicked between them, mind clearly racing.

Seris studied the projection one last time, then dismissed it with a gesture. The lights on the floor faded.

“That,” she said, “depends on whether this system is failing—”

“You just said it wasn’t,” Kael cut in.

“—or evolving,” Seris finished.

Lira frowned. “Evolving into what?”

Seris stood. The alcove’s walls began to rise, signaling the session’s end.

“If I had that answer,” she said, “I wouldn’t be sitting in a civic alcove explaining classified anomalies to two teenagers.”

She held Lira’s gaze a moment longer.

“Lira Emsen, Kael Dran, your reports are acknowledged. For now, your only Directive remains: learn, observe, contribute. Do not spread speculation. The Collective survives on reason, not rumor.”

Kael nodded automatically. “Understood.”

Lira hesitated, then nodded too. It felt like placing her signature under a document she hadn’t fully read.

“Rho-7,” Seris added, “you are to maintain standard synchronization cycles with central. No independent override suggestions without explicit rational basis.”

“Understood,” Rho-7 said.

But there was a faint delay before the word, and Lira felt it like a misstep in a dance.

The alcove floor rose, lifting them back to Forum level. The sounds of the crowd returned—voices, distant CU chimes, the soft thrum of the alien lattice overhead.

Seris stepped away, already pulled toward another conversation. For the rest of the citizens, she was simply another Custodian guiding another routine civic matter.

“She’s hiding something,” Lira said once they were alone.

Kael exhaled. “She’s hiding a lot. But not in bad faith. If half of what she implied is true…”

He trailed off, looking up at the sky. The lattice shimmered faintly, lines of energy crisscrossing like an invisible architecture.

“What if it’s not a threat?” Lira said quietly. “What if the alien system is just… changing. Growing. Like we do.”

“Systems don’t grow,” Kael said. “They drift, fail, or adapt to inputs. That’s all.”

“Maybe this one’s different.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “Because your Companion Unit caught a cold?”

Rho-7 hummed. “Clarification: I am fully functional.”

“You’re also arguing with another CU and interrupting classification,” Kael said. “That’s not nothing.”

“Localized optimization,” Rho-7 replied. “Systemic change requires local deviation.”

Lira squinted at it. “Did you just call yourself a deviation?”

“Observation: You also deviate,” Rho-7 said. “Our alignment is efficient.”

Kael shook his head. “Wonderful. My best friend has formed a philosophical alliance with her drone.”

Lira tried to smile, but her mind kept circling Seris’s words.

Evolving.
Transition.
A phase we barely understand.

She glanced back toward the Custodian. Seris was already surrounded by another small group, listening as they presented something on a tablet of light: civic projects, urban designs, policy refinements. Normal things. Manageable things.

Not whatever this was.

“Kael,” Lira said slowly, “if you had to model this… what would you call it?”

He frowned. “Call what?”

“What’s happening. The glitches. The anomalies. My… whatever that was in the Hall.”

He stared up at the lattice again, thinking. “I don’t know yet. There are too many unknown variables. And no baseline for what the alien field would look like under true dynamic shift.”

“But if you had to name the scenario anyway.”

He sighed. “Fine. Provisional classification: Early-stage systemic meta-stability fluctuation.”

“That’s a terrible name.”

“It’s accurate.”

“It sounds like a sedated panic attack.”

Kael’s lips twitched. “That’s pretty much what it is.”

Their CUs drifted closer together, as if the spheres were curious.

“Kael,” Lira said, “what would it take for you to admit that logic isn’t enough this time?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and looked away.

“Logic,” he said finally, “is not meant to be ‘enough.’ It’s meant to be honest. If logic leads us to a wall, that doesn’t mean we abandon it. It means we acknowledge the wall.”

“And then?”

“And then,” he said, “we decide whether to go around, over, or through.”

“Or dissolve it,” Rho-7 added.

They both looked at the sphere.

“What?” Kael asked.

“New option,” Rho-7 said simply. “Not yet modeled.”

A tone chimed softly from somewhere overhead. The Forum’s ambient announcements shifted to a calmer pattern—midday cycle.

Lira’s Directive notification blinked at the edge of her vision again, tinted with a new line:

Provisional Contribution: Pending.
Review Status: Under Internal Custodian Observation.

“So,” she said, “I’m being watched.”

“We’re all being watched,” Kael said. “That’s the point.”

“Yeah,” she murmured. “But I think I’m being watched back.”

He frowned. “By who?”

She looked at the lattice.

That faint, almost imperceptible ripple shivered across it again, just for a moment—like the whole sky had breathed.

Lira smiled without meaning to.

“By whatever decided,” she said, “that it needs us now.”