If the Tower wanted me to feel reassured, it would have stopped rearranging me like furniture.

  Instead, it promoted me.

  That’s the trick with institutions like this: they don’t punish you when they’re unsure what you’ll do. They give you a slightly better chair and see whether you sit down quietly.

  The notice arrived at the start of my shift, stamped with three layers of approval I didn’t recognise and a fourth I did, though I couldn’t have told you where I’d seen it before. Expanded Oversight Liaison, it said, which is the sort of title you invent when you want someone close to the machinery but not actually holding the levers.

  Ressa read it over my shoulder and laughed. Not politely.

  “Oh, they’re scared of you,” she said.

  “Good morning to you too.”

  “They don’t move people like this unless they’re deciding whether to keep them,” she added. “Or feed them to something.”

  “Comforting.”

  She sipped her drink. “You going to accept?”

  “I already did,” I said. “They don’t really ask.”

  My new station overlooked the floor at a slightly different angle: less intimate, more comprehensive. I could see intake patterns, energy flow, the subtle choreography of staff positioning that most people never notice because they’re too busy doing their jobs.

  I noticed because my job was now, apparently, to notice.

  Elarina was already working.

  She didn’t look up when I took my place, which I appreciated. Whatever conversation was building between us didn’t need an audience yet. But I could feel her presence the way you feel a pressure change before a storm—contained, deliberate, and very aware of the space around her.

  The Extractor hummed.

  I watched the metrics instead of the people. That was part of the adjustment too: teaching me to see abstraction before consequence, data before damage.

  It didn’t work.

  Mid-morning, an intake crossed Elarina’s station that made the system hesitate. Not enough to flag. Just a fractional delay, a pause so slight it would have vanished into noise if I hadn’t been watching for it.

  The Extractor compensated.

  That was new.

  I frowned, bringing up the deeper readouts I technically wasn’t authorised to access but which, for reasons I still don’t understand, had not been locked away from me.

  The machine wasn’t just stabilising. It was anticipating.

  “You see that?” I murmured into my console, opening a private channel to Ressa.

  She didn’t answer immediately. Then: “I was hoping I was imagining it.”

  “Never trust that instinct,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think the Tower’s about to tell us it’s for our own good.”

  The intake completed cleanly. Too cleanly.

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  Elarina didn’t react outwardly, but I caught the tension in her shoulders as she disengaged the field. She logged the session without comment, her movements precise, almost careful.

  They were watching her.

  They were watching all of us, but Elarina had crossed the invisible line where observation becomes interest.

  My console chimed.

  A message, internal, flagged Priority Advisory.

  Oversight Liaison Mirakei: please attend Calibration Review, Sublevel Three.

  Ah.

  There it was.

  Sublevel Three is where they send you when they want to talk without witnesses. Not interrogation - that happens deeper - but assessment. To have the kind of conversations that smile while they draw your blood.

  I let Elarina know I was stepping away, a brief flicker of acknowledgement passing between us, then followed the corridor lights down.

  The room was smaller than the consultation spaces. No soft edges. No attempt at comfort.

  The woman waiting for me wore Oversight grey and a pleasant expression that didn’t reach her eyes.

  “Mirakei,” she said. “Thank you for coming promptly.”

  “Always a pleasure,” I replied. “I assume this is about my thrilling promotion.”

  “In part,” she said, gesturing for me to sit. “We’ve been reviewing your performance since your reassignment.”

  “And?”

  “Your observational acuity exceeds projections.”

  I smiled. “I’ve always been a people-watcher.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  She tapped her console, and my intake logs appeared, stripped of context, reduced to pattern and flow. Places where my attention lingered. Sessions I’d flagged internally but never reported. Correlations I hadn’t consciously realised I was drawing.

  “You see more than most,” she said. “That can be valuable.”

  “Or inconvenient,” I offered.

  “Only if misdirected.”

  There it was. The narrowing corridor again.

  “We’d like to formalise your role,” she continued. “Give you authorised access to certain oversight functions. In exchange, we expect discretion.”

  “Define discretion.”

  She smiled. “Trust.”

  I leaned back. “That’s a big ask from a place that just rewired my brain without asking.”

  Her expression flickered, just slightly. “We adjusted your cognitive thresholds to improve resilience.”

  “You took something,” I said flatly.

  “We removed instability.”

  “Funny,” I said. “It felt a lot like curiosity.”

  She didn’t deny it.

  Instead, she said, “The Tower functions because people like you do not act on every question that occurs to them.”

  “And if we do?”

  “Then we intervene earlier.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You know what the problem is with that approach?”

  She waited.

  “You’re assuming you can still tell the difference.”

  Silence stretched between us.

  Then she said, “You’re dismissed.”

  Which is how you know you’ve said something worth remembering.

  When I returned to the floor, Elarina was on break.

  She stood near the observation rail, looking down at the Extractor like she was trying to decide whether it was a tool or a mouth.

  “They talked to you,” she said without turning.

  “Briefly,” I replied. “They like me. Or they’re considering me for disposal. Hard to tell with these people.”

  She exhaled slowly. “What did they want?”

  “To make me official,” I said. “Give me a badge that matches what I’m already doing.”

  “And?”

  “And I didn’t say no.”

  She turned then, studying my face as if searching for damage. “Be careful.”

  “I’m always careful,” I said. “I just redefine what that means as necessary.”

  Her mouth twitched. Almost a smile.

  “Something’s changed,” she said quietly. “The Extractor is no longer waiting for instruction.”

  “I know,” I said. “I think it’s been learning longer than we realised.”

  “Learning what?”

  “That’s the question,” I said. “And I don’t think we’re the primary audience.”

  Later, Pilon didn’t come in.

  No notice. No explanation.

  Her station remained empty all shift, the console dark.

  Ressa noticed immediately. “She wouldn’t just vanish,” she said. “Not without panicking first.”

  “Medical leave?” I suggested.

  “She’d have told me,” Ressa replied. “Or cried. Possibly both.”

  I flagged it quietly, routing the query through my new access channels.

  The response came back faster than it should have.

  Staff Member Pilon: temporarily reassigned. No action required.

  I didn’t like the phrasing.

  At the end of the day, as the floor emptied and the Tower settled into its night-hum, I stayed behind.

  Elarina did too.

  We didn’t plan it. We just… didn’t leave.

  “Do you think it knows?” she asked eventually.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think it knows exactly what it’s doing.”

  “And what about us?”

  I considered that.

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that we’re variables it hasn’t fully modelled yet.”

  She nodded once. “That won’t last.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Which means we need to decide.”

  She met my gaze. “What?”

  “Whether we let it finish learning.”

  The Extractor hummed, low and steady, as if listening.

  And for the first time since I’d set foot in the Tower, I understood the real danger.

  Not that it was alive, exactly. But rather, that it was being trained.