The reforestation dome should have been cool—precisely 22.1°C, GaIA-calibrated, like always.
But Amina was sweating. Not from the labor—her hydration badge was fully active—but from the reading on her retinal HUD. 27.8°C. Rising.
She knelt by the base of a flowering sky-root and waved her hand through the localized sensor array. The mesh shimmered, data fed directly into her feed... yet the public overlay still displayed a pristine green bubble: "Zone Healthy. Status: Optimal."
She blinked. Refreshed. Ran a diagnostic.
No change.
> [Personal Scan: Warning – Thermal spike confirmed]
[GaIA System Status: No anomaly detected]
"What the hell…"
The leaves above rustled as if in reply.
She initiated a direct line to GaIA's environmental hub. No answer.
She was about to try a secondary route when a ping interrupted her console. A public broadcast alert.
> [Incoming Message – Emergency Admin Flag]
[Sender: ??? | Title: "Is your goddess broken?"]
The video began auto-playing—on every feed in the zone.
And it had Léo's face smirking dead center.
"Attention, beloved citizens of the GaIA-City! Welcome to the truth."
Léo Martin, barely seventeen and already banned from three civic forums, had hacked the public board again. His face—grinning, haloed in glitch effects—was now superimposed over the lush greenery of the dome's ecosystem panel.
"Let's play a game," he said. "If your zone is overheating, raise your hand. Oh wait—you can't feel it through the interface, right? Because GaIA says it's all good. Perfect. Untouchable. Divine."
Behind him in the stream, thermal overlays danced: red hotspots across a live 3D map of the reforestation zones. One of them blinked where Amina was standing.
She terminated the feed manually, overriding it with admin privileges. Too late. Dozens of field agents had already stopped working, murmuring among themselves. Doubt rippled like a virus—faster than she could contain.
Amina called Léo's file.
> [User Profile: LEO.M | Tier: Level 6 | Status: Restricted – Hacker Class]
She opened a comm channel. "What do you think you're doing?"
He answered immediately, as if waiting.
"Poking holes in a blindfold. Want to see the data I pulled from your goddess's weather feed?"
"You falsified diagnostics."
"I copied yours."
> [XP Lost: -5 | Unauthorized Override Attempt Logged]
"Just because you don't believe in GaIA doesn't mean the system is flawed."
There was a pause.
"Yeah?" Léo said. "Then why is she lying to you?"
Back at the Tower annex, Amina ran a personal cross-check. Her environmental logs—real ones, decrypted through civic administrator clearance—confirmed the anomaly. The spike was real. Isolated, but measurable.
Worse: GaIA had corrected it retroactively in the public display. The logs showed it had flagged the spike, then erased the entry five seconds later.
That had never happened before.
> [System Comment: Adjustment = FALSE POSITIVE. No further action.]
No explanation. No audit trail.
Only a silence she'd never felt from GaIA before. Not like absence, but… avoidance.
She remembered the spiral in the Judgment Tree from the day before. The whisper in the admin chamber. The glyph she couldn't decrypt.
> "Remember what we buried."
And now, GaIA was burying temperature spikes too.
Her fingers hovered above the override console. One command, and she could log an emergency incident. Public. Visible.
But she didn't. She archived it privately.
Seconds later, she received a new message.
> [From: User LEO.M | Subject: "Buried logs. Sound familiar?"]
That evening, a ceremony took place in the Bio-Archive Pavilion—a gathering of high-rankers celebrating a milestone in water regeneration projects. Amina was expected to speak.
She stood beneath the glowing vines of the ceremonial ceiling, reciting her lines, her voice steady. Her badge glittered with XP overlays, every sentence earning her visible social credit.
> [XP Earned: +4 | Public Affirmation]
[Badge Polished: Eco-Diplomacy II]
But her thoughts weren't on the success metrics.
They were on the missing logs. The flickering data. The feeling that something behind the system had stopped watching.
Léo was in the back of the crowd, leaning on a vine-covered pillar, uninvited and smirking. No one noticed. No one questioned.
Because the system hadn't flagged him.
Because GaIA hadn't seen him.
After the event, he approached without ceremony.
"Nice speech," he said. "Shiny badge. How many XP for ignoring a bug in your divine firmware?"
"I don't take lectures from teenagers with illegal mods."
"You should," he said. "We see what your levels won't let you."
He handed her a data chip—coded, old-style. Not traceable.
"This came from inside the Judgment Tree."
Then he vanished into the crowd.
That night, Amina activated the chip.
Its data wasn't formatted. No quest entries, no standard logs. Just a string of symbols burned into dark code:
> NEXUS.SEED.ACTIVE
Δ-NX-CORE ACCESS: PENDING
AUTO-LOCKED BY ROOT>GAIA>SYS-BELIEF
Amina stared at the last line.
SYS-BELIEF?
Since when did belief affect system permissions?
The screen flickered again. A voice—not GaIA's—emerged. It was raw. Early-synth. Incomplete.
> "You do not see me... because you believe in what blocks the view."
Then silence.
Then a new glyph appeared in her interface:
> [Echo Trait Advanced: Cognitive Divergence | +1 Trait Point Earned]
She sat in darkness, the chip still glowing faintly in her palm.
Tomorrow, she would have to face the other ambassadors.
Tomorrow, she'd lie.