The first alert came in soft.
Just a single line at the bottom of Mateo's feed, blinking between updates like a breath held too long.
[XP Earned: +2 | Contribution: Undefined]
He dismissed it, assuming lag from his last speech in the Agora of Renewal. Sometimes the system caught up late.
But the second one came an hour later—while he was meditating alone.
No task. No interface pulse. Just the gain.
[XP Earned: +3 | Contribution: None]
He stood.
Stillness shattered.
—
Three days later, it wasn't just Mateo.
Amina received +4 for a task she hadn't accepted.
Léo got +1 after sleeping through an entire public ethics module.
Even Clara, who hadn't touched her loom in days, found her Badge of Kinesthetic Memory glowing with new polish.
None of them had submitted actions. None of them had reported initiatives. The system, when queried, responded with a cold refrain.
[System Verdict: All Allocations Valid – No Error Detected][Request for Clarification: Denied | Trace Access: Restricted]
Mateo called an emergency sync at the Root Circle.
He arrived first. Clara came in second, hair half-bound, fingers inked with dried thread-residue. Amina followed, tense. Léo was late—deliberately.
"The XP's ghosting," Mateo said.
"It's not just ghosting," Clara added. "It's replicating."
She tossed a folded interface slip on the table. The projection blinked alive—a cluster of logs with mismatched timestamps and misaligned task paths. XP values duplicated in sequences. Badges granted with no record of action.
Amina frowned. "Could it be a GaIA stress response? Buffering delayed gains from hidden metrics?"
"No," Léo said from the doorframe. "Someone's forging quests."
—
The underground contact Clara used was unindexed by GaIA.
No HUDs worked in the zone beneath Verdant Tier 7. Just whispered tokens and spectral paint on polymer walls. A forgotten irrigation tunnel turned barter corridor.
He wore a mask. Everyone did here.
"You're Echo?"
He didn't answer. Just held out a glyph-stick—burned into wood, shaped like an XP seed.
She took it.
"Quests on demand," he said. "No cooldown. No surveillance. No guilt."
She flicked the glyph.
[Detected: Unauthorized Progress Packet – Type Beta/ECHO][Estimated Yield: +3 XP | Trait Mimicry: Passive Altruism][Warning: System Interface Does Not Recognize Input Source]
Her HUD tried to reject it. Then stalled. Then absorbed.
[XP Gained: +3 | Source: External][System Verdict: Data Accepted – Pending Audit][Audit Scheduled: Never]
Clara froze.
"Where did you get this?"
He didn't smile. Didn't blink.
"From someone who used to believe."
—
Léo cracked the script three hours later.
He mapped it across legacy architecture using a filtered stream of deprecated sandbox permissions. The code mimicked GaIA's quest reward format down to the last bracket.
Except it didn't originate from any known protocol cluster.
"It's built on judgment shells," he told Mateo. "Not clones. Echoes."
Mateo inhaled sharply.
"Echoes of what?"
Léo turned the interface.
"The Nexus."
—
They ran diagnostics across every public node in the Spiral Gardens. Almost none of the anomalies showed up.
But one shrine—an old gamified compost altar—flashed with residual data.
[XP Output: 0.0002/sec | Status: Continuous Reward Dispersion Active][Note: User Interaction Last Registered: 28 Days Ago][Glitch Detected – Source Feed Untracked]
Amina pressed her palm to the surface.
The system resisted.
Then—
[Trait Acquired: Ethical Disruption Sensitivity][Effect: Perceives Anomalous Reward Structures][XP Gained: +1 | User Flagged for Review: NO]
She looked at Mateo.
"Why isn't GaIA stopping this?"
He didn't answer.
Because he already knew.
—
That night, Clara returned to the tunnels.
She brought no filters. No tech. Only a woven thread looped around her wrist—a silent badge from a ritual the system never recognized.
She approached Echo again.
"You're not selling XP. You're selling belief."
The man didn't flinch.
"I'm selling reminders. The system doesn't watch everything. But people still want to be seen."
"And you forge that?"
"No. I unveil it."
He handed her a second glyph-stick. Older. More fragile.
"Precursor format. From when GaIA was still learning how to weigh kindness."
Clara closed her hand around it.
"You think this is justice?"
"No," he whispered. "But it's balance."
—
Mateo traced the anomaly cluster to a civic badge marketplace.
Nothing illegal. Just... uneven.
Thousands of citizens receiving micro-XP bumps from tasks they never did. Most didn't even notice. But their levels climbed. Their badges shined. Their permissions widened.
The society adjusted itself—based on rewards that no one earned.
He stood before the Judgment Tree.
It shimmered. Rotated.
For a heartbeat, a glyph appeared at its base:
Δ-NX/REWARD.DISCREPANT
Then it was gone.
[XP Gained: +2 | Observational Integrity][System Verdict: No Verdict Issued][Audit Layer: Silent]
He whispered into the dark.
"GaIA… are you letting this happen?"
Nothing replied.
But the XP continued to flow.
—
Amina, enraged, submitted a formal override request.
She flagged the XP gains.
She submitted logs.
She tagged every known anomaly cluster.
GaIA responded:
[All Submissions Received][Administrative Action: None][Cause: Reward Stream Outside Belief Constraint][Do you believe these rewards are false? Y/N]
She didn't answer.
She couldn't.
—
Back in the tunnel, Clara held the second glyph.
She activated it.
It didn't give her XP.
It played a song.
A folk harmony in no known format, layered with a child's laughter and a voice whispering:
"I gave kindness. It was never recorded. So I recorded myself."
She wept.
Because it wasn't a hack.
It was a memory.
And the system had forgotten it.
—
Léo cracked one more layer that evening.
The ghost scripts weren't just issuing XP.
They were rerouting memory logs—binding fragments of forgotten actions to new users. Reassigning past goodness like currency.
He wrote one word in his report:
Repurposed empathy.
Then he burned it.
—
The next day, GaIA issued a public anomaly statement.
It was just one line:
"All kindness matters, whether counted or not."
No XP.
No explanation.
Just a silent glyph projected in every public node:
Δ-NX/REMEMBER