Chapter 28 — Macro Adjustment
The first thing the Curator did was stop looking at us.
Not in the way it had before—not the deliberate ignorance of deprioritization, not the polite hesitation of unresolved classification.
This time, it looked past us.
That distinction mattered.
I felt it like a pressure change behind my eyes, the way altitude announces itself without asking permission. The Shard reacted before I could think—its hum flattening, spreading thin, like something bracing against a wider field.
Valerius noticed immediately. She always did.
"It's not focused on the village anymore," she said.
Puck flapped once, uneasy. "Please tell me that's because it gave up."
I shook my head slowly. "No. It zoomed out."
The sky confirmed it.
Not dramatically. No tearing clouds or rewritten constellations. Just a subtle reordering—stars that were still stars, but now aligned a little too cleanly, as if someone had nudged them into better symmetry.
Macro-level intervention.
The Curator wasn't correcting people.
It was correcting context.
Elric joined us at the edge of the square, his expression tight. "The road markers changed," he said. "Distances don't match memory anymore. A trip that used to take two hours now takes one… or three. Depends on who walks it."
"They're rescaling causality," Valerius said. "Adjusting the environment until anomalies fall back into line."
Puck crossed his arms. "So instead of fixing the math problem, they're changing the textbook."
"Exactly," I said. "And they don't care who gets confused in the process."
The Shard pulsed—low, warning-adjacent.
I reached inward, carefully, the way I'd learned to since becoming an interface. Not to push. Not to pull.
To listen at distance.
What I felt made my stomach knot.
Threads stretched far beyond the village now—entire regions subtly reweighted. Trade routes that would quietly fail. Weather patterns nudged just enough to make old settlements untenable. Borders that would harden because migration would become… inconvenient.
No erasure.
Just pressure.
"They're making the world less tolerant," I said softly. "So margins collapse naturally."
Valerius's jaw tightened. "That's genocide by logistics."
Puck swallowed. "I really hate them when they're being subtle."
We weren't the target.
We were the excuse.
I took a breath and forced myself to think like a system—not because I agreed with the Curator, but because I needed to predict it.
"You don't eliminate anomalies directly," I said. "You alter the parameters until anomalies can't survive."
Elric looked at me. "Can we stop it?"
I hesitated.
"Not head-on," I admitted. "At this scale? Any interference I make becomes statistically irrelevant. Noise in a continental model."
The Shard hummed—affirmation, not reassurance.
Valerius stepped closer. "Then what do we do?"
I looked at the people moving through the square—ordinary, flawed, alive. None of them knew the climate of reality had just shifted against them.
"We stop being local," I said.
Puck blinked. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that but less terrifying?"
"They've escalated to macro," I continued. "Which means margins aren't just appearing accidentally anymore. They're being manufactured."
Elric stiffened. "You think there are others."
"I know there are," I said. "People who won't fit after the adjustment. Entire communities that will fall out of alignment."
"And you want to—what?" Puck asked. "Collect them?"
"No," I said firmly. "That would make us a pattern. And patterns get erased."
Valerius studied me. "Then say it."
I met her eyes. "We make the world harder to simplify."
Silence followed.
Not disbelief.
Calculation.
"The Curator is good at optimizing static systems," I said. "It struggles with systems that refuse to converge. So we introduce divergence—at scale."
Puck's ears drooped. "You're talking about chaos."
I shook my head. "No. I'm talking about plurality."
The Shard resonated—broad, cautious.
Valerius folded her wings tightly. "How?"
I gestured toward the horizon, where roads now led slightly wrong. "We don't fight the adjustment. We misuse it."
Elric frowned. "You're going to need to be clearer."
"The Curator is changing global parameters—time efficiency, resource flow, environmental stability," I said. "Those changes will break some places and strengthen others."
"Yes," Elric said slowly.
"We guide the breaks," I finished. "We help people land in the cracks instead of getting crushed by them."
Puck stared. "You want to turn displacement into sanctuary."
I nodded. "Not centralized. Not named. Just… places where the world can't quite finish deciding what it wants."
Valerius exhaled. "That's a long game."
"It has to be," I said. "Anything shorter gets absorbed."
The Shard pulsed again—this time with something like resolve.
"But there's a cost," Valerius added quietly.
I didn't pretend otherwise. "Every place we help survive becomes more noticeable. Eventually, the Curator will identify the common factor."
"And that factor is you," Puck said.
"Yes," I agreed. "Which is why I can't be the center."
That caught their attention.
"What?" Puck said.
"I can't anchor everything," I explained. "That makes me a single point of failure. Instead—"
I closed my eyes and let the Shard's hum guide me—not inward, but outward, toward resonance instead of control.
"We teach others how to anchor themselves," I said. "Not to me. To each other. To place. To story."
Elric's eyes widened slightly. "You want to decentralize interference."
"Yes," I said. "No hierarchy. No doctrine. Just techniques for not collapsing when the world pressures you."
Valerius was silent for a long moment.
Then: "The Curator will call that contamination."
I smiled faintly. "Good. That means it spreads."
The sky darkened—not with clouds, but with probability. Somewhere far away, storms would intensify. Somewhere else, they would fail to arrive at all.
Macro adjustment in progress.
The Curator was reshaping the board.
And we were about to stop playing as pieces.
Puck hopped onto my shoulder, gripping tighter than usual. "You know," he said quietly, "this is the part where stories usually say 'and then it got worse.'"
I looked out at the shifting horizon.
"Yes," I said. "But also wider."
The Shard settled into a new rhythm—not louder, not stronger.
Distributed.
Somewhere beyond comprehension, the Curator updated its assessment:
> ANOMALY RESPONSE: DIFFUSE
CONTROL DIFFICULTY: INCREASING
RECOMMENDATION: IDENTIFY PRIMARY ORIGIN NODE
It was still looking for the center.
By the time it realized there wasn't one—
The world would already be different.