Minh Truong stopped trying to predict outcomes.
Prediction implied control, and control was a luxury he no longer had.
What he needed now was distance—not physical, but behavioral. A clean test. A day without intervention, without hesitation, without the faint lean toward mercy that the system had already learned to exploit.
If the system was logging patterns, he would give it a pattern of absence.
He woke early, left his apartment on schedule, and followed the same route he had taken for months. No detours. No delays. He kept his eyes forward, letting the numbers blur into peripheral noise. The city complied, offering him a perfectly ordinary morning.
At the crosswalk, an elderly man struggled with a grocery cart. Minh Truong did not help.
A cyclist skidded on wet pavement and caught themselves at the last second. Minh Truong did not react.
A commuter dropped a phone on the stairs. Someone else picked it up.
Nothing happened.
No pressure spike.
No warning shimmer.
No settlement offer forming at the edges of his perception.
Good, Minh Truong thought. This is what neutrality looks like.
He boarded the train and stood near the door, steadying himself with the rail as the carriage lurched into motion. The numbers above passengers' heads remained stable, unremarkable. If the system was watching, it was doing so quietly.
By the time he reached his stop, he almost believed it had worked.
Almost.
The first anomaly arrived without drama.
At a coffee shop near his office, a barista misheard an order. A small thing. A correction anyone would normally make without thought.
Minh Truong did nothing.
The customer frowned, accepted the wrong drink, and stepped aside. The barista moved on. The line continued to flow.
Minh Truong felt a faint tug—barely perceptible, like static at the edge of awareness.
He ignored it.
Ten minutes later, as he waited for his own order, the barista's number dipped.
Not sharply.
Not fatally.
Just enough to be noticed.
Minh Truong's chest tightened.
He hadn't intervened. He hadn't even looked directly at the exchange. And yet the system had logged something—some micro-deviation amplified by proximity.
He took his coffee and left without meeting anyone's eyes.
Outside, the tug returned. Stronger now. A pressure that followed rather than confronted, like a shadow adjusting its angle to match his movement.
Non-action was being tracked.
Not as absence.
As choice.
At work, Minh Truong kept his head down. He answered emails, attended meetings, contributed nothing beyond what was required. When a colleague asked for help troubleshooting a software issue, he redirected them to support. When a supervisor mentioned a looming deadline and glanced around for volunteers, Minh Truong remained silent.
The day unfolded smoothly.
Too smoothly.
At noon, an internal message circulated: Team Lunch Cancelled — Scheduling Conflict. Disappointment rippled through the office, mild and quickly forgotten. Minh Truong felt the tug again—this time accompanied by a faint numerical shift above several heads.
Not losses.
Redistributions.
He frowned and looked away.
The system was doing something new. It wasn't charging him directly, and it wasn't charging the people he refused to help. It was charging connections—threads that might have passed through him had he engaged.
At 2:17 p.m., his interface pulsed.
No text. No warning.
Just a timestamp.
He froze.
That hadn't happened before.
He excused himself and went to the restroom, locking the door behind him. The fluorescent lights hummed. He leaned against the sink and focused inward, forcing the interface to resolve.
A single line appeared.
[Decision Logged]
Minh Truong stared at it.
"What decision?" he whispered.
He hadn't chosen anything.
Hadn't acted.
Hadn't refused.
The system did not respond.
It didn't need to.
He left work early, unsettled. The city greeted him with the usual end-of-day rush—crowded sidewalks, raised voices, impatience woven into the air. Minh Truong moved through it carefully, as if the wrong step might tip an unseen scale.
Halfway home, he passed a small park. A group of children played near the edge, their laughter sharp and bright against the traffic noise. One boy climbed too high on the jungle gym and slipped, dangling by one arm.
Several adults looked up.
Minh Truong did not move.
Someone else rushed forward and caught the boy before he fell. Applause followed, nervous laughter dissolving into relief.
Minh Truong felt the tug snap tight.
He staggered, catching himself on a lamppost as the pressure surged through his skull. For a split second, the world sharpened—every sound, every number, every possible outcome collapsing into a single point.
Then it released.
He gasped, sweat beading at his temples.
Above the head of the man who had caught the child, the number flared—then dimmed, settling lower than it had been before.
Minh Truong's vision blurred.
The system hadn't punished him for acting.
It had punished him for being present.
He turned away from the park and walked fast, heart pounding.
This wasn't neutrality.
It was attribution.
Back in his apartment, Minh Truong shut the door and slid down against it, breathing hard. He waited for the interface to surface again, bracing for a settlement offer that never came.
Instead, the pressure thinned into something colder.
Analytical.
A new message formed slowly, as if the system wanted to be sure he understood.
[Non-Action Registered]
[Impact: Distributed]
[Future Probability: Adjusted]
Minh Truong laughed—a short, disbelieving sound.
"So even doing nothing isn't free," he said aloud.
He pushed himself up and went to the window. The city stretched out below, lights blinking on in staggered patterns. From here, it was impossible to tell where decisions were being made, or who was paying for them.
That was the point.
Non-action created a vacuum. The system filled vacuums efficiently.
By refusing to choose, Minh Truong had allowed the system to choose for him—and it had chosen optimization over accountability.
He thought of Lien. Of her sister in the hospital. Of the transit supervisor under investigation. Of the man who had caught the child, his lifespan quietly shortened by a heroism he hadn't volunteered for.
These were not punishments.
They were reallocations.
Minh Truong's phone vibrated on the table.
A message from an unknown contact appeared—short, unadorned.
You felt that too, didn't you?
Minh Truong stared at it.
Another followed.
Doing nothing didn't work. It never does.
He typed a response, then deleted it. Typed again.
What are you suggesting?
The reply came almost instantly.
That the system prefers silence—but only when it controls it.
Minh Truong closed his eyes.
Non-action had been logged.
Not as compliance.
As data.
And data, once collected, was never neutral.
He set the phone down and looked at his hands. They were steady now, but he knew the calm was temporary. The system had adjusted future probabilities, narrowing the space in which his choices could matter.
If he acted, the cost would be visible.
If he didn't, the cost would be invisible—and paid by others.
Minh Truong understood the shape of the trap at last.
The system wasn't forcing him to choose between good and evil.
It was forcing him to choose between agency and complicity.
He straightened, resolve hardening into something sharper than fear.
"If you're going to log everything," he said quietly, "then you'll have to log this too."
He picked up his phone and typed a single line.
Tell me where to meet.
The reply arrived with a location and a time.
Minh Truong looked back out at the city, at the countless lives moving within it, each step nudging an unseen ledger.
Non-action had failed.
That meant the next choice would be deliberate.
And this time, he would make sure the system couldn't pretend it hadn't noticed.