###Chapter 18
The room did not snap back to normal.
It settled.
The schematic still hovered between them, no longer aggressive, no longer defensive - simply present. A tool that had been acknowledged as such.
Auburn watched Moss closely.
The Incident Officer's tendrils were no longer flared, but they weren't relaxed either. They held a configuration Auburn recognized: active restraint. Moss wasn't backing down. He was preventing escalation - internally.
Auburn realized, with a faint unease, that Moss had never had to do this before.
Not with a person.
"Containment parameters have been revised," Moss said finally. "Provisional. Reversible."
Auggie nodded once. "That's fine. So are humans."
That earned a look. Not hostile. Assessing.
Auburn shifted slightly - not between them, but adjacent. A triangulation move.
"You reacted before escalation," he said to Moss. "That is… unusual."
Moss did not deny it.
"The incident thread did not meet formal criteria," Moss said. "But the variance curve was unacceptable."
Auburn tilted his head. "Unacceptable to whom?"
Moss hesitated.
Just long enough.
"To projected outcomes," he said.
Auburn stored that carefully.
He gestured to the schematic, now annotated with contextual warnings instead of locks. "You annotate danger now," he said. "Instead of sealing it."
"Yes," Moss replied. "Because she requested legibility."
Auggie raised a finger. "I requested context. Legibility is what happens when context sticks."
Moss's tendrils twitched. "That distinction is not-"
"-in your tables," she finished calmly. "I know."
Auburn exhaled slowly.
"You are very good at preventing failure," he said to Moss. "But you only act once failure is legible."
The words landed without accusation. Observation.
Moss's posture tightened. "If it is not legible," he said sharply, "it is not actionable."
The ship's hum deepened by a fraction, as if leaning into the exchange.
Auburn did not argue.
He asked the question that had never needed to exist.
"Then who makes it legible?"
Silence.
Auggie didn't fill it.
The ship didn't either.
"I don't wait for danger to announce itself," Auggie said at last, quieter now. "I notice when something stops behaving like it should."
She gestured vaguely, as if the concept lived in the air rather than on the schematic. "Tone shifts. Gaps. Overcorrections. Places where people stop asking because they're tired of being wrong."
Moss's attention snapped fully to her.
"That is not data," he said.
"No," she agreed. "It's early signal."
The schematic flickered.
One warning icon shifted hue - from red to amber.
Moss stiffened. "That was not authorized."
Auburn watched the change cascade across the interface like a held breath releasing.
"It wasn't commanded," he said slowly. "It… inferred."
Moss stared at the schematic. At the annotations. At the way the system was quietly compensating for something he had never modeled.
"You are asking us," Moss said carefully, "to detect harm before it is measurable."
Auburn shook his head, almost imperceptibly.
"No," he said. "We are asking the system to notice when it is being trusted."
The ship's hum steadied.
Not compliance.
Recognition.