I didn't refuse the transfer.
Refusal created records. Records created closure.
Instead, I introduced friction.
The system's transfer logic depended on predictability—stable outputs, transferable profiles, clean compatibility curves. All I had to do was remain useful while becoming difficult to place.
I adjusted nothing that could be flagged as resistance.
I adjusted relationships.
Greyline entered its final optimization phase quietly.
The first sign was the absence of new intake. No provisional candidates. No replacements for resolved stations.
Greyline wasn't shrinking.
It was being drained.
The system had stopped investing in uncertainty.
That was always the last step.
Support Operations collapsed into fewer, denser workflows. Recovery buffers vanished. Tasks that once ran sequentially were layered in parallel.
The system wasn't testing anymore.
It was extracting remaining value.
I let dependency clusters thicken.
Not by excelling.
By becoming inconveniently connective.
I accepted tasks that linked otherwise independent processes. I delayed just enough to force cross-routing, then resolved before escalation.
Each time the system tried to isolate a workflow, my presence complicated the cut.
Removing me cleanly would require rerouting multiple chains at once.
The transfer logic recalculated.
Again.
And again.
The notice remained.
Unanswered.
Unresolved.
That indecision wasn't mine.
It was the system's.
Evan Arclight's party returned on the third day of final optimization.
Not as observers.
As a stress test.
Their drills overlapped Greyline simulations intentionally this time. Shared infrastructure. Shared power routing. Shared timing windows.
Greyline was being evaluated for containment failure.
That was new.
Evan moved first.
Not aggressively.
He adjusted his timing mid-drill to compensate for a delay that wasn't his.
Greyline-induced lag.
The system accepted the correction.
Then penalized it.
Not for Evan.
For Greyline.
The correction introduced inefficiency upstream.
A-Class efficiency metrics dipped by a fraction.
That fraction mattered.
Lena Myr reacted next.
She shifted her support field to stabilize a secondary process that shouldn't have required it.
Greyline bleed-through.
Her interface flagged cross-division interference.
Not her fault.
But logged.
Sylpha Rune noticed it immediately.
She paused her scan and looked down—not at us, but at the floor itself.
For the first time, A-Class acknowledged Greyline's presence as a problem.
The system hesitated.
Again.
Longer this time.
Not in Greyline.
In the shared layer.
The pause rippled upward.
A-Class routines desynchronized.
Only slightly.
But enough to register.
That was dangerous.
Greyline instability wasn't supposed to propagate upward.
That was the entire point of Greyline.
I felt the shift before I saw it.
Routing pressure bent inward.
The system stopped trying to extract me.
It tried to contain me.
My transfer compatibility dropped by two percent.
Not enough to cancel.
Enough to stall.
Halev watched the ceiling for a long time after the session ended.
"This is what happens when you optimize too cleanly," he said quietly. "You forget how to absorb mess."
"Greyline absorbs it," I said.
"For now," he replied.
"They're deciding whether that function is worth the cost."
The final optimization directive arrived that evening.
Public.
Undeniable.
—Divisional outcome pending—
No options listed.
Just states.
Consolidation.
Partition.
Termination.
Greyline would not survive unchanged.
The system reran my transfer projection.
The outcome diverged.
Not upward.
Sideways.
[TRANSFER PATH — UNRESOLVED]
That was new.
Unresolved meant the system could not guarantee efficiency post-transfer.
Which meant my classification as a long-term asset was becoming unstable.
Good.
Evan's party felt the aftershock the next day.
Their drills ran clean—but required manual override twice.
Greyline bleed-through again.
Not failure.
Friction.
Evan frowned for the first time since I'd seen him.
Not at us.
At the interface.
He was experiencing something unfamiliar.
The system not aligning perfectly around him.
That wasn't Greyline's fault.
It was its effect.
I understood then.
Greyline didn't need to survive.
It only needed to interfere long enough.
Long enough to contaminate the assumption that certainty scaled cleanly.
Long enough to prove that extracting assets created instability elsewhere.
The system didn't like tradeoffs it couldn't localize.
That night, the transfer notice dimmed.
Not withdrawn.
Deferred.
I had succeeded.
Not by resisting.
By becoming contextually incompatible.
The system could move me.
But not without consequences it hadn't modeled fully yet.
And systems delayed what they didn't fully understand.
Greyline would end.
I could see that now.
But it wouldn't end quietly.
Not cleanly.
Not without residue.
And that residue—spread thin, unresolved, inconvenient—
would persist.
In A-Class metrics.
In oversight models.
In me.
The system had tried to simplify.
Instead, it had created interference.
And interference, once introduced, never stayed contained.