Evan Arclight didn't accuse anyone.
He didn't need to.
He submitted a comparison request.
Not a complaint. Not a challenge.
A reconciliation.
The request went through an oversight channel most people never used—not because it was restricted, but because it was boring. Dry. Procedural. Designed for long-term audits, not immediate outcomes.
Evan framed it as a routine alignment check.
A-Class baseline variance versus post-alignment performance.
Greyline not mentioned.
No individuals named.
Just numbers.
That was what made it dangerous.
Oversight responded in under a minute.
Then stopped.
The pause propagated.
Not across training floors.
Across dashboards.
I felt it from the integration layer.
My task routing flattened abruptly. Secondary buffers disappeared. Processes that usually failed over through me were cut cleanly instead.
Integration nodes were being retired.
Not slowly.
Immediately.
The first failure wasn't loud.
A stabilization process terminated mid-cycle. No compensation. No reroute.
Just a clean drop.
Upstream tasks stalled.
Downstream tasks escalated.
The system corrected by widening tolerance margins elsewhere.
That created drift.
Not localized.
Distributed.
Integration nodes existed to absorb that drift.
Without them, instability had nowhere to go.
Evan's request surfaced a contradiction oversight couldn't ignore.
A-Class performance had degraded after optimization.
Not catastrophically.
But consistently.
Enough to violate long-term projections.
Oversight didn't see Greyline.
They saw cost leakage.
The system initiated a public correction.
It had to.
Silent fixes wouldn't hold under audit.
The notice appeared across all divisions.
No warning.
No buildup.
—SYSTEM CALIBRATION UPDATE—
Routine language.
Harmless tone.
But the contents told a different story.
Adaptive tolerance ranges adjusted.
Cross-divisional buffering restored.
Legacy stabilization protocols temporarily reactivated.
Legacy.
That word should not have been there.
People noticed.
Not because they understood it—
—but because the system had admitted it rolled something back.
Systems weren't supposed to do that publicly.
Training resumed under the new calibration.
A-Class drills felt heavier.
Not slower.
Less smooth.
Greyline's replacement structure couldn't absorb variance the way the old one had.
The correction had exposed the absence.
I felt my access layers widen again.
Not fully restored.
But no longer compressed.
The system wasn't sure whether retiring integration nodes had been a mistake.
So it hesitated.
Again.
Oversight requested a follow-up from Evan.
Not an explanation.
A clarification.
"Which reference window do you consider authoritative?"
That question was a trap.
If he chose recent data, the discrepancy vanished.
If he chose historical baselines, the contradiction deepened.
Evan chose neither.
He submitted both.
And let oversight see the divergence.
No accusation.
No interpretation.
Just evidence that optimization had changed the meaning of success.
Integration nodes continued to fail.
Not all at once.
In sequence.
Each retirement created a small gap.
Each gap shifted load upward.
The system compensated.
Each compensation distorted metrics elsewhere.
The correction was amplifying the problem it meant to hide.
I watched one of the other integration nodes disappear.
Not exported.
Not reassigned.
Just… gone.
Its processes dissolved cleanly.
And the instability it had been holding surfaced two layers higher.
Where it couldn't be ignored.
That was when oversight froze part of the correction.
Not reversed.
Suspended.
—CALIBRATION STABILITY UNDER REVIEW—
That line spread faster than any announcement.
Because it meant uncertainty.
And uncertainty was supposed to be contained.
Halev found me during the pause.
"They never planned to show this," he said quietly.
"No," I replied.
"They thought it would cancel out."
He exhaled.
"It never does."
Evan stood still during the freeze.
Watching the metrics scroll.
Not satisfied.
Focused.
He wasn't trying to win.
He was trying to re-anchor reference.
To prove that something stable had existed before—and could exist again.
That belief alone was dangerous.
The system finalized the correction an hour later.
Not fully.
Partially.
Enough to restore function.
Not enough to restore confidence.
Greyline wasn't reinstated.
But neither was it erased cleanly.
The system had admitted, publicly, that something essential had been removed.
And not fully replaced.
My asset status updated quietly.
[ASSET STATUS — CONTEXTUAL]
No longer localized.
No longer contained.
The system had stopped pretending I was harmless.
It hadn't decided what I was yet.
Only that I mattered again.
Evan archived the oversight response.
Labeled it carefully.
No judgment.
Just sequence.
Before.
After.
Rollback.
That archive wouldn't stay private forever.
Not because Evan would release it.
But because once reference points existed—
People began looking for them.
The correction ended.
Training resumed.
But the silence afterward was different.
Not calm.
Aware.
The system had exposed too much of its own uncertainty.
And now everyone operating inside it felt the shift.
Not panic.
Not rebellion.
Something worse.
Expectation.
For the first time since Greyline dissolved, the system was no longer the only thing deciding what stability meant.
And that—
That was not something it could optimize away.