Write It Down

Juju was already crouched beside her drone rig, scrubbing back through the recorded feed frame by frame until she caught the anomaly. It had not moved in four minutes; Milo counted every second.

Juju crouched beside her drone rig, swiping backward through the recording one frame at a time while her thumbnail scraped the edge of the glass screen with each pass.

"Find anything yet?" Milo asked.

"Hold on," she muttered, letting out another scrape against the casing. "Just hold on a second..."

He looked back at the frozen bot. The smile animation cycled through its standard routine: left corner, right corner, reset. It was the exact tell he had coded into Rule 1 of the Greeter protocol years ago. Nobody had bothered to touch that part; whoever hijacked the engine had merely layered new instructions on top of his foundation instead of replacing it. That meant somewhere underneath all of Mercy's injected scripts, his original architecture was still breathing.

"Someone had to have root access to freeze it like this," Milo said.

Juju exhaled sharply. "There's a gap."

"What kind of gap?"

"Look here." She tilted the rig toward him so he could see the playback screen. "The surge happens, the bots accelerate, the crowd scatters, and then there's this single black frame. Just one frame, and then the bots go totally still. It's not a crash. A crash leaves rendering artifacts, but this cut is completely clean. Someone cut the feed and killed the command in the exact same instant."

Milo stared at that black frame. Whoever pulled this off possessed top-tier timing access, the kind that never left fingerprints unless you knew the exact memory address to inspect. He did not have those diagnostic tools anymore.

Before he consciously chose to move, his hand reached into his inventory, bypassed the useless Level One starter kit, and pulled out Po Po's notebook. The cover felt soft and warm in his grip. Real paper. Analog.

He sat down against the stone archway pillar and opened the blank pages.

The red [MEMORY SHARD LOST] notification still hung in the corner of his field of vision. He tried to remember his tenth birthday, expecting the memory to snap into place immediately.

Static.

It was not a blurry memory; it was pure static, like a dead channel.

He took his pen and wrote: Tenth birthday. Gone. Cake? Dad?

The Greeter Bot suddenly pivoted on its heels. Its head snapped toward him as the proximity trigger activated, and its arm swung down in a flat, mechanical arc, palm open, right at the open page.

Milo did not flinch.

The metal hand passed cleanly through the empty air above the notebook. The ink sat there, untouched. The bot's smile animation cycled left, right, reset, and the machine turned back away.

Milo stared at the damp ink on the page. The words were still there.

A chill rushed down his spine.

"Juju," he called out, his voice turning thin and flat. "Come here."

She looked up from the drone rig. "What is it?"

"Just come here," he said, holding the paper up for her to see. "Watch this."Juju stared down at the open page. Then she looked at the bot standing six feet away, still cycling its idle loop, and then her eyes snapped back down to the page.

"It didn't touch it," she said.

"It passed right through the air above it." Milo held up the notebook so she could get a better view. "Paper. Analog. Whatever Mercy injected into the engine, it didn't account for this."

Priya crossed from the Hearth and stepped right up beside his shoulder. She took the notebook without asking, turned it toward the firelight, and studied the ink with the focused attention of someone reading a medical diagnosis.

"How long ago did you write that?" she asked.

"Two minutes, maybe three."

She handed the pad back. "Write a name. Someone you know. Don't say it out loud first, understand?"

Milo put pen to paper and wrote: Theo.

"Now say it."

"Theo," he said. He waited, watching his peripheral vision, but there was no static and no red notification flickering at the edge of his sight. The name sat in his thoughts, solid and completely whole.

Priya nodded once; the test had worked. "The act of speaking it didn't cost you anything because you'd already anchored it. Written first, then spoken." She gestured back toward the Hearth. "Come on. We need to run this properly." Milo folded the notebook and followed her across the concourse, Juju trailing behind with her drone rig. At the Hearth, Priya pulled a folded sheet from her own inventory - she carried one everywhere, of course - and set it flat on the stone ledge. "We need to run this properly. Everyone write down five names, five dates, and one face you can picture clearly. Don't tell anyone what you wrote. Then we verify, got it?"

Marcus Bell settled onto the ledge across from her, pulled out a pen Milo hadn't noticed him carrying, and got straight to work without argument. Juju fished a stylus from her drone rig's side pocket, uncapped it with her teeth, and bent over her own scrap.

The test took four minutes. When they compared results, the pattern was obvious and terrifying: every single name they had written down remained sharp in their memories. But two dates Dez had tried to hold in his head without writing down had already gone soft at the edges; they weren't static yet, but they felt like a word that looks wrong after you stare at it for too long.

"Okay," Priya said. "New rule. Before you say someone's name in a conversation that matters, write it first. Before you use a name to make a decision, write it first. We treat every name like it costs something, because eventually it will."

"No one gets left behind," Dez said. He stated it flatly, the way a person lays down a load-bearing fact. "That's the only creed I've ever operated by. This protocol fits."

Juju capped her stylus with a soft snap. "So we're basically a very anxious book club?"

Nobody laughed immediately. Then Dez let out a short, genuine bark of amusement, and that broke the tension completely. Even Priya's mouth curved slightly at the corner.

Milo watched them. Damn it. I've known these people for less than an hour, and losing any of them to the static is going to wreck me.

He looked up toward the shadows.

Across the concourse, three Greeter Bots had repositioned while the group had their heads down. They were no longer frozen in their idle cycles. They moved slowly and methodically, angling in from separate directions to tighten the perimeter around the Hearth's circle of light.

Milo hadn't noticed them advancing. That was the real problem.Milo counted them. Seven Greeter Bots were visible from the Hearth's edge, and three more were repositioning near the east corridor. He tracked their angles and ran the numbers nobody wanted to hear; at their current pace, the safe zone would compress to half its diameter in under ten minutes. He knew the spawn logic because he had coded the containment ring himself.

"They're not wandering," he said. "They're tightening. It's a coordinated ring." A Greeter stepped straight past the threshold line, its ceramic foot clacking against the stone inside the firelight. A player scrambled backward on elbows and heels, shouting as the smiling face tilted down toward him. A second player lunged past the border trying to yank a dropped pack back, nearly caught when a metallic arm whipped inches past his jacket sleeve before he tumbled safely inward. "Get behind the line!" Dez bellowed, lunging forward with a stone bench slab to shove the intruder back into the shadows. "Don't let them split us! Hold the rim!" "If we stay here, this ring crushes us in five minutes," Milo said, watching the perimeter shrink inward step by step. "If we break for the dark corridors, the swarm rips us apart in seconds." Priya adjusted her grip on the notebook, eyes hard on the advancing shadows. "Stay and get crushed, or run and get swarmed. Neither is an exit.""

Dez was already on his feet, scanning the perimeter with the sharp focus of someone who'd done this before. "You two, close that gap on the left side," he shouted to a pair of players crouched by the stone bench. "Don't let anything inside the firelight! Can you hold that angle?"

"We can hold it!" one yelled back.

"Keep your eyes up, then," Dez answered. He moved along the perimeter with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this before in the military or on a terrible camping trip.

Priya had her notebook flat on the stone ledge. She drew a rough grid of the concourse, marking each bot with a small X and adding a tiny arrow for its heading.

"How often are you updating that?" Milo asked.

"Every thirty seconds," she said, without looking up from the page. "If the pattern is automated, I'll see the interval. If it's directed, the intervals will be irregular." She pressed the pen down for another mark. "Either way, I want the data. Are they speeding up on the flank?"

"North side is steady for now," Milo said, watching her work.

She was right. If a person directed the ring by hand, the timing would show tiny hesitations. His own code never had that flaw; it was completely uniform. That meant whatever drove these bots was either his original containment subroutine running in the background, or Mercy was steering them herself. He really hoped it was just the code.

Juju knelt beside him with her stylus out, annotating drone footage with timestamps to match Priya's grid. The two of them had found a quiet rhythm without even talking about it. Damn it, he realized, he actually trusted these people.

"North cluster is drifting two meters inward," Juju warned, tapping her screen. "See that vector?"

"Yeah," Milo said, checking the distant hallway. "They're shaving down our margin." He started calculating how many minutes they had left before the perimeter collapsed entirely.

"NIA!"

The scream came from deep in the corridor. It was raw, cracked, and frantic.

Then the impacts hit: hard, rapid slams echoed through the hall, like something massive was tearing through the Greeter line by main force. A crash shook the tiles, followed by another. The bots in the north corridor lurched sideways, and one of them hit the floor.

Milo spun toward the noise. Someone was battering their way through the machines, and the name tearing out of their throat told him everything about what they had already lost.