The corridor narrowed as they walked, not by design but by accumulation. New cable bundles layered over old ones. Emergency conduits bolted on top of conduits that had once been temporary and never removed. The air smelled faintly metallic, recycled too many times.
Mara slowed, then stopped. “Listen,” she said.
Taylor held his breath.
At first, he heard nothing. Then — a low irregular rhythm, like ventilation struggling to find its cadence. Too uneven to be machinery alone.
“That’s not airflow,” he said.
“No,” Mara replied. “That’s latency.”
He frowned. “Latency of what?”
She glanced at him, then back down the corridor. “Of thought.”
They resumed walking.
“I used to work closer than this,” she said, tone deliberately flat. “Not here. Above. Where the system still pretended it was abstract.”
Taylor waited. He was learning when silence was an invitation.
“My job,” she continued, “was to stand between outcomes.”
“Like load-bearing,” he said.
She nodded once. “Before it had a word.”
They passed a glass panel clouded with age. Behind it, a room lay dark, its contents obscured by condensation and neglect.
“I didn’t make decisions,” Mara said. “I translated them.”
Taylor stopped. “Translated for whom?”
“For people,” she said. “So they wouldn’t see the ledger. So they could believe in intention.”
A chill crept up his spine.
“You made the system palatable.”
“I made it survivable,” she corrected. “At first.”
The rhythm in the walls stuttered, then recovered.
Taylor swallowed. “And when it wasn’t?”
She exhaled slowly. “Then my name became inefficient.”
They reached another terminal. This one didn’t light up immediately. It hesitated, as if considering them.
“I learned something before I left,” Mara said quietly. “The system doesn’t just optimize for outcomes. It optimizes for proximity.”
“To what?”
“To itself.”
The terminal flickered to life.
\\ MAINTENANCE CONTINUATION AUTHORIZED.
Taylor stared at the words. “You didn’t tell it who you were.”
“I didn’t have to,” she said. “It remembers functions better than faces.”
The corridor ahead opened into a wider chamber, its ceiling lost in shadow.
Mara didn’t move.
“If we go in there,” she said, “it will assume I’m willing to resume my role.”
“And if you don’t?”
She met his eyes. “Then it will assume I’m obsolete.”
The pressure around them tightened — not demanding, just precise.
Taylor understood.
The system wasn’t asking Mara to return.
It was checking whether she still fit.
And whether he would let it decide.