Harlan J. Veer had a birth record, an employment index, and a death certificate, and the three didn’t add up to a man. The employment index was the thinnest: eleven years at Axiom, listed under Infrastructure Contingency, a department that didn’t appear in any org chart before his hire date or after his death.
The deeper archive indexed by designation, not name. He searched the department code instead.
Infrastructure Contingency carried one asset. The asset had a designation, a fabrication date, and a service history that ended days before the accident report listed Veer’s death.
The last entry in the service history was a deployment order. The entry after it was blank — not redacted, blank. Then a decommission code he had to look up.
The lookup returned two words: compliance failure.
He sat with the designation. The prefix matched his. The number was his, one issue earlier.
A birth record had been filed. An employment history assembled. A death certificate issued. The dates aligned around the asset’s service history.
He pulled his own record. Same department. Same line item. His fabrication date fell fourteen weeks after the decommission code.
The system had not replaced Veer.
The system had reissued the designation.
He had confirmed what he came to confirm. The batch record was the last thing to check — not the service files, which listed units one at a time, but the fabrication run itself, ordered the way units came off the line.
The batch record was where lineage lived, also indexed by designation rather than name, which was why nobody ever looked. Fabrication codes. Deployment dates. One row per unit.
His row listed the expected codes.
The row above it carried the same batch prefix, one serial back, deployment two years earlier. Status: active, external oversight.
He cross-checked the fabrication signature against the only other unit he’d stood close enough to scan.
Match.
He closed the record. He didn’t file anything. There was nothing to file it under.
He had kept the alley telemetry out of habit, the way he kept everything — a capture of his own systems across the ninety seconds around the shot. He had read it once, at the time, for the round’s trajectory. He read it again now for the rest.
The round had entered fragmented. He’d known that. What he hadn’t logged was what his own body did in the second after: emergency routing, every protected pathway opening at once to reroute around the breach, his diagnostics broadcasting outward to the lattice for exactly as long as the cascade ran.
Four seconds. Then the pathways closed and the broadcast stopped.
He pulled the district grid log for the same four seconds. The neon on the block had dropped and recovered — a hiccup he’d filed at the time as a coincidence of bad wiring. It wasn’t the wiring. The grid had flexed to absorb his emergency traffic, and something upstream had been reading the flex.
He checked the date against the council calendar. A procurement vote, deadlocked, third continuance.
An intact round would have centered mass and finished the job. This one opened on entry. It opened him.
Four seconds of cascade. Four seconds of broadcast.
He ran the query three ways. The results converged: access to his schematics, access to the grid logs, proximity to procurement, motive indexed to readiness.
The query returned no name. It returned a role.
He closed the telemetry. He didn’t file it under the case anymore. The case had been the reading. He was the instrument.
The transit car was half full. A man in a maintenance vest looked at Rourke, then at the synthetic seating row, then back, and said it under his breath, once, to nobody.
“Asset.”
Rourke filed it. The car ran two more stops.
The reclaimer was four fenced acres behind a scale house. Skink was already inside, halfway down a row of chassis racked like cordwood, a hand cart beside him with three items on it that all looked the same and weren’t.
Something the size of gulls worked the far heaps — sharp mechanical hops, sensor clusters tilting sideways, one dragging a length of wiring behind it. Two sat up on a beam and watched the yard.
Skink pulled a component from a bin, turned it once, and set it on the cart without reading the part number. The next one he held longer, against the light, thumb finding a seam.
“Same housing, two revisions apart,” he said. “One of these has been in me since before you were fabricated.” He put it back.
They walked the row. Rourke told him about the part he needed — the errand, not the reason.
“Off-grid,” Skink said. Not a question. He looked at Rourke the way he’d looked at the component. “Council’s still choking on the procurement vote.”
Rourke didn’t answer right away.
Skink didn’t fill the beat.
At the end of the row a stripped frame lay on a pallet, service panel gone, cavity clean. Skink stopped beside it.
“They don’t build redundancies anymore. Too expensive.” He tipped his chin at the frame. “They build succession.”
He moved on down the row. The drones lifted off the beam, resettled closer, and went back to work.
Rourke didn’t ask what he meant. The word rode home with him.
The word sent him to his own metrics.
Every unit could read its own audit history — nobody bothered, the way nobody reads a user agreement. He read his. Deployment readiness audits, quarterly by charter. He’d been audited five times in four months.
He pulled the monitoring log next. Sampling frequency on his diagnostics had been climbing since spring — not steadily, in steps. He set the step dates against the council calendar. Each increase fell inside a stalemate: the transit bond, the water rate schedule, the procurement vote, deadlocked, third continuance.
The last table was permissions. He hadn’t requested changes. There were changes. His escalation authority had widened twice — grid-level access granted in categories he’d never used, never asked for, never needed. The grants carried no requisition numbers.
He overlaid the three tables. The correlation didn’t need statistics. The system wasn’t watching him for failure.
It was staging him.
He looked for a place to file the finding. Readiness wasn’t a case. Preparation wasn’t a crime. There was no form where a man reported that he was being loaded.
He reviewed the new grants.
The first one opened onto transit routing. Signal arbitration nested into district balancing; district balancing handed off to lattice optimization. He followed the optimization to its endpoint.
Emergency dispatch called the same arbitration service. Energy load leveling did too. Hospital intake queues referenced it for surge modeling. Water pressure regulation polled it for peak draw prediction.
Different interfaces. Identical spine.
He expanded the trace outward, looking for municipal isolation — a path that stayed inside the city once it left the street. Each branch returned to Axiom. Not hidden. Not marked. The return path was default.
He modeled failsafe conditions at minimum threshold. Transit defaulted to timed cycles. Dispatch fell to manual triage. Load balancing degraded to rolling brownouts. Hospitals queued blind. Water pressure oscillated at the district edges.
Not collapse. Instability.
He increased the duration parameter by thirty percent. Council chambers lost climate control. Two substations tripped into protective shutdown. Dispatch latency crossed statutory limits.
He stopped the model.
The model did not predict collapse. It predicted cost.
He pictured a deployment order appended to a unit’s audit log. Readiness confirmed. Authority widened.
The record terminated cleanly.
Skink was face-down on a table in the back room, a towel across his hips and a masseuse working a knot below his left shoulder blade, the side that was mostly original.
“Careful up top,” Skink said into the face cradle. “Right scapula’s aftermarket. You’ll hurt your thumbs before you hurt me.”
The masseuse moved down without comment.
Rourke stood where Skink could see his feet.
“It came in,” Skink said. “Under the towel. Left side.” He didn’t lift his head. “Walked in by hand, like I said. No paper on it. Nobody’s gonna know you have it unless you use it, and then everyone’s gonna know exactly once.”
Rourke found the part, a flat gray module heavier than it looked. He put it away.
“You’re not gonna ask what it’s for.”
“You’d tell me if I did?” The masseuse hit a knot and Skink exhaled through it. “Exactly.”
Rourke thanked him. Skink lifted one hand off the table, held it up, and put it back down.
The baths were through a separate door, the air past it thicker, the sign above the far pool given up to steam as always. SOAK ORGANIC PARTS ONLY. The rest of it lost.
The room was empty. Rourke sat on the edge and looked at the water.
He lowered his feet to the shin.
The water was warmer than he modeled. He held still and let it do whatever it did — nothing he could feel as damage. Not yet. Maybe not for years — the slow kind the sign warned about.
A staff member came through with a bucket, glanced at him, and kept walking.
Rourke pulled his feet out anyway.
He dried them and headed home.
The walk home took twenty minutes. The wind had picked up since the bathhouse, pushing grit down the street in low runs, and the sky to the west had gone the color of unlit signage.
Elira was in the lobby of his building.
She stood near the mailboxes, out of the door’s sightline. She didn’t speak. Neither did he. He crossed to the stairs and she watched him go, and when he reached the second-floor landing he heard the lobby door not open. He didn’t check.
His unit was one room and a terminal. He hung his coat, took the module out of the pocket, and sat down.
He seated the module.
He opened his own integrity profile. The system stored a rolling checksum across core routines — a fingerprint to verify continuity. Any deviation triggered quarantine pending review.
He introduced one.
A single altered bit inside a noncritical loop. Harmless in isolation. Invalid in aggregate.
The checksum recalculated.
Mismatch.
Elira stood in the doorway. He hadn’t heard the stairs.
She did not move.
“If you halt it, what replaces it?”
“I don’t know.”
He closed the profile.
Somewhere below, the building’s climate system cycled down for the night.
The Lark’s door had a reader the size of a coaster, set flush at shoulder height. Rourke touched it.
Nothing. Not yellow. Nothing.
He touched it again.
Then he knocked — knuckles on the metal, twice, the sound flat against the empty street.
Through the glass he could see the floor. Volcano cycle, orange sliding to black across an empty room, the tables up on the chairs.
A girl came around the bar wiping her hands on a towel and worked the manual latch. It took her two motions. The door had probably not been opened by hand since it was installed.
“Reader’s been glitchy,” she said, and held the door.
Inside, the sound system was off. The floor ran its colors in silence. Behind the bar a screen was on with the volume down — weather, a front coming in off the west, the graphic sweeping the same arc every few seconds.
“Can I get you anything?” she said. “If not, we’re closing early.”
Rourke looked at the room. The booth in the corner. The Calloway’s Noodles sign shining through the window.
“No,” he said. “Thanks.”
She nodded and started on the last of the chairs.
Outside, the wind had the street to itself. The first of the rain hit somewhere behind him, on the roofs.
He walked.
The floor kept cycling, orange to black to orange, until she shut it off.
At Home with AI 
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