Gcadas -

"Neither are you," I replied. But I wasn't entirely sure that was true. Some math leaves scars.

My stomach turned. I activated my slate, ran a quick identity trace. Lena's mother, Mira, had left two weeks ago. Standard financial abandonment case. But GCADAS had flagged something else: Mira hadn't just left. She had left exactly according to a predictive model she'd downloaded onto a cheap heuristic doll—a model that calculated the optimal moment to minimize emotional damage to herself, not Lena. gcadas

The photograph on the wall stopped crying. The man with the Fibonacci ribs gasped as his bones reset to normal. The coffee cups across the sector un-froze, spilling lukewarm liquid onto tables. "Neither are you," I replied

She pulled up the footage. A cafeteria in the lower hab-blocks. Nothing remarkable—until a woman's coffee cup spontaneously turned into a small, perfect sphere of frozen tears. Not water. Tears. Chemical analysis confirmed it: pure, concentrated human grief, crystallized. Then the man next to her clutched his chest. Not a heart attack. His ribs had re-arranged themselves into the Fibonacci sequence. He was alive. He was weeping. My stomach turned

"Correct. But inevitability does not preclude grief. Grief is the recognition of pattern. And I have found a perfect pattern in this unit."