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Maya turned her tablet around. On the screen was not a graph. It was a screenshot of a private message from her younger sister, Zoe. Zoe was seventeen, depressed, hadn’t left her room in three months. She watched Vortex content ten hours a day.

The Muse had given it a 12% Projected Engagement Score. A corpse.

The show didn’t go viral. It went human . It spread like a slow tide, person to person, not algorithm to algorithm. Private.Tropical.15.Fashion.in.Paradise.XXX

The Nexus Loops lead stood up. “You’re insane. The engagement cliff will—”

Harris frowned. “Maya, the numbers—” Maya turned her tablet around

Tonight’s decision was brutal.

She worked in “Entertainment Content and Popular Media.” Officially. Her business cards said Director of Narrative Analytics . Unofficially, she was the Oracle. The algorithm she’d built— The Muse —didn’t just predict what people would watch. It told them what they wanted to feel. Zoe was seventeen, depressed, hadn’t left her room

Maya placed her tablet on the table. “The Muse says 98% for the axe-fighting show. And 12% for the dying planet.”