Episode 034| The Report

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 1 · 11:34 a.m. · CV-1A Cockpit · Frozen Tundra Return Airspace

When the CV-1A pulled up, Lika didn't look back at that fissure.

The airship cut onto its return course, the white of the frozen tundra shrinking under the porthole until it became a single featureless gray. Shortcut mode had taken over navigation; 6 hours 40 minutes to touchdown in Saint Tranya. For that stretch he didn't have to touch the stick.

He leaned back into the seat and shut his eyes for a moment. His legs were still weak; the aftershock of that fight inside the Instance only now began to creep up on him. Half a step behind his left, that knot of cold 1 degree lower than the cabin stayed pressed to him — Shadow_001 had come aboard too, quiet and still. He didn't have to think about it to know it was there.

He opened his eyes. There was one thing he couldn't sleep on if he left it unhandled.

---

That notification in the lower right corner of his brain-chip interface was still lit. He'd glanced at it at the gangway earlier; now he spread the whole thing open.

[Event #001 · Report]
[On-site Observer: NULL]
[Event: Observed Subject Entered the Rift]
[Timestamp: 11:02:13]
[Status: Pending Review]
[Assigned: Central Spectra Review Queue]

Lika stared at the words "Entered the Rift" for a long time.

8 months ago, when he'd written that NULL rule, what he'd been thinking about was wiping his own identity out of Spectra's outward-facing fields — making any observation action signed from L.K.S._Core show up in the main database as NULL. That rule had saved him once this morning: there was someone on-site, but Spectra didn't know who.

But NULL blocked "who he is" — it didn't block "someone went in."

The second he crossed the boundary, the whole city's sensor cloud watched it together. NULL made him nameless, but it didn't make that step silent. Spectra had saved a file all the same, tagged it pending review, dropped it into the queue, waiting for some shift worker to click it open.

This record couldn't stay.

---

He'd thought of the easiest way: just delete it.

Deleting one record was a matter of 3 seconds for a man like him. But he'd scrubbed too many logs; he knew better than anyone that deletion itself is a kind of trace — a sequence that had run in order, suddenly a single gap in the middle, more conspicuous than whatever had filled that slot. A reviewer who saw a "pending review" vanish into thin air would only want all the more to know what it had been.

Delete wouldn't do. He had to overwrite.

Rewrite "Observed Subject Entered the Rift" into something Spectra ran tens of thousands of times a day — a sensor-cloud self-calibration, a routine echo from the boundary zone. Make that second look like nothing had happened at all, bland enough that no one would give it a second glance.

His fingers twitched on his knee, as if setting type.

---

Lika fired up L.K.S._Core shortcut mode and, through that back door he'd left in Spectra's underlayer 8 months ago, opened an independent channel — a one-way splice into the main database. It didn't route through the CV-1A's ID; the airship itself still didn't exist as far as Spectra was concerned.

He wrote the command especially slowly.

Before he set out, he'd warned himself: the back door worked, but every time he used it, it might rouse the thing behind that signature. Today he dared be even less careless — he'd just crawled out of an Instance that thing had written, knew all too well how many mechanisms the past him had buried that he still hadn't touched.

The command was short: overwrite the contents of Event #001 into "boundary-zone sensor echo · self-calibrated," change the status from pending review to archived, keep the timestamp 11:02:13 untouched (moving the time would only give it away).

He pressed it.

---

[L.K.S._Core · Write Request]
[Target: Event #001]
[Operation: Overwrite + Archive]
[Executing...]

What happened next froze Lika's fingers in midair.

His command had only said "overwrite this one entry." But what moved along with it inside the main database wasn't just that one entry — in the same second, scattered across 7 different sub-databases, every shred of corroborating evidence tied to that step at 11:02:13: the sensor cloud's raw echo, the maglev air-traffic compensation record, the relational index that NULL registration had logged — all of it was swept clean together.

He hadn't issued any of those commands.

[Overwrite Complete]
[Related Records: 7 / 7 Archived]
[Trace: None]

7 / 7.

The back of Lika's neck went cold again, and this time it had nothing to do with Shadow_001.

He'd written countless cleanup scripts; he knew how much corroborating evidence a clean aftermath had to drag down with it — but that was work he had to list out himself, line by line. The thing just now, he'd thrown it a single "overwrite," and it had known on its own which seven places to chain in, chained them more thoroughly than he'd have thought to.

A cleanup like that, ready and waiting there all along, for him to come press that one button.

He stared at that line, "Trace: None," and his throat moved. L.K.S._Core. He'd always taken it for a string of tools he'd written in his past, a code name — something that listened to his commands and ran his errands. But a tool doesn't decide on its own which seven places to chain in, and it doesn't think of the things its master overlooked.

That thing just now didn't move like a tool. It moved like someone who knew this main database better than he did, standing behind him, quietly finishing the half a command he'd left unwritten.

This thought, he didn't want to touch right now. At 6,000 meters, one man plus a knot of cold shadow he couldn't see, he hadn't the strength to dig in that direction. It could wait until he was on the ground.

---

He was about to put the interface away when his eye caught a line of small print at the very bottom of the report. It was the review log he'd been too rushed to expand earlier.

He opened it.

[Event #001 · Access Log]
[Created: 11:02:13 · system auto]
[Read: 11:24:07 · Reviewer ID ███]
[Overwrite: 11:34 · NULL]

11:24.

Lika's breath caught.

He'd overwritten at 11:34. But this record had been clicked open and read once at 11:24 — 10 minutes ahead of him. At that point he'd just crawled out of the Instance minutes earlier, still aboard the returning airship, knowing nothing.

The reviewer-ID field had been smeared over by a privilege layer he couldn't read through, leaving only 3 black blocks. He tried to peel that layer back — he was at least a Triggerer now, and he had L.K.S._Core. But this time his sense of direction hit not Spectra's wall but something a rank higher, something even he couldn't read. The 3 black blocks didn't so much as stir.

He'd erased the record. But there was one thing he couldn't erase:

Before he made his move, someone already knew that someone had gone in. And who that someone was lay hidden behind a privilege even he couldn't open.

【Ch. 034 End · CV-1A Cockpit · Frozen Tundra Return Airspace】