Shit.
I scroll through the data, trying to keep my hands steady. The system’s throwing off error flags like confetti, but it’s not crashing—it’s confused. There’s something off about the signal…something weird that doesn’t feel like an error in my work so much as technical.
It doesn’t make sense.
Unless the input was wrong.
I blink at the label: Input Set C.
That’s what it should be—phantom limb pain, mid-forearm, moderate intensity. But I don’t remember double-checking the staging folder before I left it running overnight. I was exhausted. Buzzed. Pissed off. I thought I was being efficient.
What if I loaded the wrong trace?
What if I pulled from the wrong archive?
“I—uh…” I swallow hard. “That spike isn’t from the translator. It’s the input. Something’s off.”
The Mlok tilts his head at me. The Merati are already making notes, which is never a good sign.
Rhyss is silent. Watching.
I keep going. “I think I queued the wrong file last night. It must’ve been mislabeled in the export folder—I thought it was phantom limb, but this isn’t matching the pattern.”
“And you didn’t verify it before running the test?” one of the Merati says.
“I thought I had. But I…must’ve skipped a step.”
Rhyss still doesn’t speak, which is almost worse than if he ripped me apart.
“This isn’t a failure in the translator,” I add. “The algorithm was responding to a signal it wasn’t built to handle.”
“And in a live test,” says the other Merati, “that would still be catastrophic.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “I’m not asking for clearance. Just time to find out what happened.”
Rhyss finally moves.
He steps forward, too slownotto be angry, and every part of me wants to flinch—but I don’t. I hold my ground.
Mostly.
“Dr. Walker,” he says. “You came to your clearance review hungover. You ran an unverified signal in front of the advisory board. You presented unstable data as trial-ready, and now—after jeopardizing months of research, after wasting the committee’s time—you stand here and say youmighthave skipped a step?”
I grit my teeth. “It was an honest mistake?—”
“There is no such thing,” he snaps. “Not in this lab. Not when live subjects are involved…subjects who can feel pain, which you could have madefar worse.”
Okay–that pisses me off. Because I get pain, I really do. My grandmother struggled with chronic pain every damn day of her life; my mom told awful stories. I want to fix this. “Dr. Rhyss,” I start.
But he doesn’t let me continue.
“You don’t get to bewrongat this stage,” Rhyss goes on. “You don’t get to sleepwalk through prep and hope your code is smarter than your hangover.”
He’s making me seem like some kind of alcoholic in front of the committee, and my face burns in response. I want to argue. I want to tell him I’m brilliant and he knows it, that one misstep doesn’t erase everything I’ve done to get here. But I also know if I open my mouth, I might cry. And there’s no way in any universe I’m giving him that.
“You can’t extrapolate from incomplete data,” he says. “You cannot guess at clinical readiness based on a handful of cleansignals and one catastrophic outlier. You have no idea what would have happened if that was a real patient.”
“I do,” I say, voice tight. “That’s why I stopped the sim.”
