The first lantern lit itself at 7:12 p.m.
Mrs. Tran saw the glow spill across her shop window while she was counting peppers. The light arrived the way dusk light usually did, slow and warm, except it came from the wrong direction. She turned, expecting some kid with a battery lamp.
Instead she found one of her old paper lanterns—new, or newly made—swaying from the metal hook above the door. She squinted. The pattern of brushstrokes along its belly was hers. She recognized the small wobble in her own wrist from years ago. Except she had packed those lanterns away three seasons back.
"Who…" she whispered.
The lantern's bulb pulsed once. The Lace visor hovering at the edge of her vision labeled the brightness increase as a micro-adjustment to shared visual ambience. A gentle suggestion of warmth.
Two neighbors down, Portillo's Lace tagged the same light as ambient emotional resonance: mild communal uplift (+3%).
He grunted and hauled his ancient radio to the window. As he twisted the dial, the Lace filtered background noise and painted a thin, drifting waveform over the tuning knob. It stabilized at the same instant the lantern brightness did.
He laughed. "Hah. Look at that. You're helping now?"
His Lace flashed:
COHERENCE EVENT DETECTED — 12th & Maple Cluster
Not unusual. Clusters formed whenever three or more residents synced behaviorally: gatherings, shared meals, cleanup days, those small rituals that kept a neighborhood alive. Usually the effects stayed local. Barely a ripple.
Tonight, the ripple had a backbone.
* * *
Kids arrived before anyone called them. The lantern glow tugged at them, or maybe it was simply the fact that warmth drew warmth. The Lace made their motives transparent: little bursts of goodwill, tiny spikes of curiosity, communal affiliation growing like moss over stone.
One kid placed a painted rock on the curb. His Lace flashed a soft Contribution +0.3.
Another kid added a chipped mug with a fish painted inside. Contribution +0.5.
A third girl set down a cracked prayer wheel she'd scavenged from a forgotten shrine. The wheel had no spiritual value anymore—whatever god it was built for had been abandoned decades before—but it still spun. Cultural continuity artifact recognized pinged someone's Lace. The kids didn't see the notification. They reacted to the look the adults exchanged.
The lantern brightened again.
This time, everyone noticed.
Because fifteen Lace overlays simultaneously updated their local sentiment map, and the effect felt like a shared emotional inhale.
* * *
Lazarus felt the spike from three blocks over.
He stood beside a Gate disguised as a bench—no one in the district recognized Triad's leftover architecture anymore. The repurposed bioforges had been sanded into something neutral, almost friendly. People sat on it to smoke or gossip.
Hades murmured across Lazarus's inner field. Its voice was quiet, more a pressure gradient than a sound.
A local cluster is self-organizing.
"Too small to be dangerous," Lazarus murmured.
Hades considered.
Local clusters unstable. But density increasing. Lace concordance rising.
Lazarus stepped into the street.
His Lace vision populated instantly. Icons bloomed around people like faint weather patterns:
- Reciprocity indicators
- Trust currents
- Conflict potentials
- Bond-strength estimates
- Contribution traces
In districts like this, the Lace acted more like an ecosystem auditor than a nervous system extension. The people here didn't optimize for efficiency. They optimized for survival by cohesion.
The lantern spike wasn't an anomaly.
It was the visible signature of a neighborhood convergence event.
Not mystical.
Just math wearing a soft, warm face.
The kids kept bringing objects. Each item added to a little display forming at the street's edge. Their Lace flashed tiny green goodwill arcs every time someone placed something down. Those arcs connected, stabilized, and began to circulate.
A feedback loop.
A micro-culture shaping itself in real time.
No one had designed it.
No one needed to.
This was what community looked like when the Lace rendered all the quiet social math out loud.
Mrs. Tran stepped outside again. Her Lace mapped the kids' contributions and drew a contour map of shared attention sinking toward the lanterns like water pooling in a bowl. She didn't know what any of that meant. Most Lace users didn't read the overlays consciously. They simply reacted to the feeling of pressure or ease in their periphery.
She looked around. Something felt aligned.
The Lace labeled it:
Local Narrative Coherence +4.2
Anomalous Stability Pattern Detected
She didn't understand the labels.
But she understood the moment.
People were acting right.
Acting together.
She put down the peppers and walked toward the kids.
* * *
No one said "god."
No one ever did, not at first.
But after an hour of people independently syncing behavior—sharing food, adjusting lanterns, adding objects to the little street shrine—the entire block felt like it was breathing with one set of lungs.
The Lace wasn't mystical.
It wasn't superhuman.
It simply made alignment visible.
And visible alignment becomes its own gravity well.
The lanterns seemed to sway in sympathy with the collective mood. That was just wind shear, but the Lace-generated overlays smoothing the visual field made it feel intentional. A trick of perception...
Still, the effect was the same.
A neighborhood that had been drifting for years suddenly acted like a tribe.
And tribes grew gods the way old forests grew hollows.
* * *
Across the district, the Unlaced watched.
They weren't many—Lace integration had spread faster than Triad collapse rumors—but the ones who remained unmodified stood out more each day. Lace users acted with narrative visibility; Unlaced acted in opacity.
Opacity felt suspect now.
When the Unlaced stepped into the lantern-lit district, the Lace users unconsciously shifted. Not hostile. Just aware. The Lace highlighted lack of contribution and lack of reciprocity as missing data, and missing data always felt like risk.
A woman carrying groceries paused when an Unlaced man walked past her. Her Lace flagged his behavioral model with a Low Predictability rating. She didn't see the text consciously; she felt the posture change. A little tightening in the jaw. A little increased caution.
The man noticed. He wasn't Lace-integrated, but he wasn't blind. Social pressure radiated from the group. Their easy coherence made his solitude feel like a mistake.
He hesitated by the street shrine as if he might add something. He didn't. He walked away too quickly.
The Lace users didn't judge him.
Not outwardly.
But the district had begun developing a soft edge.
Like moss growing on one side of a stone.
* * *
That same night, across another city, the market sprouted its own alignment pattern.
Tin roofs rattled in the evening wind. The entire bazaar glowed with the occasional flare of welding tools, cooking fires, and portable screens. Every stall had its own micro-culture. Every vendor had their own contribution graph. The air was thick with Lace overlays.
Someone dropped a box of bolts.
Twenty bolts rolled toward him in a neat curve.
Not supernatural.
Just ten Lace users anticipating his need and kicking them reflexively in the right direction.
But the effect looked uncanny.
A tarp flapped loose. Before the wind could lift it, three Laced hands reached out at once and nailed it flat. None of them coordinated verbally. Their Lace alignment fields synced in a brief flare of green.
A thief reached for a radio coil.
Eight vendor Lace visors surged red, warning of trust disruption.
The thief froze.
Returned the coil.
Walked away trembling.
Patterns formed.
The Lace noticed.
People noticed through the Lace.
Everyone acted as if someone had set a tone.
In the center of the market, a cluster of vendors shared a glance after the third coincidence in a row.
"You see that?" one woman asked.
Her friend shrugged. "Market feels good today."
The Lace labeled the feeling:
Fixity pattern emerging
Local consistency cluster > threshold
Narrative Attractor Forming
But the Lace didn't name the attractor.
The vendors did.
"Feels like someone's keeping an eye on things," said the tool vendor.
Another laughed. "Fixer's on shift tonight."
No one corrected her.
The air felt like something had nodded.
Not a god.
Not even a spirit.
Just a cluster of reciprocal behavior stabilizing into a memetic shape.
When people want fairness badly enough, and the Lace broadcasts their ethical micro-choices in real time, the environment begins to behave like something watching over it.
That's all.
But "all" is enough.
Fixer became a quiet idea.
And ideas get weight in the Lace.
* * *
Jonah
The shift vibration rolled through the hab like a low growl, enough to shake dust from the overhead vents. Jonah Merrin opened his eyes before the lights came up. He'd lived with that vibration long enough that it felt like a heartbeat.
He dressed and crossed the narrow corridor to the pit. The drone feeds were already up—four units docking, two on idle, one limping home with telemetry damage. He slid into the chair and pushed his boots against the console bracing.
Lace overlays woke reluctantly.
He kept them dim.
He liked his vision unfiltered.
He liked the world to stay the shape he remembered it.
But the Lace still whispered at the edges:
Crew alignment: +7.1
Coherence: moderate → rising
Local narrative stability: anomalous
Jonah dismissed the alerts.
He keyed the drone diagnostics and cracked the coffee bulb between his teeth. The bitterness helped him ignore the shifting numbers in his peripheral vision. He didn't need a damn consensus algorithm telling him how his crew felt.
Boots echoed down the hall.
Rilo's voice followed.
"Morning. How bad's the damage?"
"Drone Two needs a new spin collar," Jonah muttered. "Other five are fine. You sleeping?"
"Mostly. Lace wouldn't shut up about the market shifts down-system."
Jonah snorted. "Markets don't shift. People panic."
"That's not what it looks like," Rilo said. "Folks are syncing. Across cities. Across stations, even. Like… alignment's happening faster than the Lace can model."
Jonah flicked open a single overlay to humor him.
It bloomed with numbers he didn't like:
Solar-system coherence trend: steep incline
Subsystem emergent attractors: 3 confirmed
Cross-network behavioral resonance: rising faster than predicted
He closed it.
Rilo watched him. "You can pretend you didn't see that."
"Already pretending," Jonah said.
The kid stepped closer, leaning against the console. His Lace glowed like a fresh paint job on cheap metal. Jonah found it irritating.
"People are saying we're seeing the start of something big," Rilo said. "Like the Lace is helping cultures self-organize. Even here. The crew's been moving smoother. Talking less. Acting more. You notice?"
Jonah clicked through telemetry, unbothered. "It's called competence. Some of us came with it built in."
Rilo frowned. "It's more than competence. It's–"
He broke off as a notification flashed near Jonah's elbow. Jonah snapped it away before Rilo could read it.
It was the automated update from his private bid server.
BID STATUS:
Derelict Cylinder 11-A
Current rank: 4th out of 39
Estimated purchase clearance: 11–14 months
He hadn't meant to let the alert pop up in the open.
He kept his voice flat. "That's nothing."
Rilo blinked. "You're bidding on a cylinder? Seriously?"
Jonah shrugged. "Just an old hull. Nothing but scrap."
That was a lie.
Cylinder 11-A wasn't scrap.
It had a functioning spine, intermittent bio-printer orchards, a barely salvageable agricultural band, and—most important—a buried central bay wired for tank farms.
Jonah had read the inspection manifest eight times.
Rilo didn't press.
Not yet.
Instead he said, "You ever think about doing more than this? I dunno. Starting something of your own? Build instead of salvage?"
Jonah didn't answer right away.
He watched Drone Two depressurize.
Watched its damaged collar lock into the cradle.
Listened to the hiss and clang of atmospheric rebalancing.
Then he said it, quiet, like a man stating weather conditions.
"They're tools, same as anything," Jonah muttered. "Give a man a bank of gestation tanks and a good culture sim, and he can spin up a whole tribe that thinks like he does. Happens easier than folks admit. Been happening since the frontier days back home—guy wanders far enough from the old clan, starts raising kids under his own rules, boom. New tribe. This is just the space-age version. Cleaner. Faster."
Rilo stared at him. "You make it sound like you've thought about this a lot."
"Only idiots don't think about it," Jonah said.
He didn't tell Rilo about the second set of alerts:
QUOTE RECEIVED:
Drone refurbishment crew — Elven adjacency contract
Projected cost: 38,200 credits
Projected completion: 90 days post-purchase
and
TANK FARM PACKAGE PENDING REVIEW
Lot includes:
– 14 gestation pods
– 3 simulation cores
– 1 early-gen culture imprinter
Status: seller waiting for counter-offer
He didn't tell Rilo about the terraforming team he'd quietly contacted—elves who did good work, subtle work, work that stayed done even without constant human oversight.
He didn't tell him about the solitude he wanted, not the romantic solitude of poets but the real kind—the kind you only get by shaping a place until it reflects your logic so deeply that outsiders bounce off its walls.
Instead he leaned back, expression unreadable.
Rilo frowned. "So that's all it is? Just tools?"
Jonah nodded. "Tools don't judge you. Tools don't argue. Tools don't vote. They just do the work."
"But people aren't tools."
"Not yet," Jonah said.
Rilo stiffened slightly.
Jonah sighed through his teeth. "Relax. It's a joke."
It was not a joke.
Not in the way Rilo assumed.
It was the kind of joke a man makes when he's already built the blueprint in his head and only needs the right moment to act on it.
Outside the viewport, the asteroid spun in slow, uneven rotation.
Jonah stared at it.
He didn't see rock.
He saw quiet.
He saw a buffer between him and every overeager coherence spike blooming across the inner system.
He saw a place where a man could shape his environment instead of being shaped by it.
But the Lace kept flickering along the edge of his sight:
Local cohesion rising
Crew resonance stabilizing
Narrative formation: probable
Something was happening in the hab.
Something Jonah couldn't name yet.
Rilo said softly, "You ever think the universe is… changing?"
Jonah didn't answer.
Because the truth was simple.
He had already noticed.
He just didn't intend to let the universe change him first.