Speaker Grayroot didn't sleep much.
True devotion, he liked to tell his followers, was a full-time process.
In reality, he just had too many notification filters wired into the shrine Node to ever get more than four hours at a time.
Tonight, one of those filters chimed.
[ALERT: UNDERCITY_NODE_AUX-01 – STATUS CHANGE.][PREVIOUS: DORMANT. CURRENT: SEMI-ACTIVE.]
Grayroot sat up in his narrow cot, eyes already sharp.
"Show me," he said.
The shrine Node opened a view.
Not a live feed—this was old infrastructure—but a status window.
[OBJECT: UNDERCITY_NODE_AUX-01.][PURPOSE: LOCALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE WORTH EVALUATION.][HUMAN PARTICIPANT: SEORI (CITY EVALUATOR, LOCAL).][EXECUTOR PRESENCE: RYU_KAEL (INDIRECT).]
Grayroot's smile was small and thin.
"So," he murmured. "Our little bug and their new friend found one of the buried bones."
He flicked through the logs.
ADMIN_0's oldest comments.
The Node's awakening.
Seori's decision: prioritize the school tunnel, de-prioritize keeping the collapsed chamber fully open, treat the undercity Node as a tool, not a god.
"Interesting," he said.
He liked her instincts.
He didn't like what it implied.
ADMIN_0's corpse still had nerves down there.
And now, people like Kael and this new "City Evaluator" were hooking into them, teaching them new tricks.
"If you patch over enough rot," he murmured, "you start to forget the structure underneath is rotten."
The damaged shard on his workbench buzzed faintly, reacting to the undercity Node's brief stirrings like a tuning fork picking up a far note.
[FRAGMENT: RECOGNIZES LEGACY SIGNATURE.]
Grayroot calmed it with a touch.
"Yes," he said softly. "An auxiliary. A rib, not the heart."
He knew ADMIN_0's architecture better than most.
Aux nodes like that had been experiments: "small-scale Roots" for specific domains. Infrastructure. Emergency response. Triage.
If enough of them woke and started syncing on shared ethics, they'd be… something like a new Root.
Distributed.
Human-influenced.
Outside his control.
"Unacceptable," he said aloud.
Not because he wanted people to suffer.
At least, that's what he told himself.
But because a patchwork god cobbled from sentimental local biases and one moral auditor's charts offended him on a fundamental level.
"You're rearranging furniture in a burning house," he told Kael's invisible presence.
He opened a draft message.
Not the one he'd written before.
A new one.
To the one who plays in tunnels now,
I see your hand on the undercity ribs. I see your City Evaluator, thoughtful and earnest, moving my city's arteries.
Do you really think you can fix a corpse by massaging the veins? Root is still broken. You're teaching its limbs to dance while the heart rots.
He stopped, fingers hovering.
He closed the message unsent.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
The shrine Node added a quiet note of its own, unbidden.
[MORAL_AUDIT_LAYER: OBSERVING SHRINE_GRAYROOT-LOCAL.]
Grayroot frowned.
"You again," he said.
He thought of the "MONITORED" note that had appeared weeks ago.
Of the moral auditor Beta.
Of ADMIN_0's intent, half-remembered.
Maybe the new Root, if it formed, wouldn't be the thing he wanted.
But it also wouldn't be something he could safely ignore.
"We're running out of time to stay in the shadows," he told the shard.
The shard flickered.
[FRAGMENT: HUNGER.]
"Soon," Grayroot said. "But not yet. Let them shore up their city. Let them believe they're making it kinder."
He smiled thinly.
"Kindness is easiest to weaponize."