120: Chapter 121 Everything is normal

For the first time, a red light flashed on Lynn's data wall.

In West District Residential Area B-4, a light representing an individual turned from green to a flashing red.

She had just finished brewing her second cup of coffee; the cup was set down before it even touched her lips. She strode to the console and double-clicked the red dot, causing detailed data to pour out like a waterfall.

Target ID: Kathy M-1120.

Abnormal Metric: Gait Rhythm.

Deviation: 2.4 standard deviations.

2.4—it had just crossed the 2.3 threshold she had set. The system automatically flagged her as a high-risk subject of interest.

Lynn's heart skipped a beat. The system was working. Those Infiltrators hiding in the shadows were finally showing their flaws.

She pulled up Kathy M-1120's baseline data and real-time surveillance footage, preparing for a deep behavioral analysis. The screen showed a female worker in her twenties walking down a corridor toward her residence; her left leg clearly landed heavier than her right, and her step frequency was about fifteen percent slower than the baseline.

There was indeed a problem.

Lynn's fingers hovered over the keyboard, ready to issue the lock-down and isolation command.

But before issuing the order, she habitually glanced at the target's recent records—a basic operating procedure.

There was a new entry in the medical files from twelve hours ago.

"Minimally invasive repair of the left medial meniscus; rest recommended; painkillers prescribed."

Lynn's fingers froze.

She looked at the limping worker on the surveillance screen, then back at the medical record.

The cause of the gait abnormality was found. It wasn't a failed mimicry by some alien organism; it was a worker who had just undergone surgery, walking through the pain.

A false positive.

Lynn let out a long breath, her tense shoulders relaxing as she took a sip of the now lukewarm coffee.

She was a bit disappointed, but mostly relieved.

The system's ability to precisely capture gait changes from a meniscus surgery proved the monitoring network's sensitivity was still intact. As for false positives, they were an inevitable cost of widening the threshold; manual verification was all that was needed.

She clicked to unfollow Kathy's file and entered her password to confirm.

The red light went out. The dot turned green again.

"Post-operative recovery gait deviation, non-abnormal."

She finished typing the note and stretched. The data wall returned to being a sea of green.

Everything was normal.

The Colony's night cycle descended once more.

In the West District, waste disposal robots swept the streets along set routes, their metal wheels grinding over the synthetic pavement with a faint rustling sound.

Under the cover of this sound, things were happening.

In Residential Area B-4, Kathy M-1120's neighbor opened their door.

In Residential Area C-7, six early-shift workers walked into the same breakroom.

In Administrative District A-2, two night patrollers conversed in a stairwell.

They were all doing one thing: adjusting.

The Infiltrators were a learning species. They had spent twenty-four hours figuring out the baseline of Lynn's AI monitoring system.

They learned that 2.3 standard deviations was the red line, that a shadow delay of 0.4 seconds wouldn't trigger an alarm, and that a slight gait deviation of 0.2 Hertz wouldn't be flagged.

As long as they stayed within these bounds, they were safe.

The three hundred thousand sensors in the West District worked through the night as usual. They recorded tiny fluctuations in body temperature, brief irregularities in heart rates, and misalignments of shadows on walls.

Then, the AI system dutifully bundled all this data—deviating from the baseline but not exceeding 2.3 standard deviations—labeled it "environmental noise," and tossed it into a low-level folder that no one ever checked.

The replacement was underway.

Not a single red light turned on.

Eight o'clock the next morning.

Lynn sat at her desk and opened the daily routine summary.

Scanning coverage: 99.2%.

System confidence index: 99.5%.

Subjects of interest: zero. Abnormal events: zero.

She glanced out the window. The sunlight was pleasant, and several workers were walking down the street, chatting and laughing.

She signed off on the report.

Everything was normal.

East District, 3:00 AM.

Sergeant Hark walked through Corridor 3. This was his fourth patrol tonight.

As he passed the T-34 intersection, he looked up.

The lights didn't flicker. Gary was already locked in the isolation room, and this corridor had returned to its original laws of physics.

He continued forward, and when he reached the T-41 intersection, he stopped.

The light flickered.

It went out cleanly once and then lit up, with an interval of less than half a second.

Hark's right hand immediately rested on his holster.

He stood still, leaning against the wall and merging into the blue shadows of the night lights, waiting for thirty seconds.

A woman walked over from the other side of T-41.

She walked very slowly, as if taking a stroll. As she passed the intersection, the light flickered again.

Hark followed her.

He didn't run; his power armor's stealth mode was at maximum, and the shock-absorbing layer on his boots absorbed most of the impact sound. He trailed about fifty meters behind the woman.

The woman reached the T-45 intersection.

The light flickered a third time.

Hark stopped and watched the woman enter a door.

Room C-209.

He didn't go up to knock; instead, he turned and went back to the command room.

His notebook was spread open. Under Gary's name, he wrote a second line.

C-209, woman, T-41/T-45 light flicker.

He glanced at his watch: 3:15 AM.

He picked up his notebook and headed out again.

4:00 AM. He followed a cleaner returning from the night shift through two streets. Every light the cleaner passed flickered above or beside him.

A third name was added to the notebook.

4:30 AM. A fourth name.

5:00 AM. A fifth name.

Hark sat in the command room chair, the notebook flat before him. Two pages, five names, and five records of flickering lights.

By himself, in two hours, within this East District of fifty thousand people, he had used his own eyes and legs to find four suspected Infiltrators.

Gary was the first, caught last night.

Now there were five.

He wasn't happy about finding clues. Looking at these five names, the muscles in his back tightened bit by bit.

This wasn't an achievement; it was the tip of the iceberg.

If he could run into four just by walking around, what did that mean? It meant the density of Infiltrators in the East District was already high enough that random encounters could trigger consecutive detections.

There might be fifty. There might be five hundred.

He only had six subordinates, and the area they could patrol daily was less than a tenth of the East District.

He couldn't catch them all by himself. By the time he caught the hundredth, half the East District might no longer be human.

He needed eyes.

He needed fifty thousand pairs of eyes.

He pulled open a drawer, took out the encrypted communication terminal, and entered a long string of command codes.

This wasn't an ordinary isolation request.

"Signs of large-scale infiltration detected in the East District. Conventional security forces can no longer maintain control. Requesting activation of the highest-level emergency plan."

Sent.

Real world, Holographic Operations Cabin.

Li Cang was staring blankly at four unmatched part models when a red exclamation mark suddenly popped up in the bottom right corner of the system's main interface.

[Deduction Internal Event Triggered: Your garrison Commander requests the activation of a trump card authorization.]

He clicked on the details.

East District, Sergeant Hark's emergency report.

He switched his view to the Colony's global status map.

The map didn't show the Infiltrators' locations, because as the operator, he could only see what the characters within the civilization could see.

But he could see the data panel.

East District: One isolated, four suspected discovered.

West District: Zero.

The Cyber Federation's side was spotless; the data was so perfect it looked like forged accounts.

He was all too familiar with such forged accounts. Every time he saw a quarterly report at the company where all metrics were green, he knew things were definitely rotten underneath—the person making the spreadsheet had just hidden the rot well.

The Cyber Federation's AI was that person making the spreadsheet.

It wasn't that the West District had no Infiltrators; it was that the West District's system was blind.

Catching five in the East District meant the infiltration had fully spread. Time was not on his side.

He opened the deployment interface and looked at the three face-down trump cards.

Intervention points: three. Full.

He reached out, tapped the first trump card, and pressed the flip button.

A system prompt sounded in the cabin—low and metallic.

[Trump Card 1: Imperial Truth Activated]

[Effect: All units belonging to the faction enter a zero-tolerance ideological framework. Evidence collection restrictions removed. Universal Judgment Mechanism activated.]

He leaned back in his chair.

Next, it would be a process of watching a group of madmen find another madman.

Public live stream channel, commentary booth.

Isabelle was analyzing the data curves for the West District.

"Twelve hours in, the Blue Faction's data performance is nothing short of perfect. This AI monitoring system has withstood the environmental interference of the night cycle, successfully achieving zero false positives and full-domain coverage."

She adjusted her monocle, her tone carrying professional admiration.

"This level of fine-grained management is indeed the best opening a standard template strategy can produce. By contrast, the Red Faction—"

Her voice suddenly cut off.

On the public screen, among the three grey question marks representing the Red Faction's trump cards, the leftmost one suddenly lit up and flipped, revealing a card with a black background and gold trim.

The bullet-chat instantly exploded.

"A card was flipped! The Red Faction flipped a card!" "Flipping this early? The match just started!" "Imperial Truth? What card is this? I've never seen it!" "It's an original-style trump card; it's not in the database at all!"

Isabelle's fingers paused in mid-air, and then she immediately pulled up the public effect description of the card in her private data layer.

She took a look.

Just one look.

Then she took off the single-lens data monocle she always wore and placed it on the table.

This was a highly disruptive action. It meant she had given up on using data to analyze what was coming next.

Karen sat beside her, watching her.

"What's wrong?"

Isabelle looked at the public screen, her voice a bit dry.

"He abolished the evidence-gathering phase."

"What do you mean?"

"It means," Isabelle said, "that from now on, in the Red Faction's territory, arrests don't need evidence, and convictions don't need procedures. He hasn't turned the East District into a fortress."

She paused, seemingly searching for the right word.

"He has turned the entire East District into an Inquisition of a hundred thousand people."