The corner eye's electronic counter, his constant friend for months now, finally read DP: 402. He stood on the leveled expanse of Riverside Village, his face baked by the sun. For weeks, each waking moment had been spent surrounded by the Outbreak System's flashing, immediate alerts: a potential cholera cluster from the contaminated river, a potential measles epidemic in an adjacent hamlet. Each victory over these short-term threats had been met with a small, satisfying chime and a few meager Development Points. He'd applied them to support the nascent Health Oracle Network (HON)—additional medical material, a motorbike for Anna Brooks to travel to distant patients, and a used water filter. But today, he was about to invest in something else."Anxious?" Anna's voice was gentle beside him. She glanced over at the vacant lot with him, her own face a blend of hope and fear."Terrified," Reuben admitted with a sudden laugh. "What if it fails? What if I type in the command and nothing happ

They began shortly after the school's establishment had stabilized. They were little things at first, coiling around the village like the mist over the river at dawn. A flick of an eyebrow as Reuben passed by. A whisper that evaporated when he stepped into the market. The lively, unified community that had greeted the opening of the school now showed hairline cracks.The System, so attuned to danger at the population level, had marked the shift as neither an outbreak vector nor a new, overt measure: [SOCIAL COHESION: -8%]. There was no plague to avert, only a gradual, insidious sickness of the soul.The catalyst was Elder Jabari. A man whose power, once derived from tradition and respect, had been eroded by Reuben's hard-miracles of concrete. Where Jabari offered rain prayers, Reuben's System-built well delivered water. Where Jabari treated fever with herbal poultices, Reuben's clinics delivered cures that took a disquieting effect. The Elder saw his power, the worth of his life, drai

For three days after the Science Sermon, a profound stillness descended on Riverside. The [SOCIAL COHESION] reading held steady at a healthy 80%, and the [KNOWLEDGE MULTIPLIER] hummed with greater efficiency. The village healed, learned, grew. Reuben allowed himself a thin slice of pride, a feeling as foreign as it was fleeting. He was doing well, here, in this one small corner of the world.The proportion illusion was shattered at 3:17 AM.Reuben was awakened not by sound, but by a searing, electric pain at the rear of his eyeballs. The Outbreak System's standard, lean console stuttered, flickered, and fractured into a maelstrom of static. Strange flows of information—topographic reports, heat maps of population densities, hydrology graphs—crossed and merged in a whirlpool maelstrom. His head was being used as a rack to hold the servers of a god.**CRITICAL SYSTEM UPDATE IN PROCESS.****SYSTEM CAPACITY REACHED: RIVERSIDE VILLAGE HUB STABLE.****ACTIVATING REGIONAL EXPANSION PROTOCOL.

Quiet at the Riverside clinic was the comforting, crisis-avoided kind. Sunbeams streamed through gleaming windows, illuminating motes of dust that twinkled and danced in the heat. Reuben Stone, annotating a fresh, foreboding data stream from the Kojin Foothills on his System screen, allowed himself a moment's reprieve. Anna Brooks carefully restocked a cabinet in the corner of the room with antiseptics, her hands steady and smooth. In the corner, Miriam labored carefully over a minute map of the new water pipe system in the village, her tongue thrust out in concentration. The [MORALE] figure in the clinic thrummed a soothing, familiar green.The peace was rudely interrupted by the roar of engines and the whine of tires spinning too hard on gravel.Reuben looked up as three black, unmarked SUVs screeched to a halt out in front, blocking the entrance to the clinic and the school walkway beyond it. Doors swung open simultaneously. Eight men in dark, impeccably cut suits emerged. They did

The hush of the cell had ceased to be a shroud of despair but an underwater cable, humming with the pulse of two silent clocks: one running down to a Riverside epidemic, the other to the collapse of all that Reuben had built. He had spent the hours in between in a hyper-concentrated stillness, conserving his energy, his mind shuddering through and discarding a hundred futile plans. The guard who presented him to his repulsive dinner had stared straight through him, a wall in uniform.The system, it seemed, was sealed off.As the wan yellow of the single bulb began to feel like a torture instrument, another sound was heard along the corridor, not the heavy, rhythmic tread of the regular guards, but a quicker, lighter, and slightly nervous step. His door creaked open with a clank on the lock, and in place of a guard, a young man stood waiting, looking very out of place.He was probably in his mid-twenties, dressed in a tattered, crumpled jacket, a messenger bag slung over his chest. His