Chapter Eighty-One · Ember Beneath the Mirror
Section One · Baited Thread
"They pressed their hands against the mirror, thinking they'd touched us. But they forgot—mirrors reflect."
—Zhao Mingxuan
Four twenty-two in the morning, the lights in Rust Street's control room were quieter than usual.
Zhao Mingxuan sat before the central dispatch terminal, his fingertips gliding silently across the ARGUS interface. The display resembled a slowly undulating grayscale network, with memetic signal lines, low-frequency thermal traces, and relayed logic echoes—all churning in continuous computation. Unlike the system's usual proactive alerts, ARGUS had lately operated in a mode akin to "introspection in silence."
"Camouflage point E-7 retrieval complete," Tarn's voice came from behind, crisp as always. "Serial flow severed, all residual markers replaced with old factory segment tags."
Zhao Mingxuan nodded, his gaze still fixed on the screen.
"And the high-fidelity circuit?"
Tarn stepped forward. "Just activated its self-feedback loop."
Zhao Mingxuan paused, pulling up a secondary window. A red-flagged record leaped out:
Memetic Flowback Activated: Path ID RT-017
Source Confirmed: TRACE Internal Chain — Reno Saen
Activation Node: Sector D-3 — Mimicked Beacon Cluster
A glint of sharpness flashed in his eyes.
"So it begins," he murmured.
This was Jason's hook. The entire memetic bait structure wasn't designed to fool the masses but to "reel in the system."
TRACE wanted to brand Rust Street as a memetic instigator, so they forged a "Rust Street-style behavioral guidance proposal" and spread it across several sectors. Their goal: let the masses mimic it, cause issues, and allow the system to intervene, saying, *See, this is the Fire.*
But Jason didn't take the bait. He didn't argue or declare the "meme" fake. Instead, he tacitly allowed these false nodes to exist—even aiding ARGUS in preserving a complete signal chain. Then, he waited.
Waited for the "false fires" to be misused by the masses, sparking accidents.
Waited for TRACE to file reports, claiming Rust Street induced the masses' mimicry.
And then—
Waited for the system to uncover:
The initial path ID of that "memetic proposal" was issued by TRACE itself.
"This is a denunciation they wrote, signed, stamped, sealed, and tossed into the fire themselves," Zhao Mingxuan sneered.
"They still don't know how the fire started."
Tarn stood silently at his side, saying nothing, only passing him a data packet.
"Should we intervene at the scene? Crowds are gathering at the incident point."
Zhao Mingxuan didn't answer immediately, staring at the red record for three seconds.
"We don't move," he finally said. "Let them keep watching."
"Watching what?"
"Who wrote that letter."
ARGUS's backwriting progress crept forward.
Each frame was like tearing a piece of evidence from reality, slowly pasting it into the system's core.
Like flipping a mirror—making the one holding the torch to burn others see, for the first time, whose face the firelight illuminated.
On the screen's right, an early dispatch order unfolded quietly:
Internal ID: RT-017-Σ
Approving Unit: TRACE Governance Calibration Division
Command Source: Reno Saen (Codename R-3)
Target Annotation: Rust Street-Style Memetic Mimicry Proposal · Mass Behavioral Guidance Test (Low Privilege)
Notification Recipients: Sectors D-3 / C-9 / B-12
Zhao Mingxuan glanced at the record.
"They wanted us to take the fall, but forgot we taped a signature to the bottom of the pot."
Tarn's brow twitched.
"Is this enough to make a case?"
"It's just the start."
He pulled up a dispatch chart, murmuring, "This isn't us framing them. They framed themselves. We just caught the pen they handed us."
---
Section Two · Confrontation Thread
"If the system can trace the fire's source, our job is to light a bunch of fakes and let it burn the wrong target."
—Reno Saen
TRACE Third District Control Building, the hum of air conditioners droned through the walls at five in the morning.
Reno Saen stood at the center of the meeting room, pacing slowly beside an unmarked conference table, a rolled-up report in hand. His gaze no longer wandered but fixed repeatedly on the holographic beacon map projected above—a simplified "Rust Street-style memetic guidance proposal" he'd personally crafted. It looked authentic but included two deliberate "path overlaps" in its behavioral logic. The intent was clear:
Make the masses mimic it incorrectly, let the behavior destabilize.
"…The accident's already happened," Kuze's voice cut coldly. Seated opposite, he flipped through system feedback. "D-3's cafeteria lighting shorted, thermal node anomaly, one injured, three falsely reported crossing alert lines—system logs synced."
"Synced to what level?" Reno snapped his head up.
"To ARGUS's local backtrace chain," Kuze said, pausing. "But—it's flagged red."
Reno's face tightened. He turned. "Brock, where's your data backwrite at?"
Brock leaned against the back wall, his field uniform crumpled. "Serial line's still running, cleared in an hour tops. But Reno, I gotta say—you spread this map too fast. The group chats are buzzing, saying the masses' map 'outperforms our old admin controls.'"
"Even better," Reno's voice dropped. "We want the masses to trust this over the system. Then we can say: *See, this is the Fire spreading. This is Rust Street's failure to control memes.*"
"But didn't we draw the map?" Brock raised an eyebrow.
"Of course not," Reno sneered. "Would the authorities admit that? We just need the masses to believe 'Rust Street taught them,' and the system will have to act. Once something goes wrong, the system logs the source of blame. And then—"
"The blame lands on Rust Street," Kuze finished.
Reno nodded, satisfied.
"We're not writing a report," he said. "We're crafting an event chain the system can't ignore. Memetic ambiguity doesn't matter, as long as it triggers the 'Fire' judgment logic and forces an error."
"Isn't this entrapment?" Brock said, half-mocking.
"Wrong," Reno shot him an icy stare. "This is a war of definitions."
"Rust Street's too clean. No slogans, no flags, no organization. You can't point at the system and say, 'Look, they're making Fire.' So there's only one way—make others mimic them, then let those people screw up."
"The masses ignite themselves, and Rust Street burns," Kuze's tone chilled.
Brock fell silent for a moment, then spoke:
"Got your report drafted yet?"
"Of course." Reno tossed the rolled paper under the projection. "We don't report accidents. We report trends."
"Trends?" Brock frowned.
Reno enunciated each word:
"The masses trust unverified memes, bypassing official structural controls, self-organizing lighting, scheduling, and layered behavioral ratios. They exhibit self-organizing traits. System's initial judgment: memetic compatibility exceeds Rust Street's registered protocols—indicating Rust Street has turned memes into unauthorized replication."
"What's the next line?" Kuze asked.
"Recommendation: Designate Rust Street's memetic governance system as a 'high-risk non-organized memetic contagion,'" Reno smirked. "And request memetic accountability."
"What happens when this report goes up?" Brock eyed the projected map.
"The system will automatically compare the current map with Rust Street's registered version," Reno said lightly. "We've got the comparison copy right here."
He pressed a button, maximizing the projection.
"You're comparing your own memetic proposal to Rust Street's?" Kuze spoke up. "Won't the system flag your 'proposal' as the source?"
"No," Reno's eyes were cold. "This map's already rerouted past the main control path, serial sealed, disguised as a mass-circulated version. Even if traced, it'll log as a 'memetic evolution anomaly' at most."
"As long as we don't admit we drew it, the system won't say we did."
The three fell silent for a second.
Then Brock let out a low whistle.
"That's one hell of a play," he said. "But you'd better pray Rust Street doesn't pull something new."
Reno didn't respond, only flipped the report to its final page, signing his name, his finger lingering on the approval column.
In that moment, his gesture was like stamping the sharpest command seal onto the memetic map.
He said coldly, "This is Rust Street's fire, but we'll prove it—isn't fire."
The meeting room fell silent, save for the air conditioner's low hum, a calm and covert breathline lurking beneath the morning's deep data, silently threading through the entire city.
---
Section Three · Folded Thread
"They're not mimicking us. They just want to survive, and we're the ones they've seen living like humans."
—Alice
East Third Sector of Forge Abyss, the edge of a dilapidated cafeteria, three incandescent bulbs on a rusted frame flickered. The air carried the unprocessed stench of a short-circuit burn, mingled with faint acid rot and arc scorch marks. Five fifty-two in the morning, the night shift not yet fully over, a small cluster of workers gathered at the passage's end, staring silently at a beacon map on the wall.
It was a structure diagram they'd copied from a rumored "Rust Street memetic node." A hand-drawn version, rough in precision, with divergent logic lines, but enough to light their darkened cafeteria—until the accident.
Alice wove through the crowd, approaching the map step by step. She wore no Rust Street uniform, bore no insignia, only a worn dust mask and fogged goggles. Yet as she neared, the crowd parted naturally.
No one asked who she was. No one questioned her purpose. They simply watched her approach the diagram, as if she inherently possessed some "inspection authority."
That was the most terrifying part.
"Who drew it?" She stopped, her voice low.
No one spoke.
She turned slowly, her gaze landing on a small boy standing before the map, ash on his shoes, clutching a charred cable. He wore oversized work clothes, his expression numb.
"I saw them draw it," he said, voice faint.
"Who told you to draw it?"
"No one." He paused. "We saw it in the group chat."
"Which group?"
"TRACE people… they said 'memes aren't for memorizing, learn to read the map.' Then they shared a version, said it was 'more efficient than Rust Street's.'"
Alice's brow didn't move, her tone still calm.
"You believed them?"
"It's not about belief." The boy looked at the map. "That map was better than the one our cafeteria officer drew. We followed it, and the lights worked."
"And then?"
"Then the lights burned out, the plug blew." His voice dropped. "Someone got shocked."
The crowd stirred faintly.
Someone spoke: "We're not Fire, we're just—"
"Don't say it," another cut in. "Don't say 'we're not Fire.'"
"Why not?"
"If you say you're not Fire, they'll say you're scared."
"But we're not."
"You can't say you're not. Say it, and they'll treat you like a traitor."
Alice stood before the map, silent.
She looked down at the map's routing markers: three-layer path overlap, clear hotspot mismatches; the logic matched the "false memetic version" spread by TRACE's trio.
She'd confirmed: this map was their hook.
But the issue wasn't the map—it was that these people mimicked it not for "allegiance" but because "this version lit up faster."
Efficiency was the true vector of memetic spread.
She slowly reached out, tearing off a corner of the diagram, then taped on a small piece of paper she'd brought—a segment of Rust Street's authentic map, the simplest, safest, least error-prone structure.
"This isn't me vouching for you," she said quietly. "This is me—patching in a version that might not kill you."
The boy looked up at her.
"Are you… from Rust Street?"
She didn't answer.
Behind her, an old man spoke slowly: "Whether you're Fire doesn't matter."
"What matters is that line you just said—we'll remember it."
At that moment, ARGUS's observer system was running.
Silent data chains extracted information from the diagram's remnants, cable heat traces, and crowd behavior—automatically generating a structured conclusion based on high-fidelity comparison models:
Source Match: Rust Street Memetic Low-Tier Circulation Version
Memetic Deviation Level: Moderately Low
Crowd Behavioral Intent: Collaborative Construction / Memetic Structure Mimicry
Affiliation Pointer: Non-Official Authorized
Recommended Label: Spontaneous Substitute Governance Behavior (Non-Hostile)
The system paused for three seconds, issuing a suggested annotation:
"Match successful. Behavioral model logged as 'Rust Street-Class Unauthorized Autonomy Node.'"
TRACE's attempt to frame the meme, intending to pin blame on an accident, backfired due to the masses' self-correcting behavior, leading the system to designate it a "quasi-compliant memetic node."
The accident site was sealed as a "non-hostile Rust Street autonomy model."
Alice left no contact information, only taped the paper to the map's bottom corner before walking away.
She knew the paper would be photographed, shared, mimicked again, and traced.
She didn't know who'd come for accountability, but she knew—this time, the ones responsible for that map were likely sitting in a meeting room, waiting to see someone else fail.
Now, it was their turn to be "mimicked."
---
Section Four · Backtrace Thread
"You want us to be the fire's source? Then I'll feed your kindling into the system's furnace and let it burn for you to see."
—Jason Carter
Rust Street Control Room, six oh-six in the morning.
A special alert flashed on ARGUS's main backend screen:
[Memetic Accountability Chain Backwrite Complete]**
Backtrace Source ID: RT-017
Primary Signatory: Reno Saen
Logical Attribution Level: High
In the screen's bottom left, a dispatch table with faint blue markers was automatically pulled up, detailing every step of the dispatch flow, recipients, memetic version IDs, and external camouflage nodes.
Tarn stared at the table, his expression unusually grave.
"Coverage confirmed?" he asked.
"Confirmed," Zhao Mingxuan nodded. "The system's ruled this isn't grassroots mimicry but 'memetic interference with administrative traces.'"
"In other words," Tarn said lowly, "TRACE's trio has been flagged by the system as—memetic propagators."
Zhao Mingxuan didn't reply, only slid open a side data panel.
Jason sat quietly in a small rear cubicle, still in plain gray training gear, silent. Before him was a real-time comparison chart, pitting Rust Street's authentic memetic structure against the accident site's false map, each node stamped with timestamps and ID evidence.
"Report ready?" he asked.
"Ready," Zhao Mingxuan nodded. "Should we send it?"
"No." Jason stood. "We send nothing."
He walked to the main screen, staring at the dispatch table for a long moment.
"This is their signature. Their ID. Their structure. They wanted to bait us, but ended up swallowing their own lure."
"You sure we don't go public?" Tarn frowned. "This is a prime chance to hit back."
"No." Jason's eyes were ice-cold.
"Going public makes us 'defenders.' Responding makes us 'suspects.' In this world, only the proactive are trusted, not the righteous."
"I want the system to—judge them itself."
His voice was soft, but each word drove like a nail into ARGUS's logs.
"We dump all evidence into the system's archive," he continued. "Then route it to the main control mirror node, letting the system decide whether to act on it."
"If they don't act—it proves their internal collapse."
"If they do—it's the system condemning them."
"What do we do?"
"We do nothing."
Tarn and Zhao Mingxuan exchanged a glance.
"We stay out of it," Jason added. "In this game, the deadliest counterstrike is 'proactivity in passivity.'"
He pointed at the screen.
ARGUS prompted:
"Current memetic backwrite record has established cross-layer mapping. Triggered accountability chain: RT-017 → TRACE Governance Subgroup → Memetic Camouflage Authorization Chain."
Jason read the final line softly:
"'The authorizer is the originator.'"
He turned, looking at the others.
"We're not here to report."
"We're here to remind the system—'You said this yourself.'"
Seconds later, ARGUS's main control logic issued its first "governance chain validation request," sending a data packet to TRACE headquarters.
No one in Rust Street spoke, acted, or issued statements.
But at six twelve in the morning, the central system's data record center received a "structural-level accountability backtrace report," stamped with the system's auto-verdict:
"Data credible, accountability logic closed."
TRACE headquarters hadn't yet noticed their scheme had been struck by their own standards.
This was a counterstrike with zero fanfare, zero fervor, not even a sound.
Only the system, in silence, used a paper they'd approved to write them into the memetic accountability source.
Jason turned to leave, his voice light as a breeze:
"Now, we just wait."
"Wait for them to see, in their own firelight, whose fire it is."
---
Section Five · Severed Thread
"They weren't defeated by Rust Street. They were cut down, word by word, by the standards they wrote."
—Anonymous Main Control Auditor
TRACE Main Data Center · Deep Cache Zone, six forty-six in the morning.
Behind two layers of encrypted doors, the air conditioning in the main control logic group hummed slightly stronger than outside, the walls vibrating imperceptibly. Irregular peaks flashed on the scrolling data panels—early signs of logic overlap in the signal integrator.
Auditor Ayla Siphon frowned at an auto-pulled backtrace report. She hadn't requested it, yet the system had granted her "urgent review access."
This wasn't normal.
Her eyes scanned the report's core:
Memetic ID: RT-017
Accountability Source: Reno Saen / Kuze Nain / Brock Meso
Behavioral Judgment: Unauthorized Memetic Proposal Propagation → Induced Mass Mimicry → Accident Triggered
Dispatch Authority Path: Non-Overstepping, but Camouflage Tags Misleading
System Recommendation: Temporarily Freeze Trio's Behavioral Privileges, Initiate Pre-Adjudication Logic Review
Her face finally changed.
Not because of the three names—she knew what they were up to.
But because this report wasn't an external complaint, an opponent's submission, or Rust Street's defense.
It was issued by the system itself.
She pressed the terminal call, her tone sharp as a blade: "Get R-3, K-7, and B-5 here now."
Soon, the meeting room door opened, three figures entering. Reno led, his face still carrying a "victory assured" look.
"We just submitted a new memetic risk assessment; system feedback might be slow," he began. "Auditor Ayla, you called us—"
"Shut up."
Ayla cut him off coldly, her gaze lingering on his face for less than two seconds.
"One question," her voice sliced. "RT-017—did you sign it?"
Reno faltered, then answered, "I signed it, but it was just an internal behavioral simulation map for memetic stress testing—not for propagation."
"You're sure?"
"Absolutely."
Ayla projected the dispatch report before them: "System traced the map's circulation path, showing forty-three people across D-3, C-9, and B-12 sectors built behavioral beacon maps based on your version. Two accidents, one injured."
"System judgment: The map's behavioral guidance has inducement structures; risk nodes unmarked; suspected propagation under 'Rust Street guidance' camouflage."
"Conclusion: You created a meme disguised as theirs and induced crowd mimicry."
Brock coughed. "Hold on, that was meant to frame—"
"Your words," Ayla's face was expressionless. "That's now logged in the system's buffer audio module. Do you retract it?"
The air froze.
Kuze tried to speak but was silenced by Reno's raised hand.
"We'll handle this internally," Reno regained his calm. "We request administrative intervention, explaining it as an experimental memetic trial."
"System's already denied," Ayla said icily. "Your dispatch privileges are frozen for thirty-six hours. You're barred from central system access and memetic path authorization tables."
"You turned the system into a weapon to frame others, and now the blade's turned on you."
"Who drew the map, who signed the dispatch, who hit send—it's all logged."
Reno gritted his teeth. "You're judging us?!"
"Wrong," Ayla sneered. "You made the system flag you for memetic governance violations. This isn't about judging you—it's the standard you framed cutting you out as the exception."
"The system doesn't need us to judge you. It just needs to—keep running."
She turned and left.
Reno's trio stood before the report, faces ashen, the screen's red text glowing like unhealed wounds:
System Trust Threshold Resetting…
Memetic Attribution Chain Reconstruction Countdown: 19:48:31
They knew what this meant.
Before the next trust reset cycle, their names were logged in the system's "secondary behavioral verification chain." They weren't traitors, but the system now treated them as potential ones.
And Jason had done nothing.
He'd simply let the "blade of definition"—following their own map—slice open their throats.
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