The Tampered Score

The first time Erin Park copied out the score record, her palms were wet with sweat. She had worked in Alliance data for six years and seen plenty of heroes fall on camera. She had also seen plenty of scores get “corrected” after the fact. But she had never seen a correction as clean as the one attached to Aiden Carter. This was not a small adjustment. It was a rewrite of the timeline. Half a second before his rescue, the system dragged the score downward. Then, after he restarted the pump station, the whole dip vanished as if nothing had happened. The public record only kept a harmless average. On paper, he still looked like a barely passable low-rank hero. “Someone is doing negative optimization on him,” Erin muttered.