Chapter Five: Who Breaks First

Children filled the front row. Nine-year-old Qiao Qi sat on the left. Eleven-year-old Lin Mo sat on the right. The boy did not hide from the camera. He sat straight beneath a label: E-00, PRIMARY EDITOR. Something cracked softly inside Lin Mo’s skull. The smell of antiseptic, flashing screens, and dozens of voices repeating one sentence leaked through. Lu Chen removed his glasses. He looked seventeen years older. “You didn’t stumble onto Full Stop,” he said. “The account was trained on your language patterns from the beginning.” “And my social anxiety?” “A side effect, and a firewall you built yourself. You discovered that the less attention you received, the harder the protocol found you to read. So you made yourself afraid of every gaze.”