Chapter Four: Viewer Zero

“Seven of them. Some were bought. Some went mad. Some vanished from every archive. Crown called them calibrators. Rejected cuts aren't prophecies. They're cache leaking out of the attention system.” Billions of simultaneous eyes, Zhou explained, created weight in reality. Brands used advertising, news, and algorithms to concentrate that weight on one answer. Formally rejected versions escaped distribution but retained the decision maker's attention, opening a side channel into tomorrow. “Why does changing it delete me?” Chen asked. “Because you didn't purchase the attention. The system treats you as an unauthorized change log and settles the debt with your existence.”