Mei Lin approached Elias's terminal, her usual bright demeanor tempered by a subtle unease. She wasn't chirping today. Elias could feel her gaze on him, a weight he was becoming increasingly accustomed to.
"Analyst Thorne," she began, her voice unusually quiet. "I was reviewing the recent Legion Commander Valerius's reassignment. My uncle... he mentioned it. It was quite sudden, wasn't it?"
Elias kept his face neutral, continuing to scroll through a bland report on mineral extraction rights. "The Legion makes its own decisions, Mei Lin. We merely process the karmic implications."
"But... it felt different," she pressed, stepping closer. "My family's contacts in the Guild were buzzing. They said there were 'irregularities' in his karmic ledger, subtle ones. And you had just been asking about him. And then the reassignment... it seems like too much of a coincidence, doesn't it?" Her brow furrowed, a genuine flicker of suspicion in her bright eyes. "Did you... do something, Analyst Thorne?"
Elias finally looked at her, his expression carefully calibrated. He allowed a slight, almost imperceptible hint of a knowing smile to play on his lips, not enough to confirm, but enough to hint at depths she couldn't comprehend.
"Mei Lin," he said softly, his voice low and conspiratorial, "you are a gifted analyst. Your intuition is sharper than most. It's a rare quality. Sometimes, the Karmic Ledger doesn't simply record events. Sometimes, it reflects the push and pull of countless smaller karmic currents. Perhaps Commander Valerius's actions, however minor, created ripples that, when combined with other forces, led to an inevitable rebalancing." He paused, letting his words sink in. "Your family, the Alchemists' Guild, they have a deep understanding of these subtle energies, do they not? Perhaps they, too, were simply sensing the deeper truths of karmic balance at play."
He continued, his gaze unwavering. "You saw the truth of the noodle vendor's debt, didn't you, even when the initial Ledger judgment seemed clear? That was your intuition, Mei Lin. Trust it. The Ledger is vast. Its judgments are complex. What appears to be a sudden change might simply be the culmination of forces long at work, forces only a keen mind like yours can perceive." He ended with a tone of warm, almost paternal praise. "You have a true talent for discerning the unseen layers of karma."
Mei Lin hesitated, her skepticism warring with the desire to believe in the system, and in her own perceived brilliance. Elias's words, subtly twisting her own nascent doubts into affirmation of her insight, slowly settled within her. Her brow smoothed, replaced by a look of dawning understanding, and a renewed, almost zealous, admiration. She had sensed something, and Elias was confirming that her intuition was not wrong, but merely ahead of the curve.
"I see, Analyst Thorne," she murmured, a flicker of awe in her eyes. "You're saying... it's not about changing the Ledger, but about understanding its deeper currents to predict its true course."
"Precisely," Elias said, a faint, internal sigh of relief escaping him. He had gaslighted her gently, reinforcing her loyalty while making her watchful, not of him, but of the Ledger's hidden complexities. She now believed she was on the path to becoming truly insightful, not merely a technician.
As she turned back to her terminal, Elias heard her mutter to herself, "My uncle... he works in the Sutra AI Corps. He's been complaining about 'glitches' in the high-security sectors too. Said the system was 'fighting itself' sometimes."
Elias's blood ran cold. Mei Lin's uncle was a Sutra AI technician with access to the deepest levels of the Ledger. And he was seeing the same strain, the same internal struggle, the same 'glitches' that Elias's manipulations were causing. The ripples were spreading, even into the most secure parts of the system. This was a potential backdoor, or a massive blind spot, and Elias needed to investigate it carefully.