The Citadel's artificial day had shifted again. A simulated sunrise bled through the skyline of the Zakera Ward, spilling faint amber light across plastiglass and durasteel. Sebastian sat at the small foldout table in his unit, fingers wrapped around a dented thermal mug of nutrient broth, eyes fixed on a corner of the ceiling.
He wasn't looking at anything in particular. He was feeling.
> SAS-C: "Ambient inconsistencies detected. Behavioral drift within three local NPCs—residents 4C-Beta, 4C-Delta, and 3B-Aleph. Not significant, but statistically distinct."
Sebastian blinked slowly. The warmth of the broth faded on his tongue as he stared through it.
"Drift?"
> SAS-C: "Yes. Their current behaviors deviate subtly from prior day baselines. Changes not accounted for by ordinary mood variance or routine schedule shifts. Correlated stressors absent."
> SAS-C: "Likely indicative of unstable karmic scaffolding. Narrative behavior loops diverging. Mild anomaly."
He nodded once. This was why he'd begun logging interactions with his neighbors—not because he was paranoid, but because something always felt a little too frictionless. Conversations that seemed rehearsed. Coincidences that resolved themselves just a second too conveniently. Small acts of generosity that seemed unearned.
"Entropy pushing in," he murmured.
> SAS-C: "Entropy is opportunistic in a universe abandoned by Fate. Without causal harmonization, coincidence accumulates without karmic filtration. The longer the system remains unguided, the more the seams will fray."
He exhaled through his nose and stood, bones creaking—not from pain, but from the habitual echo of a body he no longer owned. His gait was smoother now. Muscles calibrated. Reflexes refined. But the psychology of fatigue remained. It was part of the mask, and part of the man.
He crossed to the wall panel and activated the terminal. A series of scrolling diagnostics flickered to life—most of them fluff, intended to keep casual observers away. But one sub-layer of the feed showed a real-time karmic heat map. SAS-C's overlay.
It wasn't dramatic. Nothing ever was in the early stages. But it was spotted. Tiny, hairline fractures of statistical deviance that shimmered just beneath the surface of social events. A couple who passed each other in the same hallway three times in the same hour. A maintenance alert that resolved itself before anyone addressed it. A batarian dockworker who kept winning every coin toss with the salarian betting against him.
The universe wasn't broken. Not yet. But it was drifting.
> SAS-C: "No current anomalies require intervention. Recommend passive monitoring and continued data acquisition."
"Still," Sebastian muttered, "we need to know how deep the cracks go."
He reached into his bag and withdrew the omni-tool he had rebuilt. The shielding matrix was intact, the microfusion cell stable. A second model—a backup he'd sourced from a broken kiosk—lay in pieces on the table. He'd need them both soon. If he was going to start working in earnest, he needed a toolset that couldn't be traced or flagged by standard Citadel diagnostics.
> SAS-C: "Reminder: CityNet registry pings for your current ID show no red flags. However, two adjacent contractors flagged your handle in a public forum—unintentional, likely admiration."
He frowned. "I haven't taken any contracts."
> SAS-C: "Someone posed as you. Unverified shadow work being done under the identity 'S. Dalton, Systems Interlink Specialist.'"
His fingers stilled. "Someone using my alias already?"
> SAS-C: "Correction: a version of your alias. Probability high that it's a spontaneous identity ripple—universe attempting to re-stabilize by echoing your presence across alternate pathways."
Sebastian's breath caught for just a moment.
Narrative pressure wasn't just missing. It was trying to patch itself, using fragments of who he was and who he wasn't yet.
"Someone's using a name I haven't officially used."
> SAS-C: "Exactly. Karma adapts. Narrative physics seeks familiar shapes, even in chaos. You're not just affecting the world—you're anchoring it without meaning to."
He closed the terminal with a decisive press.
"Then it's time we got ahead of it."
He rolled his shoulders once, exhaled, and mentally recited the checklist of actions for the day. He'd start by accepting a benign engineering contract—basic terminal cleanup work. No public interaction, no high risk. But enough to get embedded in the Citadel's minor infrastructure and start watching how systems bled truth and fiction into each other.
Tomorrow, maybe he'd let a stranger recognize him. Just a flash. A whisper of identity.
For today, he'd watch.
> SAS-C: "And when you're ready?"
"When I'm ready," Sebastian said softly, "I pull the thread."
The lift ride to the contractor's hub was silent, save for the faint hiss of air modulation. Sebastian stood near the back, eyes lowered, hood drawn just far enough to cast a passive silhouette. Not hiding. Just… unremarkable. On the Citadel, that was safer than armor.
The directory panel in the docking annex flickered when he approached—old interface tech, probably last calibrated two fiscal cycles ago. Still functional. Still neglected.
> SAS-C: "Contractor node identified. Internal system: 'Lysus-LT Archive Sanitization – Tier C'. Compensation: negligible. Data access: partial. Risk: zero."
"Perfect," he muttered.
A tap of the interface, a biometric spoof, and the contract was his. It came with a minimalist entry permit and a single-use omni-key to a subfloor access corridor that hadn't been patrolled in months. The Citadel was always clean on the surface, but underneath, like any old civilization, there were ducts full of ghost code and bureaucratic leftovers.
---
Sublevel 42-Aleph
The room was smaller than expected—barely more than a tech closet. A dusty array of backup servers blinked dimly, humming with the low effort of non-priority data maintenance. A chair was half-collapsed in the corner. No surveillance. No guards. No motion sensors.
He liked it.
Sebastian moved slowly, setting down his tools beside the data node. His upgraded omni-tool adjusted frequencies until it synced with the archaic Citadel port. One by one, he began scrubbing local logs—archival backups of port registry transfers, transit logs, maintenance pings.
It was busywork. Intentional, even. He wanted this job to be beneath notice.
> SAS-C: "Processing baseline normalcy… 83.7% archival noise. 15.8% corrupted clusters. 0.5% tagged anomaly."
That caught his attention.
He leaned in. "Show me."
The projection rendered an old access log—timestamped two weeks before his arrival. It wasn't much: a user with incomplete credentials had routed a logistics update through this terminal instead of the assigned junction in Tayseri. That wasn't uncommon. Contractors rerouted things all the time to save themselves a floor climb.
But the packet was invisible to system-level review tools. Even now, he could only see it because his omni-tool had filtered for narrative deviation flags, not code integrity.
> SAS-C: "Packet origin traced to an abandoned maintenance node near Gozu District. Destination: quarantined refugee manifest review server. Purpose unclear."
He frowned. "Someone smuggled data into a file that shouldn't exist."
> SAS-C: "Correct. And their packet was karmically dead. It left no causal residue."
That mattered. Even digital actions—like rerouting a file—usually left small karmic ripples. Probability shifts. Behavioral micro-influences. This one didn't. It was as if the universe didn't know it happened.
A ghost move. Not Reaper, not synthetic. Worse. A narrative orphan.
Sebastian sat back, gaze fixed on the feed. He could delete the packet. Flag it. Do nothing.
Instead, he leaned in and re-routed it again, this time to a secondary customs AI queue with a slight delay. Enough that it would trigger a secondary review—not by him, but by a low-level analyst somewhere else. Someone with just enough authority to raise a quiet red flag.
He didn't need to know what was in the file. He just needed to tip the scales and watch what happened.
> SAS-C: "Intervention risk minimal. Expected ripple effect: audit delay, temporary data freeze, and one personnel reassignment within five days. No karmic damage detected."
"Then we'll watch," he said.
---
An Hour Later
He left the sublevel, walking with a mechanic's gait—relaxed but with purpose. No one stopped him. No one noticed him. That was good. That meant the universe wasn't fighting him yet.
He passed a digital ad board. Most were running generic fare—diet supplements, jump boots, extranet dramas. But one segment flickered as he walked by, showing a grainy, looped clip of a training demonstration.
A blur of motion. Blue skin. Combat pose. A biotic impact slowed to frame-by-frame highlight.
An Asari.
He paused—not out of attraction, but something quieter. Recognizable motion. It was raw and precise and old. Her stance was military, but not police. And not merc. Something older. More refined.
> SAS-C: "Match found: archived footage from a Thesan-based Huntress school. Footage not broadcast in 6 years. Not part of the rotation."
"Why now?"
> SAS-C: "Statistical fluke. Unless…"
He stared at the loop again. The face wasn't shown. Just the shape of it. The focus was on motion and strike zones.
Something in his chest gave a small, unwanted pull.
> SAS-C: "You are anchoring the world, Sebastian. Even fate's missing echoes may now drift toward you."
He looked away and kept walking.
The terminal hissed softly as Sebastian worked, nested deep within a shuttered maintenance alcove beneath Zakera's public network shell. It wasn't on the grid. That was the point.
Here, there were no watchers—no C-Sec traces, no Citadel keepalive pings, no idle traffic noise. Just him, SAS-C, and the quiet act of disappearing forward.
> SAS-C: "Network masks at 94.6%. Biometric signature fragmentation stable. Generating a synthetic civilian identity under the alias 'Dalen Keph.' Assignment: freelance systems integrator. Origin: Erszet orbital workshop, verified Alliance subnode."
Sebastian didn't respond. His eyes followed the arc of the loading bar on the retinal HUD. His thumb tapped rhythmically against his leg—impatience not from fear, but the awareness that this too was a kind of lie.
Dalen Keph didn't exist. But he would soon.
"Attach two previous contracts, both under non-critical Alliance bids. Low complexity, high efficiency. Make him brilliant—but boring."
> SAS-C: "Done. Additional padding: one failed business license application. One dropped academic registration. Modest criminal inquiry that cleared without charge. Entire profile indexed for background check clearance level Gamma or lower."
"Perfect. Someone who's valuable, but forgettable."
He leaned back. The darkness of the alcove cocooned him. This was what he did now—weave threads where none existed, leaving just enough friction to feel real.
That's what fate used to do, wasn't it? Craft imperfection to make beauty seem accidental.
---
He stood, stretching his arms overhead. Muscles smooth. Reflexes tuned. And yet, there was a growing weight in the space between each breath.
> SAS-C: "Pulse variability detected. Cortisol baseline rising. Interpret as low-level existential tension?"
"Something like that."
He walked to the edge of the alcove and looked through the vertical vent slits that gave view to the corridor beyond. People passed. A turian courier in a corporate uniform. A volus arguing into a comm-unit. Two humans walking too close together to be coworkers.
None of them knew he was here. And that was starting to bother him.
"Everything I touch is fake," he said finally. "The name. The history. Even the person who's walking through this city... he's a mask."
> SAS-C: "And yet the consequences of your actions are real. Masks are not lies. They are tools. The universe you serve has worn masks since its inception."
He didn't answer. Not right away.
Instead, he watched the turian disappear down a ramp, then turned back to the terminal. The final confirmation code blinked into place. Dalen Keph now existed—scraped together from synthetic traces and seeded into six minor databases.
> SAS-C: "Shadow contract board access acquired via alias. Non-visible listings detected. Flagged for alignment: one classified asset retrieval, one silent test of secondary AI's predictive threat index, and one passive observation post tied to C-Sec R&D."
He raised an eyebrow at that last one. "Show me that one."
> SAS-C: "Handler unknown. Payout high. Instructions minimal. Operation appears to test prediction model against unknown variables introduced to Citadel flow in last 72 hours."
He stared for a long moment. "They're testing the universe."
> SAS-C: "Or trying to measure where it's unraveling."
He saved the listing. Not to take it. Not yet. But to know it existed.
He needed to understand who else was watching. Who else had started to sense that gravity had loosened.
---
Later that night, back in his quarters, he sat cross-legged on the floor. The light was dim. The air recycler hummed a soft monotone. Outside the walls, thousands of beings moved through routines no longer tied to any spiritual fulcrum. Coincidences happened without cause. Luck moved like wind across sand, with no divine hand behind it.
Sebastian pressed two fingers to his temple and exhaled slowly.
> SAS-C: "Do you regret it?"
He didn't speak.
> SAS-C: "You didn't choose this. But you accepted it. Is that enough?"
"I don't regret being here," he said softly. "But I regret what's missing. I regret that I can't feel whether what I'm doing is right. I can only feel whether it works."
> SAS-C: "Efficiency and virtue are not the same."
"I know," he whispered. "But I'm scared I'll forget that."
Silence. Then:
> SAS-C: "If you ever forget, I will remind you."
He nodded. It was enough.
For now.