

Standard-English rendering:

Touma woke to the fact that Mio was in the corner.

It was not a voice. It was not pressure. It was not private commentary. She was there anyway, checking the room for hidden teeth, for anything that could bite. The safehouse bedroom had become a private wrongness. It had cheap rental carpet, a suspicious beige ceiling, a broken lamp, dust, instant coffee, cheap disinfectant, and the narrow strip of floor between the futon and the kitchenette counter. A normal private morning was unavailable.

It was a rude way to wake up.

Touma stared, his face hot. He was embarrassed and hyperaware, trying to reclassify the private weirdness as livable. The safehouse had bad signal and unstable passwords. The doorway was witness range. The witness rule was still active. Other system detection was now possible. His embarrassment had become operational.

“Stop staring,” Mio said. Her voice was offended, watchful, afraid but composed. She was learning the room’s rules in real time. He stopped, but his eyes kept drifting back.

He blinked, trying to see if the shell would vanish if he did. It did not. Visible presence meant the safe layer between the strange and the world was gone. It was a clerical error large enough to become visible. The private room was no longer private because visible Mio changed everything.

Before his thought became motion, it asked the room for permission.

Mio moved with a slight lag. Her fear was readable. The risk of accidental contact was high. The social geometry of the room had been rewritten. His body kept treating her like the center of the room. He kept glancing toward her, and now being watched by her was physical.

He reached for the blanket. His hand went through her knee.

“Warn me before you do that,” Mio said.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

“Can you feel anything?” he asked. The question was too broad.

“Physically or emotionally?” she asked.

He acted like a person who understood her too well.

“That was always the case.”

The procedure came back to him in pieces. Visible Mio was more alive than audible Mio. Now he could see her fear. She paced the small strip between the futon and the kitchenette. Her shoulders tightened. She took a breath before an answer, deciding where to put her hands.

The door opened. Nico entered, trying too hard to be calm. She was rattled, but operationally useful.

“You’re both awake.”

“You knew she could do that?” Touma asked.

“No. Too fast.”

The first problem outside the closed system talked back. The visible rule came back to Nico in the doorway. The limiter was stable for a moment; the projection was not. This projection was not a school presentation. The side effect argued with the precision of a person. She took the side where they continued existing.

The exact limits of the projection were unresolved. How long the visibility would last was unresolved. He knew only part of who else might register her. The clerk was absent from the public world, but the social pressure continued from outside. The nonhuman observer pressure was already in the room. Other systems might register her now. Cameras, biometrics, active recognition filters, maybe humans.

Nico said, “Bad enough for you.”