The next morning, Elias woke to silence. No Codex chime. No light pulse from the panel at his bedside.
Odd.
He tapped the screen manually.
[System Status: Temporary Lockdown – Diagnostics Running.]
He stared for a moment. His Codex had never locked down. Not once. Not unless he had done something… or unless it had noticed him trying to.
The system wasn't just reacting. It was correcting.
Still, by the time he arrived at his morning lecture, the interface had reinitialized — same familiar screen, same clean report:
C-Rank: 47% toward promotion.
Trust Score: Recalibrating.
That last part was new.
They were covering Technocratic Ethics today. Normally, Elias could coast through it — meaningless philosophy mostly used to justify rank-based privilege. But now, every sentence from Professor Lintz sounded more like a warning than a theory.
"Systems operate under consensus reality," the professor said. "Truth is what most believe — and what the system can enforce."
No one else seemed to notice. Elias wasn't sure if that made him feel smart… or alone.
His Codex pinged.
[Notice: System Update 13.7 applied.]
Adjusted parameters: Query Permissions – Reduced.
Anomaly Flag: Pending Review.]
He clenched his jaw. They had patched him.
He minimized the screen and activated local sandbox mode — a function used to test theoretical queries offline. Usually ignored by students. Technically limited. But still dangerous if used right.
He typed:
"Define: Directive 72"
No connection to the archive. No surveillance.
Just silence.
Then, something flickered — not on the screen, but in the interface delay. Codex responses normally rendered in under 0.3 seconds. This one took over five.
[Access Denied: No such directive exists.]
Too slow.
Elias felt his pulse quicken. That was the second lie it had told him.
He cleared the cache and switched modes again — this time into Historical Simulation Input, meant for modeling theoretical changes in policy decisions. He'd use the system's own academic tools against it.
Simulation prompt:
"Model impact of Directive 72 on academy truth calibration."
No red flags. Just a loading screen.
Then a single sentence appeared:
Simulation Unavailable. Base directive cannot be altered.
That wasn't a denial. That was confirmation.
After class, Elias returned to Archive Level B.
Same hallway. Same red door: Room 12-B.
He walked past it this time — not stopping, not scanning. Just counting doors.
Three more down, he ducked into a lesser-used theory lab and set up at a quiet desk. He opened the local terminal, hacked its backend using a tutorial he'd memorized from his first year, and launched a signal spoof — pretending to be a student with Level 5 clearance.
It worked. For about six seconds.
Enough to get a flicker of metadata from Room 12-B:
"Archive Sealed: Contents reclassified per Reset Cycle v9.2."
Linked Keywords: Entropy, Consensus Reality, Narrative Control.
Then the terminal shut itself down.
A message flashed on the black screen:
[Violation Detected – Access Log Sent to System Admin.]
His breath caught. They would know. They'd track this to his ID within minutes.
But as the lights dimmed and reset, something else appeared — a new message, blinking quietly in the bottom corner of the now-blank screen:
"Still digging?"
Not from the system.
It was handwritten text. Digital ink, left in the cache.
Someone had been here before him.
That night, Elias sat in his room, staring at the Codex like it was something alive. Every move he made was being watched, rated, measured.
He'd crossed a line now. The Codex was no longer just a tool.
It was an opponent.
And somewhere in this academy, someone else knew the game had already begun.