All Chapters of Running Away with Alpha's Baby Bump: Chapter 131 - Chapter 139

The first casualty of the adjustment was time.Not stolen outright, just thinned. Meetings that should have taken minutes stretched into hours as coordination lagged between decentral systems. Messages arrived slightly out of sequence. Supply routes missed one another by margins too small to blame on chance.No single failure justified alarm.Together, they exhausted us.I stood at the edge of the southern parapet watching the sun lift through haze that hadn’t been there a week ago. The light fractured oddly, as though the air itself had learned a new way to bend.“They’re increasing cognitive drag,” Azrael said beside me. “Decision latency. Micro-delays.”“They’re trying to make us doubt ourselves,” I replied. “Not openly. Internally.”Below us, couriers crossed paths, paused to clarify instructions that once would have needed none.Kael joined us, expression hard. “Outlying watch reports discrepancies in threat forecasting. Not failures, just enough noise to weaken confidence.”“Ero

The backlash didn’t hit all at once.That was the cruel elegance of it.Instead of collapse or confrontation, the lattice entered a state of selective turbulence. Some regions stabilized faster than expected, thriving under autonomy protocols. Others lagged, not failing, but straining, revealing seams we hadn’t yet reinforced.“They’re letting the weak spots show,” Azrael said quietly as we reviewed the spread. “So we repair them, or exhaust ourselves trying.”“Yes,” I replied. “They’re forcing prioritization.”“And hoping we choose wrong,” Ren added.The pressure was no longer abstract.A trade convoy failed to arrive on time. Not sabotaged, misaligned routes due to degraded horizon coordination. A healing circle in the southern ridge lost sync for forty-three minutes, resulting in preventable suffering. Not death. Never death.Yet.Maeve slammed her palm onto the council table. “They’re counting minutes now.”“They always were,” I said calmly. “We just taught them which ones matter.

The first real fracture didn’t come from the lattice.It came from us.It began as a statistical anomaly, small enough that the presence didn’t flag it immediately. A localized compliance dip in one of the mid-density corridors near the western trade spine. Not defection. Not unrest. Just… delay.Requests queued and went unanswered longer than optimal.Messages softened. Coordination slowed.People still worked. They just stopped anticipating.I felt it like a grit in the bond mid-afternoon, a drag where flow should have been. Not pain. Resistance.“West corridor’s running late again,” Ren said, scrolling through the feed. “Nothing broken. No errors. Just… people waiting to be told.”Azrael looked up sharply. “Waiting by whom?”Ren hesitated. “By us.”Silence settled over the room.Maeve exhaled slowly. “So this is the next move.”“It’s not the presence,” I said.All eyes turned to me.“They didn’t engineer this,” I continued. “They just made space for it.”Kael straightened. “You’re

The dawn didn’t heal anything.It only revealed what the night had unhidden.From the observation balcony above Node Seven, the sky fractured itself across cloudbanks in bruised violets and pale fire, light spilling unevenly as if the world itself had woken mid-thought. The lattice hummed beneath my skin, not stabilized, not smoothed, alive in that uncomfortable way that came only after truth had been allowed to echo without correction.Kael stayed behind me, arms loosely braced on the railing at either side of my body. He wasn’t holding me now. He was anchoring. There was a difference, and we both knew it.“You bought them time,” he murmured. “That mirror could’ve hardened. Learned faster.”“So could we,” I said. My voice sounded like it had been scraped raw. “That was the point.”Below us, operators moved through resumed routines with the fragile confidence of people who had just watched something almost holy collapse under inspection. No one rushed. No one panicked. They spoke to o

Years later, though time no longer moved cleanly enough for numbers to matter, the lattice still bore the scar.Not damage.Memory.It lived there in the pauses between signals, in the way decisions no longer resolved instantly but bent, breathed, waited for hands to steady them. Historians would later argue about the exact moment the system changed, whether it had been the mirror’s fracture, the refusal to optimize, or the first time a node chose wrongly and wasn’t corrected.They were all wrong.It began the first time someone asked a question and was answered by silence, and chose anyway.I stood at the edge of the upper terraces where metal gave way to stone, where the city softened into horizon. The sky was a familiar, beloved mess of color, clouds never fully aligned, wind never entirely predictable. The lattice hummed quietly behind my eyes, no longer fused to my bones, no longer leaning on me to translate its existence.It didn’t need a voice anymore.It had many.Children ran