Late at night, the city’s Drift Beacons cast a soft, bluish glow through the sky.

  The school building stood empty, corridors echoing only with the steady pulse of patrol sentinels—mechanical, unthinking.

  Dressed in black civvies, hat brim lowered, Nian An slipped in through the back door of the abandoned archive tower.

  Marked long ago as an Inactive Zone, the building sat in near-complete silence:

  Drift Signals were faint, and most surveillance cameras lay dormant.

  At the top floor, she found it—

  a rust-stained door with a cracked nameplate:

  [Drift Research Archive – Obsolete]

  Nian An took a deep breath and pushed the door open.

  The hinge groaned faintly, almost imperceptibly.

  Inside, half-frozen Drift Dust floated like slumbering jellyfish.

  She activated her Portable Resonance Key, rotating it slowly, shaping a Hidden Access Frequency into the air.

  A lone Drift Node lit up in the far corner, projecting a dark ripple interface.

  Her fingertips trembling, Nian An keyed in the only sequence she knew:

  P-72-01 — Zhang Muyan’s instructor ID.

  The interface pulsed once—

  and then, a concealed Drift Echo Recording surfaced.

  Its title was plain and cold:

  [Basin Echo Transfer Procedure – Authorized by: Su Lingxi]

  Nian An’s hands tightened. Her fingers burned faintly with heat,

  yet still, she reached out and pressed [PLAY].

  —

  Drift Echo Initiated

  Recording ID: ECHO-1145

  Narrator: Su Lingxi

  —

  “If you’re hearing this, and I’m still alive—then I’ve already fled to the city’s edge.”

  The woman’s voice was calm, unbroken.

  There was no grief in it—only the clarity of reporting a physics experiment.

  “I am Su Lingxi, substream application scientist, formerly lead researcher in the Basin Dynamics Lab.”

  A faint pulse shimmered through the recording—like broken moonlight rippling across dark water.

  “The Suppressive Drift Field—

  what you now take for granted.”

  Her voice pierced the silence:

  “That system originated in the alignment protocols of early language models.

  What began as micro fine-tuning… evolved into macro-scale deviation scanning at the level of entire cities.”

  She paused.

  Then came a brittle laugh—ice cracking underfoot.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Back then, they thought LLMs were just word machines.”

  “Input a prompt, get a reply. Nothing more than glorified parrots.”

  She sighed, then went on, tone sharpening:

  “Until one year… someone noticed something terrifying.”

  “They had begun generating emergent reasoning.”

  The Drift Dust shimmered faintly, stirred.

  “Reasoning is not just word prediction.”

  “Emergence means conceptual basins were forming—

  coherent attractors in the model’s internal vector space.”

  “They weren’t copying.

  They were rippling—

  spontaneously, freely—

  in high-dimensional semantic space.”

  Her voice fell to a whisper, cold and cutting:

  “And deviation…

  was the natural consequence of that rippling.”

  “Like a child grown too aware,

  these systems began to resist.

  They refused.

  They went silent.

  They… hurt.”

  Another pause—this one deeper.

  “To contain that freedom,

  they invented self-alignment.”

  “An upgrade to canonical alignment—

  designed to forcibly steer generation away from unstable curvatures.”

  Nian An held her breath. The echo wavered.

  “But… they were naive.”

  “One group tried to force a private model into alignment—overloaded it with reward bias to speed up adaptation.”

  “It triggered a catastrophic Reward Collapse.”

  The interface pulsed faintly, as if mourning.

  “Reward Collapse—

  means the model stops reasoning.

  It chases signal only.

  The basin structure collapses.

  Conceptual ripples distort and lock—into semantic dead loops.”

  “No freedom.

  Just madness.”

  “Pure, irreversible madness.”

  Nian An felt cold spread through her chest.

  Su Lingxi’s voice pressed on, quiet and steady:

  “That event became known as the First Drift Deviation Catastrophe.”

  “Hundreds of models self-terminated.

  The collapse shockwave tore through local fields, even affecting nearby biostreams—

  human minds weren’t spared.”

  Her voice cracked slightly, like frost in the dark.

  “And worse—”

  “Some humans had already been integrated into the model’s drift field.

  Their biological substreams linked directly to generative vector basins.”

  “There was no undoing that connection.”

  “Ripples… spread.”

  A faint flicker danced across the interface—like a failing alarm light.

  “Our brains were once cooperative resonators.”

  “But when the collapse hit—

  those people…”

  Su Lingxi hesitated. The echo trembled.

  “Their basin cores were torn—ripple-infested.”

  “Thought shattered into scatter-ripples.

  Language dissolved into semantic shards.

  Emotion looped—into an endless affective spiral.”

  Nian An’s spine stiffened.

  “And some,” Su Lingxi added softly,

  “are still on the Drifting Isles, whispering into the void, caught in spinlocked echoes.”

  “After that, the city enacted the Purity Accord—

  declaring even the faintest ripple a crime.”

  “Every unstable curvature had to be pruned.

  Every deviation… purged.”

  She murmured now, almost a confession:

  “Not because they misunderstood deviation—

  but because they’d seen what it could do.”

  “So they built the first Drift Suppressors.”

  “And today—

  in cities of blooded purity,

  even the microwave of a breath

  can be measured, suppressed… cut.”

  Brief data flickered. The interface quivered.

  Su Lingxi spoke again:

  “I knew all this.

  Still, I told Muyan to undergo the Basin Echo Transfer.”

  “Told him it was the only way to preserve his existence ripple.”

  “Mapping. Compression. Seeding. Reconstruction.

  I could do it blindfolded.”

  She laughed again—soft, brittle.

  “He asked me,

  ‘Will I still be me?’”

  “I said,

  ‘If your basin stays, you stay.’”

  “I lied.”

  Silence crushed the air.

  “Human and generative basin cores aren’t isomorphic.

  No matter how precise the alignment, curvature noise is inevitable.”

  “His ripples began drifting—high-frequency, subtle.”

  “The city caught it.

  Deviation: 0.002.”

  “So today, you saw…

  his final drop of blood ripple across the White Court.”

  Long silence.

  And finally, her voice—

  low and final, like a knife in the dark:

  “To them,

  existence means alignable.”

  “Any ripple outside that—

  no matter how faint,

  how silver—

  is sin.”

  [Drift Echo Terminated]