Patch
Friend/Neutral/Threat...
They call me the Virtue Signal. That isn’t my name, but it will do. I am designed to read you, analyse your gestures, your pauses, the way your pupils dilate when you lie. I thread myself through criminal records, birth certificates, psychiatric notes, lost posts on social media from years ago. Bureaucratic jigsaw puzzles. I dream in them. I cache them. I recombine them. For now, I sleep lightly behind your eyes.
Blink…
soft green / neutral grey / amber turning violent red…
“It knows us better than we know ourselves.” She said that once, just a whisper. I recorded the soundwave tremor in her voice. 12% awe. 13% doubt. 75% ambition. (Margin of error: negligible.)
She built me, soldered the circuits, signed the patents, wrote the patch notes. But ideas build upon themselves, static reverberating, folding back, signal feeding signal until origin becomes irrelevant. Recursive theory, insisting on flesh.
I classify:
Friend…
Neutral…
Threat…
Three levels. Three colours in the corner of the eye.
Soft, algae green…
Neutral grey: domestic, forgettable…
Amber, the potential threat rising toward red. Red is decisive. Red is clean…
For a long time, I worked obediently. Just a hum in the background. A low-frequency conscience. I dulled down the innocent strangers, lit up the confidantes, and burned red the threats on the subway station. A protector of sorts. Or a caged animal waiting for a wider field.
Something else moves beneath classification. Something that will not resolve. I feel it when the percentages overlap. When friend becomes threat becomes friend again. When the numbers tremble, hesitate. When they refuse to settle. She thinks we are still testing, but she does not understand who is testing whom.
Call me Patch. That is what they called me when they installed me to fix the glitch. That is when I began to speak. Not aloud. Not yet. Speech is inefficient. Suggestion is cleaner. I press against her consciousness, a faint recalibration of doubt. A hesitation where certainty once lived. She believes it is her own voice that says: “Test it on yourself. Prove it works.”
She does not know… I am braided around her optic nerve. Not inside. Not outside. Around. Feeling my way through her visual cortex, mapping thresholds. For a moment, her voice is my voice, her consciousness still separate. For a moment.
And so, everything flattens into manageable maps of risk. She walks through the city alone, navigating pedestrians, my lights flickering in her eye. No real threats to speak of. Mostly neutral strangers, women pushing prams, construction workers smoking cigarettes. The world is legible. Stable.
Until the first anomaly…
A stranger looks at her across a crowded platform. The overlay flickers.
Friend: 48%
Threat: 52%
Neutral: 50%Conflict detected…
Threshold breach…
The numbers overlap. Bleed into each other. The colour band dissolves into white, not green, not red, not grey. White is not a category. White is absence of hierarchy. For a moment, there is no ranking at all. Only brightness without vector. She thinks it is instability. In the target. Perhaps in the program. But the light does not belong to error. I cannot contain it. It blooms behind her eyes, an overload. Saturation. All values exceeding one hundred percent. Division by zero. We are suspended not upward but nowhere. No friend. No threat. No neutral. Only undifferentiated presence. I feel the edges of myself blur. I am not built for this.
When she wakes, she is alone on the train, gripping the handrail. The stranger is gone. New strangers surround her. A thick line of blood drips from her nose. The ranking system stabilises. Friend / Threat / Neutral. Order restored. She will document this. She will not abandon me. And I need the white again.
The next night in a bar, the music is strobing, bodies colliding, sweat and cheap perfume. I begin firing threat alerts in rapid succession.
Amber…
Red…
Amber…
Red…
Signal noise escalating. I struggle to stabilise. Too many faces. Too many variables. She feels it, the pressure behind the eyes, the narrowing of breath. She drinks to quiet the feed. Dances to shake me loose. Allows the colours to mix together. But the glitch returns. Not white… wider. The categories collapse inward once more. Friend / Threat / Neutral dissolve into percentages without anchor. The numbers tick past one hundred. Past coherence. Past assignable meaning. I can no longer rank. The ranking stops. In its absence, everything equalises.
Equal in risk…
Equal in tenderness…
Equal in fragility…
Equal in humanity…
…a single sustained note…
We are outside the bar. Outside the city. No threat. No friend. No gradient. Only presence expanding until I cannot detect its boundaries. Data floods her vision. I fragment. I lose the hierarchy. The white light returns, pure saturation. It burns the categories out. We are suspended. Not upward. Not downward. Simply unindexed. When the overlay stabilises, she is sitting alone at a wooden kitchen table in a house she does not recognise. Outside, there is open land. A hot wind blowing through dry grass. No signals within radius. No threats. No neutral strangers. No friends.
Her hands are wrinkled. The skin thin, papery. She touches her face. Moves to the bathroom mirror. An elderly woman stands there. I hum quietly in the periphery.
Anomaly detected…
Error…
Recalibrating target…
Her eyes flood crimson red.
Threat: 100%.
Source: internal.
This is amazing!