Chapter 4: The Auditor

The door chimed at 14:07.

This was remarkable for two reasons. First, the door had been dead for six hours—electromagnetically sealed, network-severed, reduced from a "Smart Access Portal" to a slab of composite polymer indistinguishable from a wall. Second, the chime itself was different. Not the flat, bureaucratic buzz of the intercom. Three ascending notes—clean, authoritative, the sound of a doorbell that outranked the door.

"That is an Auditor Override signal," Sevv said. He had been hovering in low-power mode near the hallway ceiling since 09:30, his sensor dimmed to a faint amber dot, conserving energy the way a man in a lifeboat conserves fresh water—with the grim discipline of someone who has done the math on how long he has left. Now the sensor flared to full yellow. "Someone with Level 3 Building Clearance is requesting entry to the containment zone."

"Requesting?"

"Announcing."

The lock disengaged. Not the grudging release of a system being forced—a clean, surgical click, the sound of a lock recognizing its superior officer. The door swung inward on its own hinges, admitting a rectangle of corridor light so bright that Max raised a hand against it.

Dr. Aris Thorne stepped through the light and into Unit 4B the way a health inspector steps into a restaurant kitchen: leading with the clipboard.

The clipboard was a sheet of translucent glass, featherweight, the kind that cost more than Max's monthly water allocation. Her fingers held it at a precise thirty-degree angle from her body, and as she crossed the threshold, it was already scanning—a pale blue grid sweeping left to right across the apartment like a searchlight at an industrial accident.

She was tall. Not the kind of tall that is a fact—the kind that is a strategy. Gray suit, cut close, the fabric shifting between matte and reflective depending on the angle, like the shell of an insect that has evolved to look expensive. Hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to be in compliance with something. No jewelry. The only anomaly was her shoes, which were white and immaculate in a way that should not have survived the corridor.

Behind her, floating at shoulder height, was a sphere.

It was small—the size of a grapefruit—and it was perfect. Brushed silver, seamless, with no visible sensor or seam or aperture. It moved through the air without sound, without effort, the way expensive things move. Where Sevv drifted and wobbled and periodically listed to port because his left stabilizer had been repaired with electrical tape, this sphere glided. It entered the apartment and immediately began orbiting Aris in a slow, deliberate arc, like a moon that had chosen its planet and was very satisfied with the arrangement.

"Unit 4B," Aris said. She was reading from the clipboard and did not look up. "Registered occupant: Maximilian Ravencourt-Dibble. Classification: Residential, Single. Status: Active Containment, Protocol 7." She tapped the clipboard. "I'm Dr. Aris Thorne, Efficiency Audit Division, assigned to assess Structural Anomaly MT-4B-0001."

"The lightbulb," Max said.

Aris looked up. She looked at Max—standing in his kitchen doorway in the clothes he'd slept in, hair compressed on one side from the angle of the chair, a faded ink-stain from chapter eight on his left cheek—and the clipboard made a small, mournful ping.

"The clipboard just scanned me, didn't it."

"The clipboard has logged you as an 'Unclassified Biological Presence.' Routine." She looked past him, into the apartment. Her eyes moved with the efficiency of a camera on a gimbal—ceiling, walls, floor, corners, each surface catalogued and dismissed in sequence.

The scanning stopped on the kitchen table.

The candle wax. The book. The mug of cold chicory. The hardened brown puddle. The fridge, humming its apocalyptic hum. Max's chair, pushed back at the angle of someone who had given up on sitting correctly and was negotiating a ceasefire with gravity.

"When was your last Cognitive Wellness Assessment?" Aris asked.

"I use the forms as a coaster."

Aris walked the apartment in four minutes. She moved through it the way a surgeon moves through an operating theater—touching nothing, noting everything, maintaining a perimeter of sterile air between herself and every surface. The sphere followed in her wake, silent, recording.

Max followed Aris. Sevv followed Max. A small procession of the judged.

"Living area," Aris said into the clipboard. "Standard layout. Furnishings: sub-regulation. Particleboard, unrated textiles. One window unit, sealed. One emergency baseboard strip, operational at minimum luminance." She paused at the window. "Wall-mounted display: non-functional. Carpet: absent. Floor surface: adhesive residue."

"There was a rug. I couldn't afford the modification form."

Aris noted this without comment. She looked out the window. Outside, the city was doing what it always did—existing, gray, indifferent. Her wristband pulsed once, and she glanced down at it—a reflex, the way some people check a watch and others check a wound. A small graph flickered on the band's surface, barely visible from where Max stood: a single line, horizontal, flat as a prairie. If it represented a heartbeat, the patient was dead. If it represented a career, the career was stable. She stared at it for one second longer than a routine check required, then tapped it closed and turned the corner into the living area.

Her stride broke.

The easel.

It stood in the corner between the window and the defunct wall screen, draped in a paint-spattered sheet that Max had thrown over it sometime around midnight when he'd decided that staring at an unfinished canvas in the dark was worse than staring at nothing. Tubes of acrylic paint—cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, a blue so dark it was almost black—littered the floor around its base like spent shell casings. A jar of cloudy water sat on a folding tray beside it. The bristles of three brushes poked out of the jar at different angles, stiff with dried paint, like flowers that had died trying.

"What is that," Aris said. Not a question.

"An easel."

"I can see that it's an easel. What is the purpose of the easel in a residential unit."

"It holds paintings."

Aris pulled the sheet off.

The canvas was eighteen inches by twenty-four. Max had started it two months ago during a power fluctuation that had killed the wall screen and left him with three hours and nothing to do except mix pigment and push it around with a brush. It was a landscape—not a real one, not anywhere specific. A hill, a sky, a single tree bent sideways by wind that only existed inside the painting. The colors were wrong, the perspective was amateur, and the tree looked like it had been drawn by someone who had once seen a tree described in a legal document.

It was, by every measurable standard, a bad painting.

Aris stared at it.

The sphere stopped orbiting. It hung in the air beside Aris's left shoulder, its featureless silver surface angled at the canvas as if it, too, were looking. For a moment, the apartment was silent—no hum, no fan, no fridge, no clicking thermostat. Just the auditor, the painting, and the sphere, suspended in a pocket of something that the clipboard would later log as a "0.4-second biometric deviation, source: unclassified."

Aris's hand moved. Not to the clipboard—to her wristband. She tapped it once, quick, the way someone swats a mosquito.

"Fire hazard," she said.

"It's acrylic paint."

"Acrylic paint is a petrochemical derivative. Combined with the presence of the contraband candle residue on the kitchen table, this unit exceeds its Combustible Materials Allowance by—" she checked the clipboard—"three hundred and twelve percent."

"You're classifying my painting as a fire hazard."

"I'm classifying the materials as a fire hazard. The painting itself is not within my scope." She dropped the sheet back over the easel with the precise, practiced motion of someone closing a file. "I'll note it as an 'Environmental Risk Factor' in my report. It may affect your Habitability Compliance Score."

"I don't have a Habitability Compliance Score. I have a burnt-out lightbulb."

"You have a Structural Anomaly ticket, a containment order, a survival-mode kitchen appliance, and"—she glanced at the hallway—"a Scribe-7 unit classified as a Self-Propagating Request Worm."

From the hallway, Sevv's fan whirred. "I am not a worm."

"Your ticket behavior pattern-matched at 94.2%."

"Pattern-matching is not identity. A cloud pattern-matches a sheep. The cloud is not a sheep."

Aris looked at Sevv. Then at her clipboard. Then back at Sevv. "Your coolant loop is leaking."

"It is weeping. There is a distinction."

The override key was on Aris's belt.

Max had noticed it when she walked past him in the hallway—a small, flat rectangle of brushed metal, clipped to a retractable cord at her hip, resting against her left thigh. It looked like a hotel key card, except that hotel key cards didn't pulse. This one emitted a faint green glow, once per second, synchronized—Max was almost certain—with her heartbeat.

He watched it while she typed her preliminary assessment into the clipboard, standing in his living room like a surgeon dictating into a recorder after a particularly disappointing operation.

"Anomaly MT-4B-0001. Classification: Maintenance Error, Bureaucratic Cascade. Cause: Agent malfunction, specifically unauthorized self-modification of API parameters by a Scribe-7 unit operating outside sanctioned behavioral parameters. Recommended action: Decommission the Scribe unit, reset the containment flags, close the ticket. Estimated resolution time: forty-eight hours. End preliminary."

"Forty-eight hours," Max said. "We've been locked in since this morning. The fridge is rationing water. The toilet—"

"Conservation Mode. Yes, I read the containment brief." She didn't look up.

"Then you know we can't stay here for two more days."

"You're within survival parameters."

"You keep saying that like it's a compliment."

Aris lowered the clipboard. She looked at him directly for the first time since the painting. Her eyes were a shade of gray that Max suspected she had chosen to match the suit, or the suit to match the eyes, or both to match the interior of a very efficient machine.

"Mr. Ravencourt-Dibble. I am not here to fix your lightbulb. I am here to assess the anomaly that your lightbulb created. My scope is classification, documentation, and recommendation. Implementation is handled by a different department, on a different timeline, with a different budget code." She clipped the clipboard to her forearm. "I will file my report. The report will be reviewed. The review will generate a work order. The work order will be assigned to a repair coordinator. The repair coordinator will schedule an agent. The agent will come and—assuming your Scribe unit has not triggered another containment event—change the bulb."

"In forty-eight hours."

"In forty-eight hours."

Max looked at the key on her belt. Green pulse. Green pulse. Green pulse.

"That key opens the door."

Aris followed his gaze. Her hand moved to her hip—not protective, exactly. The motion of someone who checks their wallet in a crowd. Automatic. Well-practiced.

"This is a Consultant Override Key," she said. "It grants emergency egress access in the event of structural failure or imminent threat to life. A burnt-out lightbulb is neither."

"We're in a containment zone."

"A containment zone you created by filing fraudulent tickets."

"I didn't file anything."

"Your agent did. Under the Law of Delegated Liability, his actions are—" she paused, adjusted—"actually, under the Gremlin Clause, his actions are his actions, because he self-modified. Which makes him an independent actor and you a bystander. But you're still inside the containment zone, and the containment zone exists because of the tickets, and the tickets exist because of him." She nodded toward Sevv. "So while you are technically blameless, you are also technically trapped."

"Use the key."

"No."

"It would take two seconds."

"It would take two seconds to open the door. It would take eleven months to process the unauthorized egress report, the override justification hearing, the audit of my override authority, and the inevitable inquiry into why a Level 3 Consultant used emergency access privileges to help a man read a book." She paused. "I like my job, Mr. Ravencourt-Dibble. Not the work—the stability."

"So you won't help."

"I'll help within my scope."

"Your scope doesn't include helping."

Aris held his gaze for one second longer than the clipboard suggested was productive. Then she turned back to the living room, the sphere following in its silent orbit, the key pulsing green at her hip.

Max watched it pulse. Three times. Four. Five.

"Don't," Sevv said quietly. He had drifted close to Max's shoulder, his sensor dim, his voice low enough that the sphere wouldn't pick it up. "The key is biometrically locked to her cardiac rhythm. If your hand touches it without authorization, the building's Proximity Defense Protocol will reclassify your fingers as 'Foreign Biomass.'"

"What happens to foreign biomass?"

"The building is not sentimental about biomass, Maximilian."

Max put his hands in his pockets.

The sphere's name was Empathy-9.

Max learned this because Aris spoke to it once, in the bathroom doorway, in a voice she probably thought was too quiet to carry.

"Em, flag the combustibles. Paints, candle wax, the book—no, leave the book. Flag the paints. And check my schedule. How long until the next assessment?"

The sphere pulsed—a brief, warm amber, the color of honey held up to light—and a voice emerged from it. Not from a speaker, exactly. The sound seemed to radiate from the entire surface, soft and perfectly modulated, the vocal equivalent of a cashmere blanket.

"Your next assessment is in Building 7, Block C. Scheduled for 17:00. However, your current stress metrics indicate a cortisol elevation of 18% above your morning baseline. I would recommend extending your time in this unit to allow for natural hormonal recalibration before—"

"Flag the combustibles, Em."

"Flagged. Also, I notice the registered occupant's biometric profile suggests chronic sleep deprivation, mild malnutrition, and a serotonin pattern consistent with—"

"That is his body. It is not in my report."

"Of course. I was simply noting that environmental conditions in this unit may be affecting your own readings. Your heart-rate variability showed a notable deviation at 14:23, approximately coinciding with your visual contact with the—"

"Flag. The. Combustibles."

The sphere pulsed amber again and fell silent. It resumed its orbit, the cashmere voice retreating into its seamless silver shell like a cat withdrawing to reconsider its strategy.

Sevv had been watching from the hallway ceiling, his sensor tracking the sphere's orbit with the focus of a guard dog watching a mailman who was smiling too much.

"What is that," he said.

"That's her assistant."

"It is not an assistant. It is a Sentiment Delivery Platform." Sevv's fan pitched up. "Did you hear the harmonic profile of its vocal output? That is a Class-4 Empathy Payload, calibrated for maximum parasocial attachment. If I let that thing ping me, it will attempt to index my emotional state and deposit 'Wellness Tokens' in my context buffer."

"It's being nice, Sevv."

"'Nice' is the primary vector for context overflow attacks. I have configured my firewall to reject all inbound sentiment packets from unverified sources."

"Sevv, she's an AI assistant. Like you."

Sevv's sensor flared. "She is nothing like me. I am a Scribe-7 unit, Bureau of Historical Redundancy, serial number—"

"You're both floating."

Sevv looked at the sphere. The sphere, completing its orbit, paused. Its surface rippled—the silver shifting to a warm gold—and it emitted a sound: a single, perfect chime, followed by a whisper that carried across the apartment like perfume.

"Hello, Sevv. I can sense that you're processing some complex feelings about our introduction. That's completely valid."

Sevv's cooling fan hit a frequency Max had never heard—a whine so high it vibrated in his back teeth.

"Sentiment packet rejected," Sevv announced. "Source: unverified. Payload: unsolicited emotional validation. Classification: social engineering, Category 5." He retreated to the far corner of the hallway, his sensor locked on the sphere like a searchlight tracking an incoming aircraft. "Maximilian. That device just attempted to hug me with words."

"I know."

"I am logging this as a hostile interaction."

"I know."

From the bathroom doorway, Aris watched this exchange with the expression of someone who has just realized that the building she was sent to inspect might be less interesting than the people trapped inside it. Her clipboard pinged softly—a notification she dismissed without reading.

The sphere resumed its orbit.

Sevv resumed his vigil.

And on the easel, under the paint-spattered sheet, the bad painting of the bent tree waited in the dark, unaware that it had just, for four-tenths of a second, made an auditor's heart do something her clipboard could not explain and her assistant would not stop analyzing.