“Who among the Tutorial 100 do you fear most?”“Palistra.”“Not Midorikawa?”“No. Midorikawa fights you. Palistra makes you fight yourself.”— Interview with John Kallum, A History of the System ApocalypseThe train deposited me at East Corporate with its familiar assault of neon signage and cracked permacrete, the district’s particular brand of industrial grime, and I made my way toward SMB11.The MegaBuilding’s lobby was the same: cavernous, chaotic, and designed by someone who actively hated navigational logic. The wall of flickering holo-displays still strobed through destinations like a dying heartbeat, half the text corrupted into gibberish.But this time I knew where I was going.[FLOOR 3-C: CHAOS CONTAINMENT]Only third floor, close, unlike the forty-eighth.I found the elevator bank on my second try, a huge improvement over my last visit, and rode up with a group of contractors who looked like they’d seen things that required extensive therapy. Nobody spoke. I eyed how everyone minded their own business and barely suppressed a grin at the thought that Alice would be so uncomfortable.The doors opened onto a corridor that immediately felt wrong. Not chaos-shard wrong, just bureaucratically wrong. Yellow caution tape stretched across the hallway ahead, blocking the direct route with cheerful corporate productivity.A holo-sign flickered above it:⚠ SECTION CLOSEDCONTAINMENT LEAKAGE PLEASE USE ALTERNATE ROUTEWE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE“Leakage,” I muttered, staring at the sign. “What does that even mean? Is reality leaking? Is something else leaking? Why is ‘leakage’ in the same font as ‘we apologize’?”The sign offered no answers.I turned left, found a dead end, turned around, (...)