The incident is logged three different ways.

  First as infrastructure damage.

  Substation casing compromised. Fence failure. Load spike. Emergency stabilisation costs itemised down to the pound.

  Second as public safety.

  Unlicensed interference. Civil risk exposure. Crowd presence. Multiple recordings flagged, most of them low quality. Faces blurred automatically.

  Third as variance.

  That one takes longer.

  A cursor blinks in an empty field while the system waits for a category that already exists but hasn’t been used in years.

  Eventually, something close is selected.

  THERMAL ANOMALY — MOBILE

  STATUS: ACTIVE

  BEHAVIOUR: NON-MALICIOUS

  RISK PROFILE: ESCALATORY UNDER REPETITION

  A note is added.

  Subject demonstrates capacity for local stabilisation through destructive intervention. Collateral acceptable at current scale. Pattern suggests need for regulation rather than enforcement.

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  Another pause.

  Then:

  RECOMMENDATION:

  Monitor. Do not intervene. Prepare mitigation.

  A budget line shifts.

  A pilot programme is quietly approved.

  Outside, the estate lights stop flickering.

  People go back inside.

  The city exhales and moves on.

  2.

  The cafeteria is bright by design.

  White tables. Clean lines. Food arranged to look impressive. Everything labelled. Everything resolved.

  Harry sits alone.

  His tray remains untouched.

  He rolls his shoulder slowly, testing it. The bruise beneath the fabric twinges — yellowed now, fading, but still present when he presses.

  He doesn’t like that it’s still there.

  Across from him, Chloe talks while scrolling on her tablet. Budgets. Thresholds. Complaints. Her voice stays level, but the effort shows.

  “…it’s not catastrophic,” she says. “It’s just messy. And I hate messy.”

  Harry nods, barely listening.

  His thoughts keep returning to the collision.

  The jolt.

  The shock.

  The rider who didn’t slow down. No apology. No acknowledgement. Just disruption, introduced and then gone.

  Unresolved.

  He presses his shoulder again. His jaw tightens.

  “You remember what you said the other day?” Harry asks.

  Chloe looks up.

  “Which part?”

  “About unresolved things,” he says. “How they don’t go away on their own. They just sit there. Eating attention.”

  She studies him more closely.

  “Did something happen?”

  Harry shrugs, careful.

  “Nothing important,” he says. “Just noise where there shouldn’t have been any.”

  He picks up his fork and nudges the food around the plate. He still doesn’t eat.

  “I don’t like systems that allow that,” he says.

  Chloe exhales, almost a laugh.

  “No one does.”

  Harry smiles, small and polite.

  His fingers curl against the edge of the tray.

  Outside the windows, the city looks calm. Optimised. Stable.

  Harry watches it like it’s made a mistake.

  Somewhere in the background, a new mitigation protocol finishes compiling.

  Harry doesn’t know the name attached to it yet.

  He only knows the bruise shouldn’t have happened.

  And this time, it won’t be left unresolved.