Fold 12 - First Contact

Yuwon moved past the second checkpoint. The surface under his boots felt slightly different, smoother in some places. As he slowed his step slightly to confirm, the sensors detected the ground's surface was no longer behaving like standard pavement. Every few meters, it changed again.

"I think the ground is changing" Yuwon said. "The texture's off, but I can still follow the path."

"Yeah, I see it" Saejin replied. "Be careful."

"You got it, captain."

There was a pause. Then Saejin replied a little quieter: "I'm not a captain."

"Sure you are" Yuwon said. "Captain of my emotional damage control."

Soren's voice cut in over the channel, dry and perfectly timed. "Should I leave you two alone, or are we pretending this is tactical mission?"

"Calibrating..." Saejin said without missing a beat.

"Copy that. Syncing to cringe."

Yuwon smiled at the corner of his mouth, then rounded the corner and stopped. A bench stood in the alley, ordinary, fixed in place, but it hadn't been there in the scan.

"There's a bench here now" he said. "Looks standard. No sign of distortion."

"Logged" Saejin said. "The grid still looks stable from here though... it might be a borrowed memory fragment."

Then suddenly movement. Yuwon turned around just in time to see a child, small, maybe nine, sprint across a nearby alley. She didn't look at him, didn't seem to see anything at all. Her clothes were torn, one knee scraped and bleeding. Then she vanished before he could react.

"I've got a civilian" he said. "It's a young girl and she looked injured. North alley off C13."

"Can you get to her?"

"Trying but she just took off..."

"No thermal signature on my end" Saejin checked. "If she's real, she's not reacting to the Gate."

"She looked real."

They were quiet for another block as Yuwon was carefully scanning the perimeter. Then a new voice came through, clear, emotionless.

"You treat this space like a problem. But the structure you protect is older than your understanding of it."

Yuwon didn't break stride."Captain, you getting that?"

"Yeah" Saejin said. "It's coming through your sync."

The voice followed: "Stability isn't safety. You don't fix the system. You delay its failure."

Yuwon glanced up as the path in front of him started to change. The street narrowed, then warped inward at an unnatural angle, like two versions of the same block were trying to exist at once. The geometry was very wrong.

"Got a distortion" he said. "Left and ahead. It feels like this thing is trying to redirect me."

"Yes, the structure is unstable" Saejin confirmed. "That corner didn't exist ten seconds ago."

Yuwon stopped at the edge of the distortion. The left wall was stretching, flickering between two textures: brick and wood paneling. A door appeared halfway up the surface, floating unsupported. That wasn't a memory. That was the Gate improvising.

The voice came again.

"You follow rules written to preserve comfort, not function. That's not order. That's paralysis."

Yuwon lifted his hand. A quick flick of his fingers sent a pulse forward, then the space buckled, and snapped back into its original shape.

He lowered his hand again and rechecked the perimeter.

"The signal is steady now" Saejin said. "But that wasn't random. It either tried to steer you or see how you'd react."

Yuwon exhaled once, slowly.

"Well" he said, "it's got my attention."

--------

Inside the mobile unit, Saejin adjusted the sync bandwidth. His hand paused briefly mid-motion.

"It's okay to let it collapse" he said quietly."Sometimes recursion is a better system than memory."

Hara, who had been watching the whole time, turned slightly. "Can you repeat that?"

Saejin blinked once. "I didn't say anything."

Hara didn't respond right away. She glanced at Saejin, caught the look on his face, then turned back to her console. Without saying anything, she opened a private log and tagged the moment. Just a timestamp, nothing labeled. But she'd come back to it later.

--------

Yuwon slowed as he reached the next intersection.

Two blocks ahead, the girl stood in the middle of the street. Same torn clothes. Same bleeding knee. But this time, she didn't run. She just watched him, arms held close to her sides, chest rising fast, like she couldn't quite get her breath under control.

He raised one hand, palm open.

"Hey" he said gently. "It's okay. I'm not here to hurt you."

She didn't answer. Didn't move, just stared, scared.

"You're not in trouble" Yuwon said."You're just caught in something weird, right? I'm here to get you out."

He took a careful step forward.

Her eyes widened. She stepped back, one foot uncertain, heel skimming the edge of the curb behind her.

"Easy" he said."You don't have to run."

But she did. Again. Two quick steps and she was gone, slipping around the edge of a building like she already knew the layout.

He held his position for a moment, checking the angles, but nothing else moved. Then he keyed his mic. "Got eyes on her again. Same girl, still injured, and this time she saw me."

"Did she recognized you?"

"I don't think she recognized anything."

Then after a pause Yuwon continued: "She's real." 

"I'm not arguing" Saejin replied.

The street was quiet. But Saejin and Yuwon knew it was controlled, like the zone was watching how they reacted before deciding what to do next.