[A bearer who opens it with full understanding, with genuine alliances, with the explicit intention of including rather than erasing—would produce something Headquarters has never seen before. Something they cannot model, because they have never created the conditions that would generate the data. It would create a situation where they will be completely unable to comprehend the bearer's action. ]
"So... I somewhat became something new to them," Alex said.
[Something genuinely new,] System agreed. [Which is, in the long history of things Headquarters fears, the thing they fear most.]
The word hung in the air like smoke from a candle just extinguished.
Something genuinely new.
Alex turned it over in his mind the way he'd turned the spirit stone over in his hands—feeling for edges, testing its weight. Around him, the alcove had gone very still in that particular way it went still when something important had been said and everyone was deciding what to do with it.
