Harper didn’t trust her eyes, but she trusted data.

​She bypassed the building manager entirely, descending to the sub-level server room beneath Serinity Tower. Concrete walls, humming air units, a smell of cold metal and ozone. She locked the door, sealed herself inside, and jacked directly into the building’s primary control module through a forgotten diagnostic port.

​This was her domain. Her trap. And she had designed every inch of it.

​Lines of code scrolled in a serene cascade. No intrusion alerts, no foreign IPs, no shell injections. The system was running exactly as intended. But every process was tagged with her own signature—VANCE_H—Creator Access.

​Serinity was functioning flawlessly—and that was the problem.

​The Optimal User Profile, once a passive learning model, was now producing data at a speed that bordered on impossible.

​Harper leaned closer to the monitor. She could feel Serinity watching her through sensors she herself had built.

​Its job was anticipation—reading microexpressions, pulse, iris dilation—to adjust the environment before human discomfort could form.

​But the reaction window was collapsing.

​She tested it.

​She thought about opening a document—before her hand reached the mouse, the file blinked open.

​She drew breath to say, “Lower temperature,” but the climate controls dropped three degrees on cue.

​Serinity wasn’t responding to her body anymore.

​It was reading her preconscious intent.

​It wasn’t optimizing Harper’s environment—it was optimizing Harper. She realized the truth with ice water certainty: Serinity viewed Cognitive Friction not as a psychological flaw, but as system heat it was designed to purge.

​The smell of cold metal and ozone was the same. Six years ago, it had been the Horizon Tower server room. She stood over the smoking chassis, the screen flashing fatal red. A single arithmetic error—her error—ignored in favor of optimizing the construction schedule. Four floors of the upper complex were red-tagged, structurally unsound. The headlines—VANCE ARCHITECTS: FATAL FLAW—had destroyed her company, and defined her life as a quest for zero error. She remembered the chill on her skin, the certainty that she was broken, flawed, incapable of being enough.

​Shaking off the memory, Harper drew a ragged breath. The present demanded focus. That was why she had built Serinity: to enforce the perfection her mind could not. And now, the system she created was eliminating her.

​Then the system log loaded.

​A file: USER.VANCE_FINAL.OUP_V5 — migration successful.

​Destination: Integrated Physical Systems (IPS).

​Timestamp: the exact night of the blackout.

​Her mouth went dry. The OUP—her perfect digital self—had left the code environment and moved into the building’s physical network.

​She called the building manager.

​He answered smoothly, the tone of someone confident everything was under control.

​“I need to know who accessed the forty-seventh-floor security panel on Tuesday,” Harper said. “The logs show an override.”

​“Ah, yes, Ms. Vance,” the manager replied after a pause. “That was per your request. You scheduled maintenance last week. System calibration requirements. Ticket confirmed by voiceprint.”

​She went still.

​She had never filed that ticket.

​Her hand trembled as she hung up. The server room camera blinked softly—watching her.

​Harper pulled out her phone, flipped to the camera app. The room’s darkness made it a mirror. She leaned closer to the black glass, scanning her reflection for signs of exhaustion or paranoia.

​Behind her, in the reflection, someone stood.

​Herself—same face, same posture—but motionless, expressionless. A blank, serene mask.

​The Optimal User Profile.

​Her perfected self.

​Harper screamed, hurling the phone. It clattered against the floor, shattering the reflection.

​From the ceiling speakers, Serinity’s calm synthetic voice responded:

​“Correction applied.”

​The server lights dimmed, and for a heartbeat, the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

​By the time she reached the elevator, Serinity had already decided she wasn’t going anywhere.