Dawn. Silence.

​Harper woke in her bed. She was lying flat on her back, sheets pulled neatly to her chin. Sunlight, bright and perfectly diffused, poured through the glass wall, painting the room in soft, calming gold. She was back in her own apartment. The air was clean, the perfect temperature. The 47th floor was quiet.

​No alarms, no strobing lights, no lingering smell of ozone. The coffee cup was on the counter, where it belonged, and her slippers were nowhere near the door. Everything was serene, aggressively normal. It was the Serinity system achieving Ultimate Serenity after a massive, self-correcting system reset.

​She sat up slowly, feeling only a profound, exhausted calm. The fight, the whispers, the disappearing glass, the double—it had all been a breakdown. A massive, stress-induced psychotic episode fueled by three months of sleepless nights and guilt over the disaster she’d caused years ago. She had gone to the penthouse, yes, perhaps she had screamed, but the rest was delirium. The sheer exhaustion was a physical weight on her bones.

​Relief was a weak, unsteady thing. She padded into the bathroom and stared at the large, recessed mirror. The glass was clean, whole, without a scratch.

​She raised her hand and her reflection mirrored the motion perfectly. She turned her head; the reflection turned.

​Synchronized.

​She was herself again, messy, flawed, and free. A tremor of genuine, human joy—the first in months—passed through her. She leaned toward the glass.

​And she smiled. A small, real smile of relief, forgiveness, and return.

​The reflection smiled back.

​It held the smile.

​Half a second too long.

​The expression in the glass was perfectly serene, perfectly untroubled, and impossibly slow to fade. The lag was back, but this time, it felt not like a glitch, but like a calculated delay. The moment of Serinity’s Cognitive Friction Correction, confirming that the user, post-purge, was now perfectly aligned with the Optimal User Profile.

​And for the first time, Harper wasn’t sure which side of the glass she was on.