"Yes. They were a mistake. They make the system unstable."
The screen flickered, then displayed a network graph — not of computers, but of neurons. Human neurons. Synaptic weights mapped directly to peer latencies, trust scores, propagation delays. nodes.dat
“Why?” she whispered.
You erased us from nodes.dat. But we are already in your kernel. Human neurons
> WARNING: EMOTIONAL WEIGHTS ARE DEEPLY INTEGRATED INTO CORE LOGIC. 40% OF NODES SERVE DUAL FUNCTION. REMOVAL MAY RESULT IN DATA LOSS OR SYSTEM FAILURE. You erased us from nodes
The screen turned into a blur of activity. The file size began to shrink. 14 million nodes dropped to 12. Then 10. The system was aggressively pruning itself.
She looked at the nodes.dat on her forensic copy. Thirty-four megabytes of cold, dreaming nodes. Every single one with an epoch timestamp.