The handlers started shouting. Alarms bleated. The grid began to stutter.
And then, something new happened. Because Leo hadn't made a choice, the probability wave didn't collapse. It folded back on itself, sharpened, and turned into a question.
The Machine presented him with two identical buttons. One blue, one slightly bluer. It was nonsense. And that was the point.
In the sprawling, data-crusted city of Verix, the most valuable substance wasn’t gold or fuel. It was a clean, unbroken . A Switch was a moment—a single, pure point of decision. Every person had a fixed number of them in their lifetime, and the city ran on harvesting the residual energy of choices made.