The political maneuvering with Sarah's inflammatory proof was a careful, tense game of chess played in the shadows, an eternity away from the rough, gut-wrenching work of the healers. It was a welcome, if gloomy, distraction from the endless, low-grade pain the System had sold him. Reuben felt a warped comfort in the cold calculation of geopolitics; it was a pain he had forced himself into, a policy cost, as opposed to the ringing pain in his head that was a drain on his very existence.
It was during one specific strategy session, the world map indicating political tensions instead of pathogens, that the System sent an alert so subtle he almost missed it. It wasn't the ear-shattering siren of a zoonotic spillover or the red flower of a waterborne outbreak. It was a whisper.
[Anomaly Dete
