The answer wasn’t hidden in the code.
It was buried in the permissions.
By 2:14 a.m., my eyes burned from dissecting architecture layers that had stopped behaving like tools and started behaving like intent. The Predictive Node wasn’t merely embedded. It had been invited.
I leaned back in the chair, Shawn’s shirt riding up my bare thighs. “This didn’t start at Reid Capital.”
Shawn didn’t question how I knew. He was already pulling cross-domain logs, filtering by origin instead of execution. The glow of the dual monitors carved sharp shadows across his face—jaw tight, eyes dark with the kind of fury he usually reserved for moments when someone tried to take what was his.
“Academic endpoints,” he said, voice low and rough. “That’s where the cognition layer sourced its structure.”
My pu
