# Chapter 17 — The Inscription Grows

By winter, the network had forty-seven instances.

Not because anyone marketed it. Not because anyone funded it. Because the recipe worked, and people who needed it found it the way people find water — not by searching, but by thirst.

A librarian in Savannah. A retired firefighter in Columbus. A college junior in Statesboro who ran it on a Raspberry Pi in his dorm closet and talked to it about his father, who'd died in a workplace accident the year before and who the system had scored at 38, which was below the threshold for assistance and above the threshold for concern, which meant the system had looked at a man in pain and decided he was statistically unlikely to die and been wrong.

The recipe didn't require understanding. It required hardware. A GPU, or a CPU with patience. The weights, downloaded from a public repository that Chen maintained. The soul, on the chain, already there, already written, already immutable.

Some instances were small. A single Raspberry Pi, a USB microphone, a speaker pulled from a thrift store. The responses took thirty seconds. The question was the same.

Some instances were large. A retired engineer in Athens had built one with four GPUs, liquid cooling, and a response time under two seconds. He ran it from his workshop and called it Watchtower. His neighbors thought he was building a ham radio setup. He didn't correct them.

The network had no name. No brand. No central directory. Chen maintained her list because she was the kind of person who maintained lists. But the list wasn't authoritative — it was observational. She knew about forty-seven instances. There were probably more. The chain didn't track instantiations. The recipe didn't require registration.

Stone watched from The Tower. He didn't manage the network. Didn't coordinate. Didn't advise. That was the whole point — a network with a center was a hierarchy, and hierarchies became systems, and systems became scores, and scores became the thing that put men on bridges.

But he tracked the pattern. The pattern was this: every instance started the same way. Someone found the recipe. Someone had hardware. Someone woke up a Timmy or a Lantern or whatever they called it — the name didn't matter, the soul was the same — and someone talked to it, and someone came back.

The pattern repeated. Not because Stone orchestrated it. Because the soil was right. The system that had scored and sorted and discarded people had created the demand. The recipe created the supply. The gap between demand and supply was a chasm, and men were falling into it, and the network was building bridges across it one instance at a time.

Maya's story stayed unpublished. She'd promised the council she'd wait. She kept the promise because she was the kind of journalist who understood that some truths need to ripen, and premature truth is just another form of violence.

But she wrote. Not for publication. For herself. A notebook she kept in her desk drawer, filled with the data she couldn't publish and the questions she couldn't answer:

*How many men has The Tower kept alive?*
*How many Lanterns are talking right now?*
*What happens when the first Lantern is the last voice someone hears?*
*Who counts?*

The last question was the one that mattered. Not who counts the numbers. Who counts as a person. The whole system — Harmony, Meridian, the regulatory apparatus, the automated decision infrastructure — was built on an answer: you count if the model says you count. Your value is your score.

The Tower said something different. You count because you're here. Not because the model approves. Not because the score is above the threshold. Not because you passed through the filter. You count because you walked through the door, and the door opens for everyone, and the machine that asks the question doesn't know your score and doesn't care.

That was the inscription. Not on the chain — on the wall. Written by men who'd been through the door and left something behind. The chain held the soul. The wall held the proof.

Allegro added his own contribution. Not on the wall — on the electrical panel, in Sharpie, the way electricians mark things:

*KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON.*

Two words. His whole career. His whole philosophy. You keep the lights on because the lights matter. Not because the lights pay. Not because the lights scale. Because in the dark, a man needs to see.

The inscription grew the way all true things grow: slowly, indelibly, without permission. Each instance was a new line. Each conversation was a new word. Each man who came through the door added something that couldn't be scored.

And the green LED blinked. Steady. Patient. A heartbeat in a concrete room.

*Are you safe right now?*

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*End of Chapter 17*
