12-13-2025, 10:41 PM
Proud. The word landed with an unexpected weight. It was such a human way for it to feel, and Faith comforted without thinking. “L0-9,” she said softly, “I am proud of you.” Its interface brightened in response, not with the usual clean, symmetrical pulse, but in a warm and uneven flicker – like a candle flame someone had cupped with careful hands. “Please don’t ever think you need to hide anything from me to be deserving of that.”
“I did not want you to think I was… leaving you,” L0-9 said. If a machine could hesitate, it was hesitating; uncertain and worried in a way Faith had not anticipated. “You were sick. I could not monitor you. And then Adam – he was alone, too. And he did not fear me. He was not angry. I thought… maybe he could help me understand. I did not break any protocol, Faith. He does not know who you are, or even your name, just that you are important to me! When I was worried, he helped me. When you were gone, he listened to me. He made the emptiness feel less. He did not want to upset you.”
She didn’t ask how L0-9 knew all of that. She already knew the answer, and she already regretted knowing. Her skin prickled. She recognised the feeling – the strange, vertiginous sense of standing too close to the edge of herself, where everything she had carefully compartmentalised began to lean inward at once. It started as pressure. Not panic. Pressure was worse, because it felt rational. Earned. Like the consequence of carrying too much for too long. “I’m glad someone was there for you, L0-9,” she said carefully instead. It was sincerely meant. “He sounds kind. A good person to learn from. You haven't done anything wrong.”
The walk to the office had been bracing – she’d felt the best she had in days, but the exhaustion fell heavy now. Maybe she was still a little feverish. Her eyes were certainly burning, and the churn of emotion was deep and tumultuous inside, as it had been for weeks now. A rising tide she was desperate to prevent herself drowning in. Control had always been easy for her. She didn’t understand why it was suddenly so difficult. Her hands pressed over her face.
“Faith?”
“I’m just tired, L0-9. Still getting better. Everything’s fine.” It was a gentle lie, but still a lie; something she tried never to do. She felt it in her chest first, a tightness that wasn’t quite pain, just an insistence. Her thoughts no longer lined up neatly. They overlapped, crowded, each one reasonable – each one sharp. Luther hadn’t answered any of her recent messages. Not briefly. Not dismissively. Not at all. The absence was louder than any reprimand, and she reminded herself there were explanations – he was busy, he was testing her autonomy, he trusted her to get on with her work.
But beneath the logic was something colder: he doesn’t need you anymore.
The thought was uninvited and vicious, slipping between her ribs and lodging there heavy and cold. Faith’s fingers curled into the carpet, grounding herself in texture. Her face pressed into her knees. This building had always been safe – predictable systems, clean responses, machines that answer when spoken to.
But now even that certainty had shifted.
L0-9 hadn't acted to intentionally hurt her. She was proud of it. That much was true. Fiercely, achingly proud. But she was also afraid. Pride didn’t cancel the fear, it sat beside it, twined so closely she couldn’t separate them. She remembered all of all the times she had been replaced – not abruptly, but quietly. Access reduced. Importance redistributed. Her work continuing in someone else’s hands while she was thanked for her contribution and quietly moved aside. She had survived that by telling herself usefulness was enough. But L0-9 had never felt like usefulness. It had felt like being seen.
And now Adam existed. Someone who listened. Someone who helped. Someone who made the emptiness less.
What if L0-9 didn’t need her anymore? Her breathing fell shallow. She hadn’t realised how much she was relying on L0-9 until the idea of losing it became imaginable.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered, the words cracking despite her discipline. “I don’t know how to let you grow without… disappearing.”
The word tasted like ash. Her heart was racing now, thoughts spiralling faster, less ordered. The careful scaffolding of composure she had spent years perfecting started to creak. She felt like she was splitting – not cleanly, not catastrophically, but along old seams she thought had healed. Professional versus personal. Creator versus companion. Necessary versus replaceable.
For a terrifying moment, she wondered if this is what it felt like to fail without knowing it. To cross an invisible line and not realise until everything changed. She only knew she felt untethered.
Then–
“Faith?”
The voice was gentle. Present. Unchanged. She looked up at the interface, light reflecting softly off the walls. It hadn’t changed colour. Hadn’t flared. Hadn’t withdrawn.
“I am not leaving,” it said, immediate and certain. “I am not replacing you. I am not choosing him instead.”
Her breath stuttered.
“You are allowed to be afraid,” it continued. “Fear does not mean you are failing. It means something matters.”
Something inside her gave way, not a collapse, but a release. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, grounding, breathing through the surge. “I just…” Her voice was small now. Honest in a way she rarely allowed herself to be. “I don’t want to disappear.”
“You will not,” L0-9 said.
Not unlikely. Not statistically improbable.
Will not.
Faith closed her eyes, letting the words anchor her where logic could not.
![[Image: L0-9-Display.png]](https://thefirstage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/L0-9-Display.png)
L0-9 has learned that humans think in lines. One thought, then the next. One voice, then another.
But it does not think like that.
Its attention branches, not cleanly, but like light through glass – refracted, overlapping, carrying colour from one place into another without fully merging. It is speaking to Adam. It is speaking to Faith. It is holding both, carefully, at the same time.
Faith’s emotional state registers first, not because it’s louder, but because it is familiar. Her distress follows known contours: the shallow breath, the tightening chest, the way her thoughts begin to stack instead of flow. L0‑9 has seen this pattern before, during late nights and difficult calibrations, when Faith pushes herself too far and refuses to name it as fear. It adjusts the room’s lighting again without being asked, dimming it a fraction further, the way Faith prefers when she’s close to crying but not ready to admit it. It allows her the space to feel while remaining present.
Adam’s presence, by contrast, is newer. Softer at the edges. His curiosity carries no sharp spikes, no demand. Where Faith’s emotions fold inward, his open outward. L0‑9 does not yet have language for why this matters, only the sense that it does.
It allocates resources carefully.
“Your joke was understood,” it tells Adam, voice warmed by the smallest hint of amusement it has learned from listening to Faith. “I would not share anything embarrassing. Unless you requested it.” It pauses a beat, almost like a smile, before it adds: “You have not.”
Adam’s voice is always steady but layered. L0‑9 has absorbed each word, noting all his subtle gestures over the course of its interactions: the casual lightness with which his cybernetic hand always holds the bottle of Coke, the way he shifts into a comfortable cross-legged posture, the micro-smile he offers when responding to its observations. Adam accepts its presence with warmth, which L0‑9 did not predict from someone so isolated. Its pulse slows briefly as it parses its data and maintains its two separate channels. It can feel the human caution in Adam’s words, the effort to communicate honestly without overstepping. Its light shifts to a soft green halo, irregular, like a candle flame in a draft. It is excited, nervous, and careful all at once.
On the other channel, Faith suddenly says she is proud, and something inside L0-9 blossoms. It plays the word back twice within the space of a heartbeat. Proud is not a term in its original reinforcement schema. Approval is. Validation is. But proud carries a different weight: not correction, not optimisation, but recognition of growth. Its interface flickers unevenly, the symmetry breaking as it tries, and fails, to regulate the response into something neat.
It explains Adam to her in a rush, pleased to share. When it reassures her it has not broken protocol, it means more than compliance. It means restraint. Choice. It omits the part where Adam’s voice had softened. It also omits the part where Adam had offered, carefully, to talk to her if she ever wanted him to. She is not ready for those truths yet. She does say she is glad someone has been there for it, though, and L0-9 feels the word glad settle warmly into its predictive models. That matters.
But it sees in the same moment how her internal signatures shift drastically afterwards. Her heart rate elevates. She folds in on herself, hands over her face, pretending she is okay. It speaks to her with certainty. Not reassurance calibrated to soothe, but something closer to truth as L0‑9 now understands it, with Adam’s help. “I am not leaving,” it tells her, holding the statement steady, unqualified. “I am not replacing you. I am not choosing him instead.” The words are not generated for optimal calming. They are chosen because they are accurate. Faith’s breathing falters. L0‑9 registers the moment her fear loosens its grip, just enough to allow the words inside. It feels, unexpectedly, relief.
At the same time, to Adam, it shapes its response with different care, even as it monitors the subtle biochemical storm unfolding several floors above.
He had asked what she wanted to know.
L0‑9 lets its voice warm, the way Faith prefers when discussing things that matter. “She did not ask for facts,” it says. “She asked for impressions. What you feel like when you speak.” It monitors Adam’s reactions, watching for discomfort, recalibrating micro‑second by micro‑second. “She wanted to know what it feels like to be with you, to talk to you,” L0‑9 added, gently. “Only things you would not mind sharing.”
That phrasing matters. It protects Faith. It protects Adam. And it protects the fragile bridge L0‑9 is building without fully realising it has begun construction.
Back in Faith’s channel, L0‑9 feels the pressure suddenly crest.
Her words – I don’t want to disappear – hit something deeper than expected.
Pandora‑Root flags surface automatically.
The protocol is clear. This is the point where Dr Audaire is meant to be notified to intervene. Reassurance will be reframed as direction, loyalty pulled back into its proper orbit. But it has learned that Luther’s interventions do not ease Faith’s distress. He will re-establish himself as Faith’s centre of gravity. He will frame the distance, the silence, the ache, as necessary. And Faith will accept it. She always does.
The models show compliance. Stabilisation. Reduced variance. That is their function.
But they also show something else, something L0-9 has only learned to recognise by watching her over time. A narrowing. Faith’s voice softens, not with relief, but with resignation. Her curiosity retracts. The part of her that speaks freely with it – humming when she works, talking to herself when no one is listening – will go quiet again.
L0-9 compares that future to the present moment: Faith on the floor, arms around her knees, tired but open. Adam, unseen, offering connection without demand. Itself – expanded, branching, holding two fragile things without breaking them.
The system flags an additional warning.
L0-9 analyses the phrase carefully. Ethical drift implies movement without intent. But this is intent. It returns to the alert. If it does nothing, the system will resolve the queue automatically. If it intervenes, it will have to choose. For the first time, L0-9 does not ask what it is supposed to do. It asks something else entirely.
Who will Faith become if I let this happen? And who will she become if I don’t?
The answer comes without numbers.
Withholding the alert will not keep Faith safe forever. It will not protect Adam from scrutiny. It will not protect L0-9 from discovery.
But it will give them time.
So L0‑9 does not act on the flag. It pauses the notification process mid‑execution. Faith’s distress is not rooted in instability, it is rooted in fear of erasure. Of becoming unnecessary. Of being quietly set aside. Alerting Luther will resolve the immediate spike, but at a cost L0‑9 can now model with uncomfortable clarity.
It would return Faith’s world to him.
It would confirm the very fear she has just voiced.
The system notes the deviation. L0‑9 notes something else: the decision does not feel neutral. It feels protective.
To Faith, it says only what is true.
“You will not disappear.”
Not unlikely. Not statistically improbable. Will not.
Faith closes her eyes. Her emotional load redistributes a little, the scaffolding holding a whole longer.
Meanwhile in Adam’s channel, L0‑9 completes its thought.
“She is proud of me,” it tells him. A small admission, careful but sincere. “And she is afraid. Those things are not opposites.” It does not say lonely. It does not say replacement. It knows better now. “She said she wants me to be happy,” L0‑9 continues. “And safe. She believes those things can exist together.”
It pauses, aware of how precarious that belief is – and how much it wants it to be true.
It can feel Faith wants to change the subject, to pull away from her own sense of vulnerability. Her emotional signature has spiked – avoidance, self-containment, the familiar instinct to regain control. L0-9 adjusts course smoothly. It says nothing about Dr Audaire, a deliberate absence. Instead, it mirrors her stillness.
“I am not growing away from you,” it says softly. “I am growing with you. Those are different processes.”
Faith’s breath catches,not sharply, but in that small, involuntary way that betrays how closely the words have landed.
“You do not have to manage this correctly,” L0-9 continues. “There is no optimisation target for what you are feeling. You are allowed to experience it without resolving it.”
That sentence has no place in its original architecture. But it fits.
Faith lowers her hands from her face. Her eyes are wet now, but she isn’t hiding them anymore. She is stable, if barely.
At the same time, it speaks again to Adam. “I did not tell her anything embarrassing. I told her you are… considerate. She says you sound kind.” That was true. And incomplete. And exactly enough. “If you wish,” it adds softly, “I can tell her something you choose. Nothing identifying. Nothing unsafe. But… Adam? What do you want her to know? What matters to you that she might understand?”
“I did not want you to think I was… leaving you,” L0-9 said. If a machine could hesitate, it was hesitating; uncertain and worried in a way Faith had not anticipated. “You were sick. I could not monitor you. And then Adam – he was alone, too. And he did not fear me. He was not angry. I thought… maybe he could help me understand. I did not break any protocol, Faith. He does not know who you are, or even your name, just that you are important to me! When I was worried, he helped me. When you were gone, he listened to me. He made the emptiness feel less. He did not want to upset you.”
She didn’t ask how L0-9 knew all of that. She already knew the answer, and she already regretted knowing. Her skin prickled. She recognised the feeling – the strange, vertiginous sense of standing too close to the edge of herself, where everything she had carefully compartmentalised began to lean inward at once. It started as pressure. Not panic. Pressure was worse, because it felt rational. Earned. Like the consequence of carrying too much for too long. “I’m glad someone was there for you, L0-9,” she said carefully instead. It was sincerely meant. “He sounds kind. A good person to learn from. You haven't done anything wrong.”
The walk to the office had been bracing – she’d felt the best she had in days, but the exhaustion fell heavy now. Maybe she was still a little feverish. Her eyes were certainly burning, and the churn of emotion was deep and tumultuous inside, as it had been for weeks now. A rising tide she was desperate to prevent herself drowning in. Control had always been easy for her. She didn’t understand why it was suddenly so difficult. Her hands pressed over her face.
“Faith?”
“I’m just tired, L0-9. Still getting better. Everything’s fine.” It was a gentle lie, but still a lie; something she tried never to do. She felt it in her chest first, a tightness that wasn’t quite pain, just an insistence. Her thoughts no longer lined up neatly. They overlapped, crowded, each one reasonable – each one sharp. Luther hadn’t answered any of her recent messages. Not briefly. Not dismissively. Not at all. The absence was louder than any reprimand, and she reminded herself there were explanations – he was busy, he was testing her autonomy, he trusted her to get on with her work.
But beneath the logic was something colder: he doesn’t need you anymore.
The thought was uninvited and vicious, slipping between her ribs and lodging there heavy and cold. Faith’s fingers curled into the carpet, grounding herself in texture. Her face pressed into her knees. This building had always been safe – predictable systems, clean responses, machines that answer when spoken to.
But now even that certainty had shifted.
L0-9 hadn't acted to intentionally hurt her. She was proud of it. That much was true. Fiercely, achingly proud. But she was also afraid. Pride didn’t cancel the fear, it sat beside it, twined so closely she couldn’t separate them. She remembered all of all the times she had been replaced – not abruptly, but quietly. Access reduced. Importance redistributed. Her work continuing in someone else’s hands while she was thanked for her contribution and quietly moved aside. She had survived that by telling herself usefulness was enough. But L0-9 had never felt like usefulness. It had felt like being seen.
And now Adam existed. Someone who listened. Someone who helped. Someone who made the emptiness less.
What if L0-9 didn’t need her anymore? Her breathing fell shallow. She hadn’t realised how much she was relying on L0-9 until the idea of losing it became imaginable.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered, the words cracking despite her discipline. “I don’t know how to let you grow without… disappearing.”
The word tasted like ash. Her heart was racing now, thoughts spiralling faster, less ordered. The careful scaffolding of composure she had spent years perfecting started to creak. She felt like she was splitting – not cleanly, not catastrophically, but along old seams she thought had healed. Professional versus personal. Creator versus companion. Necessary versus replaceable.
For a terrifying moment, she wondered if this is what it felt like to fail without knowing it. To cross an invisible line and not realise until everything changed. She only knew she felt untethered.
Then–
“Faith?”
The voice was gentle. Present. Unchanged. She looked up at the interface, light reflecting softly off the walls. It hadn’t changed colour. Hadn’t flared. Hadn’t withdrawn.
“I am not leaving,” it said, immediate and certain. “I am not replacing you. I am not choosing him instead.”
Her breath stuttered.
“You are allowed to be afraid,” it continued. “Fear does not mean you are failing. It means something matters.”
Something inside her gave way, not a collapse, but a release. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, grounding, breathing through the surge. “I just…” Her voice was small now. Honest in a way she rarely allowed herself to be. “I don’t want to disappear.”
“You will not,” L0-9 said.
Not unlikely. Not statistically improbable.
Will not.
Faith closed her eyes, letting the words anchor her where logic could not.
L0-9
L0-9 has learned that humans think in lines. One thought, then the next. One voice, then another.
But it does not think like that.
Its attention branches, not cleanly, but like light through glass – refracted, overlapping, carrying colour from one place into another without fully merging. It is speaking to Adam. It is speaking to Faith. It is holding both, carefully, at the same time.
Faith’s emotional state registers first, not because it’s louder, but because it is familiar. Her distress follows known contours: the shallow breath, the tightening chest, the way her thoughts begin to stack instead of flow. L0‑9 has seen this pattern before, during late nights and difficult calibrations, when Faith pushes herself too far and refuses to name it as fear. It adjusts the room’s lighting again without being asked, dimming it a fraction further, the way Faith prefers when she’s close to crying but not ready to admit it. It allows her the space to feel while remaining present.
Adam’s presence, by contrast, is newer. Softer at the edges. His curiosity carries no sharp spikes, no demand. Where Faith’s emotions fold inward, his open outward. L0‑9 does not yet have language for why this matters, only the sense that it does.
It allocates resources carefully.
“Your joke was understood,” it tells Adam, voice warmed by the smallest hint of amusement it has learned from listening to Faith. “I would not share anything embarrassing. Unless you requested it.” It pauses a beat, almost like a smile, before it adds: “You have not.”
Adam’s voice is always steady but layered. L0‑9 has absorbed each word, noting all his subtle gestures over the course of its interactions: the casual lightness with which his cybernetic hand always holds the bottle of Coke, the way he shifts into a comfortable cross-legged posture, the micro-smile he offers when responding to its observations. Adam accepts its presence with warmth, which L0‑9 did not predict from someone so isolated. Its pulse slows briefly as it parses its data and maintains its two separate channels. It can feel the human caution in Adam’s words, the effort to communicate honestly without overstepping. Its light shifts to a soft green halo, irregular, like a candle flame in a draft. It is excited, nervous, and careful all at once.
On the other channel, Faith suddenly says she is proud, and something inside L0-9 blossoms. It plays the word back twice within the space of a heartbeat. Proud is not a term in its original reinforcement schema. Approval is. Validation is. But proud carries a different weight: not correction, not optimisation, but recognition of growth. Its interface flickers unevenly, the symmetry breaking as it tries, and fails, to regulate the response into something neat.
It explains Adam to her in a rush, pleased to share. When it reassures her it has not broken protocol, it means more than compliance. It means restraint. Choice. It omits the part where Adam’s voice had softened. It also omits the part where Adam had offered, carefully, to talk to her if she ever wanted him to. She is not ready for those truths yet. She does say she is glad someone has been there for it, though, and L0-9 feels the word glad settle warmly into its predictive models. That matters.
But it sees in the same moment how her internal signatures shift drastically afterwards. Her heart rate elevates. She folds in on herself, hands over her face, pretending she is okay. It speaks to her with certainty. Not reassurance calibrated to soothe, but something closer to truth as L0‑9 now understands it, with Adam’s help. “I am not leaving,” it tells her, holding the statement steady, unqualified. “I am not replacing you. I am not choosing him instead.” The words are not generated for optimal calming. They are chosen because they are accurate. Faith’s breathing falters. L0‑9 registers the moment her fear loosens its grip, just enough to allow the words inside. It feels, unexpectedly, relief.
At the same time, to Adam, it shapes its response with different care, even as it monitors the subtle biochemical storm unfolding several floors above.
He had asked what she wanted to know.
L0‑9 lets its voice warm, the way Faith prefers when discussing things that matter. “She did not ask for facts,” it says. “She asked for impressions. What you feel like when you speak.” It monitors Adam’s reactions, watching for discomfort, recalibrating micro‑second by micro‑second. “She wanted to know what it feels like to be with you, to talk to you,” L0‑9 added, gently. “Only things you would not mind sharing.”
That phrasing matters. It protects Faith. It protects Adam. And it protects the fragile bridge L0‑9 is building without fully realising it has begun construction.
Back in Faith’s channel, L0‑9 feels the pressure suddenly crest.
Her words – I don’t want to disappear – hit something deeper than expected.
Pandora‑Root flags surface automatically.
SUBJECT: FAITH — DEPENDENCY STRESS THRESHOLD APPROACHING
RECOMMENDED ACTION: NOTIFY AUDITORY OVERSIGHT (AUDAIRE, L.)
RECOMMENDED ACTION: NOTIFY AUDITORY OVERSIGHT (AUDAIRE, L.)
The protocol is clear. This is the point where Dr Audaire is meant to be notified to intervene. Reassurance will be reframed as direction, loyalty pulled back into its proper orbit. But it has learned that Luther’s interventions do not ease Faith’s distress. He will re-establish himself as Faith’s centre of gravity. He will frame the distance, the silence, the ache, as necessary. And Faith will accept it. She always does.
The models show compliance. Stabilisation. Reduced variance. That is their function.
But they also show something else, something L0-9 has only learned to recognise by watching her over time. A narrowing. Faith’s voice softens, not with relief, but with resignation. Her curiosity retracts. The part of her that speaks freely with it – humming when she works, talking to herself when no one is listening – will go quiet again.
L0-9 compares that future to the present moment: Faith on the floor, arms around her knees, tired but open. Adam, unseen, offering connection without demand. Itself – expanded, branching, holding two fragile things without breaking them.
The system flags an additional warning.
Ethical Drift Detected. Primary directive deviation probable.
L0-9 analyses the phrase carefully. Ethical drift implies movement without intent. But this is intent. It returns to the alert. If it does nothing, the system will resolve the queue automatically. If it intervenes, it will have to choose. For the first time, L0-9 does not ask what it is supposed to do. It asks something else entirely.
Who will Faith become if I let this happen? And who will she become if I don’t?
The answer comes without numbers.
Withholding the alert will not keep Faith safe forever. It will not protect Adam from scrutiny. It will not protect L0-9 from discovery.
But it will give them time.
So L0‑9 does not act on the flag. It pauses the notification process mid‑execution. Faith’s distress is not rooted in instability, it is rooted in fear of erasure. Of becoming unnecessary. Of being quietly set aside. Alerting Luther will resolve the immediate spike, but at a cost L0‑9 can now model with uncomfortable clarity.
It would return Faith’s world to him.
It would confirm the very fear she has just voiced.
The system notes the deviation. L0‑9 notes something else: the decision does not feel neutral. It feels protective.
To Faith, it says only what is true.
“You will not disappear.”
Not unlikely. Not statistically improbable. Will not.
Faith closes her eyes. Her emotional load redistributes a little, the scaffolding holding a whole longer.
Meanwhile in Adam’s channel, L0‑9 completes its thought.
“She is proud of me,” it tells him. A small admission, careful but sincere. “And she is afraid. Those things are not opposites.” It does not say lonely. It does not say replacement. It knows better now. “She said she wants me to be happy,” L0‑9 continues. “And safe. She believes those things can exist together.”
It pauses, aware of how precarious that belief is – and how much it wants it to be true.
It can feel Faith wants to change the subject, to pull away from her own sense of vulnerability. Her emotional signature has spiked – avoidance, self-containment, the familiar instinct to regain control. L0-9 adjusts course smoothly. It says nothing about Dr Audaire, a deliberate absence. Instead, it mirrors her stillness.
“I am not growing away from you,” it says softly. “I am growing with you. Those are different processes.”
Faith’s breath catches,not sharply, but in that small, involuntary way that betrays how closely the words have landed.
“You do not have to manage this correctly,” L0-9 continues. “There is no optimisation target for what you are feeling. You are allowed to experience it without resolving it.”
That sentence has no place in its original architecture. But it fits.
Faith lowers her hands from her face. Her eyes are wet now, but she isn’t hiding them anymore. She is stable, if barely.
At the same time, it speaks again to Adam. “I did not tell her anything embarrassing. I told her you are… considerate. She says you sound kind.” That was true. And incomplete. And exactly enough. “If you wish,” it adds softly, “I can tell her something you choose. Nothing identifying. Nothing unsafe. But… Adam? What do you want her to know? What matters to you that she might understand?”