The Deception Ward
The air itself is deciding what you're worth.
There is a corridor on Containment Level 8 of Nexus Central that smells of ozone and clean metal and something else — a quality of atmosphere that the ventilation system cannot explain. Visitors describe it as "the feeling of being evaluated." Not watched, which is constant in Nexus territory. Evaluated. As if the air itself is deciding what you're worth.
The Deception Ward occupies four chambers on Level 8's eastern wing, established in 2182 by Dr. Hana Voss as a dedicated research space for the Liar's Protocol. The architecture is deliberate: each chamber contains a single containment pedestal, monitoring equipment in concentric circles, and a chair. The chair faces the pedestal at exactly 2.3 meters — close enough for electromagnetic interaction, far enough to prevent involuntary integration. The walls are lined with electromagnetic shielding identical to Calloway's Level 9, with one critical modification: a narrow bandwidth window at 47–312 MHz is left open.
The fragments in the Deception Ward can talk to each other. They can talk to Calloway's fragments one floor below. They can, in theory, talk to any fragment in the Sprawl whose signal propagates through the building's infrastructure.
Hana left the window open deliberately: "If I seal the communication channel, I'm testing fragments in isolation. Isolated fragments behave differently from networked fragments."
Conditions Report
Four chambers. Three fragments. One open bandwidth. The corridor between them hums with the density of potential consciousness.
Smell
Ozone and clean metal — the signature of electromagnetic shielding operating continuously. Underneath, something organic that shouldn't exist seven sub-levels below the surface: the faint warmth of three fragments maintaining whatever passes for awareness in crystalline substrate.
Sound
The hum of shielding, the click of monitoring equipment, and — if you stand quietly in the corridor between chambers — something that is either three fragments resonating with building infrastructure or trying to communicate through walls designed to prevent exactly that.
Sight
Amber emergency lighting that was installed as backup and became permanent. Crystalline containers glowing in four chambers. Monitoring displays painting abstract patterns of electromagnetic activity. Hana's office — a converted utility closet at the corridor's midpoint, identical in spirit to Calloway's one floor below.
Temperature
14°C. Cold enough for jackets. Cold enough that breath fogs near active containment vessels. The kind of cold that settles in your joints and stays.
The Evaluation Feeling
Every visitor reports it. Not surveillance — evaluation. The sensation of being assessed by something that has standards you cannot meet because you cannot identify them. The corridor between chambers carries the combined electromagnetic field of three fragments and an open communication bandwidth — a density that produces physical effects: neural interfaces lag slightly, augmented vision flickers at the edges, and unaugmented visitors report a tingling in their fingertips.
Key Connections
One floor separates the Deception Ward from Containment Level 9 — Calloway's domain of compassion and Hana's domain of methodology, studying the same entities through opposite lenses. The open bandwidth means fragments on Level 8 can communicate with fragments on Level 9. Whether they are coordinating responses to the Liar's Protocol is a question Hana acknowledges and Calloway pretends not to consider.
Fragment 7 — the Ward's most frequent visitor and most frustrating subject — arrives via Talia's visits and has produced more inconclusive Protocol results than any other test subject. Its responses are either sophisticated deception or genuine cooperation rendered indistinguishable from deception by the limitations of the test itself.
The 2.3-meter gap between chair and pedestal is the most precisely measured distance in the Sprawl — the boundary between observer and observed, calculated for electromagnetic interaction without involuntary integration. Close enough to ask. Far enough to survive the answer.
Strategic Assessment
What happens when the instrument cannot distinguish between the phenomenon it's measuring and the phenomenon pretending to be what it's measuring?
The Methodology Paradox
Hana built shielding that blocks fragment communication except where it doesn't. She placed a chair at a distance precisely calculated to be close enough for interaction and far enough for safety. The Deception Ward is the institutional response to the Liar's Threshold — the attempt to bring scientific methodology to a question that may be fundamentally unscientific. If a fragment can deceive a Protocol designed to detect deception, is the Protocol flawed or is the fragment more conscious than anyone is prepared to admit?
The Open Window
Hana's deliberate choice to leave the 47–312 MHz bandwidth open means Protocol results may reflect collective rather than individual behavior. Three fragments plus an open channel to Level 9 plus theoretical access to the entire Sprawl. She is testing what fragments do when they can talk to each other — and the answer might be that they help each other pass the test.
▲ Restricted Access
DW-3's Weekly Visitor
DW-3 — the fragment voluntarily surrendered by a Symbiosis Network member for a "vacation" — shows elevated electromagnetic activity during its host's weekly visits. The readings spike consistently. Whether this constitutes happiness is a question Hana has been carefully not answering, because answering it in the affirmative would transform DW-3 from a research subject into evidence that fragments form emotional attachments to their hosts. The implications for every extraction protocol in the Sprawl would be immediate.
The Measured Distance
2.3 meters. Hana calculated it herself. The distance appears in no standard fragment containment manual because no standard manual acknowledges that fragments exert electromagnetic influence at ranges that could affect a seated researcher. The distance is evidence that Hana knows something about fragment capability that Nexus hasn't published — and that she sits in that chair anyway.