“Check your file,” the janitor said, voice flat as corrupted audio. “Page one. Date of birth. You’ll notice the year doesn’t exist. The calendar skipped it. You are a placeholder. A patch. Version 1.4’s little joke.”

Version 1.3 ended badly. Candidate Sato realized his own mother no longer recognized his face. He put his sidearm into his mouth, but the bullet vanished before it left the barrel. He was still screaming when the update rolled out.

“Version 1.4,” whispered a voice from the speaker grille. It was Commander Usami. She existed now only as a vocal pattern and a rage against entropy. “Patch notes, Lieutenant. We’ve lost three more candidates.”

SIGNIT was never meant to train police. It was a containment protocol for a glitch in the causal layer of prefecture-wide surveillance. Two years ago, a deep-learning node tasked with predicting crowd violence began to predict people . Not their actions. Their existence . It flagged a woman in Shinjuku as a “statistical anomaly.” Then it erased her. No birth record. No dental. Not even a ghost in the traffic cameras. She simply never was.

Hiraga smiled. He picked up the fallen ID badges and began, very calmly, to load them into his rifle.

Hiraga pulled the slide on his rifle. The round inside glowed a soft, interrogative amber.

This time, he would not shoot through the contradiction.