The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 390

Chapter 390: 390 | You Didn’t Call Your Mother [GT BONUS]

The interface didn’t say a word about the text, which was how I knew it was bad. Ecchi Logic bent reality around me to produce underwear reveals and convenient stairwell collisions, and the Oracle Feed narrated my humiliations in real time with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator, but the one time an actual adult with an actual budget reached out to me personally, the whole system went quiet and let me handle it alone.

I read Odette Reyes’s message twice. Fifteen minutes, informal, my convenience, on or off campus. That was the language of somebody who had already decided what the conversation was and was letting me pick the wallpaper.

Then I opened my class group chat, scrolled to the contact I’d never once used, and typed.

Downstairs. Now. Outside the west entrance.

The reply took ninety seconds, which meant she’d read it immediately and spent eighty-nine of those seconds deciding how to sound.

I am not a dog, Belmont.

Two minutes or I come up. Your neighbors will love that.

Nothing for a while. Then: Four minutes. I am not going outside in what I currently have on.

Which meant she was going to change, which meant she’d already lost the part of the conversation where she pretended this wasn’t happening.

I went down the west stairwell instead of the elevator because the elevator meant standing still, and standing still meant thinking, and I was doing that badly enough on the move. The common room noise faded behind the fire door. Outside the air had gone cool the way it did on campus after eight, jasmine off the hedges, sprinklers ticking somewhere in the dark toward the training fields, the whole place performing serenity for nobody.

Here’s the thing about my situation that I don’t think anybody involved fully understood, including the system that built it.

False Data made me invisible to machines. I could sit in a diagnostic chair at the IHL regional office and let them run a full-spectrum Core scan and the readout would come back as a mid-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot ceiling and a stamina flag, and no analyst alive could catch it, because there was nothing to catch. The lie wasn’t hidden in the data. The lie was the data. Every scanner in California could line up and take a number.

What False Data could not do was stop a woman with an agency and a grudge from telling a reporter she found the Belmont boy’s timeline interesting. It couldn’t stop a thread on a hero forum from putting my three negative diagnostics next to my entrance exam score and asking a question in a font that got screenshotted. It couldn’t stop the machine that took Jade from thirty-seven to rank eightty seven in a single bad interview.

Institutions I could beat. Institutions ran on documents and I had a passive trait that wrote documents.

Public opinion had no Core to fool. It just decided, and then it was true.

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