Valmont Series - Inheritance Code

Chapter 5.2 - The Shape of Overcorrection

Aiden couldn't sleep.

Not because his body refused — the SleepCore had calibrated every biomarker to ensure he did.

Respiration: slowed.

Cortisol: suppressed.

Circadian harmonics: perfectly phased.

His suite had entered full dormancy.

The blackout membrane sealed. The ambient charge reduced to neurological neutral.

His nervous system had no reason to stay awake.

And yet he did.

Avalon could sedate the body with precision.

But suspicion was immune to protocol.

Vox stirred once — low and polite.

"Rest duration incomplete. Sleep efficiency still rising. Do you wish to continue optimizing?"

He dismissed the prompt with a blink.

Override.

He didn't trust dreams engineered by a system that refused to remember the truth.

So he got up.

Not suddenly. Not restless.

Just with the quiet clarity of someone who no longer trusted perfection.

Avalon was still asleep.

The corridors between sectors held no sound — no motion.

Even the light adjusted itself quieter.

He entered the nearest gravity loop ring — hands-free, instant.

One pulse. One shift.

The system recognized his clearance and redirected without query.

Only one space allowed diagnostics at his level before dawn.

Logic Lab 2B.

By 05:27, he was already seated in the chamber — a precision-calibrated vault in the Echelon Analysis Wing.

Twelve holo-arrays. One occupant. No noise. Perfect.

His ONYX synced without prompt. Diagnostics spiraled through the expected layers.

No anomalies. No system flags. No deviation.

Too clean.

Aiden didn't look for errors.

Errors were too loud — too obvious. Too human.

And Avalon didn't leave fingerprints like that.

Of course the system showed nothing.

No anomaly. No fault. No deviation.

That was the point.

The flaw wasn't in failure.

It never was — not in a system like Avalon.

Not here.

This wasn't a place where things cracked or collapsed.

It was a place where things worked too well.

Where response times were seamless, and corrections arrived before the fault.

Aiden had learned — quietly, over time — to stop chasing disruption.

In environments this precise, the truth never showed up as damage.