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Copyright© 2026 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 13: The Cost of Staying Careful
The fracture didn’t come from fear. That surprised them.
Fear had been easy to name. Easy to plan for. Fear followed rules—heart rate, cortisol spikes, fight-or-flight responses that the medbeds could map and moderate.
This came from something harder.
Fatigue.
Not physical. Not exactly.
Moral weight.
It showed up in small ways first.
Eli hesitated half a second longer than necessary during a simulation reroute, unwilling to let a civilian proxy take even a modeled risk. The delay cascaded. The scenario ended in failure—not catastrophic, but undeniable.
Aisha said nothing at the debrief, but her eyes lingered on the probability curves longer than usual.
Marcus snapped at Jamal once. Just once. Then apologized immediately, which somehow made it worse.
Naomi noticed everything. She always did.
“This isn’t burnout,” she said later, when Darius asked her privately. “It’s compression. They’re holding too many outcomes in their heads at once.”
“Is that dangerous?” he asked.
She considered. “Only if they stop talking.”
The disagreement happened during what should have been a routine exercise.
A simulated evacuation corridor. Time pressure. Conflicting priorities. No enemy presence—just logistics and human behavior under stress.
The goal was simple: extract the maximum number of non-combatants without drawing attention.
Maya flagged an instability in the corridor geometry. Minor. Acceptable.
“We can push through,” Jamal said. “The model holds.”
“It holds statistically,” Maya replied. “Not perceptually. The signature tightens if we move too fast.”
Eli frowned. “If we slow down, people get left behind.”
Aisha leaned forward. “If we move fast and get noticed, more people get left behind later.”
Silence settled over the room.
Darius watched without interrupting. This mattered.
Jamal exhaled sharply. “We keep choosing restraint. Every time. At some point restraint becomes its own kind of failure.”
The room didn’t argue with him.
That was worse.
Marcus stiffened. “That’s not fair.”
“I didn’t say it was,” Jamal replied. “I said it might be true.”
Naomi held up a hand before the room could tilt further. “Pause.”
Everyone did.
“That feeling,” she said calmly, “is the cost of carrying power without release. You are all feeling it. No one is wrong.”
She looked at Darius.
“But this is your call.”
Darius stood slowly.
He didn’t project authority. He didn’t sharpen his voice.
He grounded it.
“You’re right about one thing,” he said to Jamal. “Restraint has a cost. It always will.”
He turned to Eli. “So does speed.”
To Maya. “So does proximity.”
To Aisha. “So does foresight.”
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