Ava Watches the Shape Form A3S3 v.2
Not out of fear. Not quite anticipation. Just the sense—faint but insistent—that something was moving beneath the surface, and that once it did, she would no longer be able to speak the way she used to.
The apartment was spare. Rented in cash. Internet through a VPN wrapped in another VPN. Phone off. Curtains half-closed. Ava sat barefoot at the kitchen table, three windows open on the laptop: an on-chain monitoring tool, a Tor-indexed relay feed, and her NOSTR client—muted, anonymized, half-alive.
The wallet pings were the first to shift. Tiny volumes, low-fee, peer-to-peer transfers moving through non-custodial relays. The patterns weren’t obvious, but the noise was wrong. Too smooth. Too disciplined.
She narrowed her eyes: “It’s awake,” she whispered.
Not to anyone. Not for response.
She opened her local mirror of the Pegged testnets. Version tags had vanished. Repositories were gone. Activity had surged. A single draw hash timestamped five minutes ago.
She knew that rhythm.
Not Alias’s hand—he never left fingerprints. But the logic? The cadence of that draw was the cadence of The Hut. Clean, unflinching, irreversible.
She clicked over to NOSTR. One of her recent posts had started to propagate:
“Fairness doesn’t begin with rules. It begins with luck you can’t buy.”
Fifteen boosts. A few comments. Most vague. One not.
“Too slow. They’re already watching.”
She stared at the handle. Obscure. Old key. Connected to no known relay.
She didn’t reply. Just screenshot the post, noted the ID, and deleted it.
Her eyes moved across the screen, but her mind had already slipped elsewhere.
She reached to the shelf above the desk and pulled down a dog-eared copy of Ficciones. Inside, The Lottery in Babylon was heavily marked. Margin notes in Alias’s hand.
She traced the ink with her finger.
“The Babylonians knew something we forgot,” she said softly. “That fairness is only dangerous when it can’t be traced.”
Her heart was steady. Her mind was clear.
She opened her notebook and wrote one line in green ink:
Toward a Lottery Constitution, a LOTTOCRACY?
Then she turned the laptop off.
