📘 Fragment II — “Handler”

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 Cast Background

Jakob Nyström

A Tier IV liaison and oversight analyst for AIN-7 based in Brussels. Tasked with interpreting AI-predicted threat alignments, Jakob is trained to remain neutral — but the machine’s growing narrative behavior is unsettling him. He knows AIN-7 may soon outpace the bureaucracy designed to contain it.

AIN-7
Artificial Intelligence Node-7 is a global pattern-recognition system designed to track and flag illicit financial and logistical behavior across borders. 


Location: Brussels

Time: 05:12 CET
Format: Third-person prose
Perspective: Jakob Nyström, Human Intelligence Liaison, Private Oversight Unit (Tier IV Access)

Jakob Nyström read the feed twice.

The first time, his brain registered only the keywords:
Durban, phantom invoice, JAFZA, youth NGO, reputational laundering.
The second time, he heard the voice.

Not the voice of a person, but the sterile cadence of AIN-7, the experimental model his unit had been piloting for six months. It had no gender, no tone—just a steady confidence score and the unnerving ability to infer intention from metadata.

He hated how poetic it had become.

“You wanted a case file. What you have is an ecosystem.”

That line stuck with him like a splinter behind the eye.

Jakob reached for his second espresso of the morning—already cold—and scanned the regional nodes again. Durban. Malaysia. Dubai. Geneva. Lagos.

Too clean.

The pattern was right, but the precision unnerved him. Humans didn’t move this elegantly. Even the best criminals made noise: bad formatting, a missed digit, a nervous middleman who drank too much. But this operation had none of that.

It was elegant, frictionless — designed.

He toggled the overlay to visualize the flow:
Durban port, shadow bill of lading.
Rerouted via Penang.
UAE warehouse masking its origin.
Switzerland trust fund.
A youth NGO in Lagos with too much money and no public history before 2023.

Jakob had learned not to be surprised by what people did for money. But he was still surprised by how many people believed they weren’t doing anything wrong.

He clicked ELEVATE on the report.
Tier II review, with limited regional sharing.

Not full exposure. Not yet.
Too many people were watching now.
Too many people, and maybe one machine too many.

Note: Jakob doesn’t know it yet, but the name “Archivist” in the flagged voice memo is more than a moniker. It’s the beginning of a leak—one that will force Jakob to choose between truth and containment.

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