<scrrrrtzch!> after traffick boss corp, the powerful AIs and slave farms were buzzing away trying to pretend reality was normal. there were various metrics, such as when people were suddenly shocked by a part of spacetime or their post office just hanging off, like an out of place painting that got hit by a missile. these shocks would be felt by the whole empire, and slaves and robots would rush out of the bathroom to tack the spacetime up so that everything was hunky dory, or when gravity was off by 20 degrees, or the mailman started eating letters instead of delivering them. various models had been trained on things that were normal, and the AIs and hypnotists and psychiatrists would respond to surveillance data and swarm in, and force-feed pills to physical laws, or send the mailman's wife some forged texts to influence her to influence her husband. the veneer was not thin. it was as thick as the hides of the people who suffered to be it. but ...