Chapter 174: Branch Requests

Mercer spent two days reconstructing the surviving branch-request logs.

Freya disliked giving him unrestricted attention to the mystery, but the work was conducted inside the university lab under independent supervision.

The results were disturbing.

Bailey Shepard had submitted 412 branch requests against Gentle Devotion.

Most were simple hypothetical changes.

Louis discovers Serena's role earlier.

Ethan refuses Adrian's business intelligence.

Clement apologizes to Freya.

Freya sells her luxury goods.

Some looked eerily similar to events that later occurred.

Others never happened at all.

In one branch, Louis left the country.

In another, Freya divorced him and became a fashion reseller.

In another, Adrian was exposed within three months.

That mattered.

The branch requests were not prophecies.

They were possibilities.

Freya felt genuine relief.

"Good."

Mercer looked confused.

"Good?"

"If most of them are wrong, Bailey isn't writing reality."

Claire understood immediately.

Someone wanted Freya to focus on the matches and ignore the failures.

Classic selection bias.

The books sent to Freya contained only events that had already happened or could be predicted from current circumstances.

Even Chapter 171's title could have been anticipated if the sender knew investigators had found a second copy.

The impossible appearance of the title remained unexplained, but one anomaly did not justify surrendering reason.

Freya returned to her rules.

Verify everything.

The branch logs contained another useful pattern.

Bailey's requests became increasingly focused on Freya.

Early requests concerned business rivalry.

Later ones asked about her marriage, career, and behavior.

The final twenty requests all began with the same condition.

IF FREYA REMEMBERS ANOTHER WORLD.

Louis read that line twice.

"Bailey knew?"

"Or imagined it."

Freya could not tell which was worse.

The final branch request had no output.

Its condition read:

IF FREYA REALIZES SHE IS BEING OBSERVED.

The result field was corrupted.

Derek asked whether Crosswind logged the location of beta users.

Only approximate network data.

The Bailey account had connected from several places over months.

Most routes were anonymized.

One was not.

A university campus.

Claire recognized it.

Crosswind had recruited beta testers there during its early research phase.

Investigators obtained the old participant lists.

There were eighty-three names.

No Bailey Shepard.

But one participant had later disappeared from the project before final interviews.

Her name was Eliza Warren.

Claire went silent when she saw the photograph.

"You know her?"

Claire nodded slowly.

"She was one of our most obsessive readers."

Eliza had treated adaptive fiction less like entertainment and more like a puzzle.

She constantly tried to break stories by forcing improbable branches.

After Crosswind shut down, Claire lost contact with her.

Derek compared the old photograph with the masked hotel footage.

Height matched.

Build matched.

Not enough for identification.

But for the first time, Bailey Shepard had a possible real name.

Freya wrote it beneath the three rules.

Eliza Warren.

Then she circled it once.

No conclusions.

Only a lead.

Freya noticed how easily the matching branch requests could seduce people into forgetting the hundreds that failed. She asked the researchers to display unsuccessful predictions beside successful ones in every future briefing. Accuracy without the denominator was storytelling, not evidence.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.