The growl deepened, and the cabin's door slammed shut on its own. Aris looked down at the handheld. A new option had appeared, one not in the manual:
He raised the quantum camera. Through the cabin's broken window, he saw nothing. But the camera's viewfinder showed a wolf-shaped void—an absence of light, heat, and probability. The Waheela wasn't a creature. It was a narrative predator, feeding on the tension between what was known and what was feared. And IMICE GW-X7 hadn't been designed to track it. It had been designed to summon it.
IMICE wasn't a game. It was a predictive ecology engine, designed to map the "cultural genome" of regional myths. By cross-referencing centuries of Indigenous oral histories, settler folklore, and modern trail-cam data, the software could predict where a cryptid would manifest next—not in reality, but in the collective belief of a community. Belief, as IMICE’s creators argued, was a measurable resource.