Guardian now spends more on anti-rodent countermeasures than it loses to GG's human network. Its procurement reports still classify the cause as a vermin infestation.
The difference is not cosmetic. A rival operative would trigger a review of staffing, tactics and cost. Vermin trigger traps, seals and another supply order. Guardian keeps buying the second answer because the first would require the corporation to record that it is losing security operations to animals paid in treats.
GG deploys an augmented rat for about two hundred credits. Her animals carry surveillance equipment and explosives through routes that corporate teams overlook. Her human assets know only the part of an operation they need to perform, so capturing one person does not reveal the network around them.
One rat, IPO, has survived forty-seven operations because it refuses routes that feel wrong. GG trusts the refusal before she knows its cause. Guardian's systems read the same behavior as an infestation adapting to controls.
The dispute is therefore larger than a budget label. Guardian built its security model around people whose labor could be priced out, tracked or compelled. GG answered with workers the model does not recognize as workers. Every new countermeasure makes that refusal more expensive without changing the category.
The corporation can keep recording the cost as pest control. Readers can follow GG's field record to see why the rats are only one part of a campaign built to make correct systems fail on their own terms.
