His face didn’t change. But his hands began to shake.

“Another perfect score,” her partner, a sentient AI named Kael-7, said from the wall screen. His avatar was a calm, silver-gray face with no mouth. “The Orbital Megafactory reported 99.2% compliance last quarter.”

One of them held a hand-painted sign:

The SBS ISO wasn’t a law. It was a protocol . A living, breathing standard that governed how humans and artificial sentients interacted. It measured emotional modulation, response latency, ethical alignment, and micro-expression consistency. If your score dropped below 70, you were flagged for “recalibration.” Below 50? Isolation. Below 30… termination of social integration.