It didn't happen the way she expected.
Lisa had imagined an uproar. Parents demanding answers. Skinner breaking down. Cameras flashing. A swirl of voices agreeing, finally, that something was deeply wrong with Bart Simpson.
But after the applause faded and Bart was led away, Springfield... reset.
Just a little.
Just enough.
The next day, the banners from the talent show were gone. The flyers, the programs, the photos. The hallway bulletin board had already been updated for "Springfield Spirit Week."
Milhouse brought it up first.
"My mom doesn't remember what happened. She says I just 'fell asleep before the finale.' I didn't. I was there. I saw it. I recorded it."
Lisa nodded. "My dad asked me why I didn't clap harder for Bart's piano piece."
Martin checked the school website. The event summary had one line:
"Talent Show concluded with inspiring student performances."
No mention of the incident.
No mention of Bart.
Just... silence.
The next morning, Edna Krabappel asked Lisa why she looked tired.
Lisa replied: "Because I exposed my brother as a foreign consciousness simulating a gifted child with embedded psycho-strategic doctrines."
Krabappel blinked.
Then smiled gently.
"Sweetheart, your imagination is incredible."
Lisa stared at her.
No sarcasm.
No concern.
Just dismissal dressed as kindness.
Only the resistance remembered.
Martin had backed up the audio three times—one copy in a VHS tape disguised as Scratchtasia, one hidden inside a TI-83 calculator, and one encoded into a song on his iPod Mini titled "Meatball Parade."
Milhouse refused to talk in full sentences now. He communicated in fragments. Out of fear. Or pattern training.
Lisa understood.
Even she felt... thinner.
Like the world had pulled something out of her while she was sleeping.
Then she found the toy.
Maggie's toy. The one Bart had insisted she keep. A strange, off-brand learning cube with rotating panels and blinking lights that never quite matched. Lisa hadn't touched it since Bart's removal.
Now it blinked in perfect Morse code.
She stared.
Decoded.
Her breath stopped.
"SYSTEM OVERRIDE COMPLETE. HOST STABLE. STAGE TWO INITIATED."
She looked up at Maggie.
The baby met her gaze without blinking.
Then dropped her pacifier—slowly.
Lisa locked herself in her room.
She tore through her notebooks. Every date, every event, every observation. Rechecked the timeline. Looked for inconsistencies.
Then it hit her:
No one else had changed.
The town hadn't revolted. It had absorbed.
Bart had been taken. But the system didn't crash.
It rerouted.
Which meant he'd never needed to stay.
He'd only needed to leave after planting the seed.
At school, Lisa walked the halls with a new kind of stillness.
She tested people.
Asked them what happened to Bart.
Janey said he got homeschooled.
Sherri and Terri thought he "won a scholarship."
Skinner said Bart was "on extended sabbatical for scholastic focus."
Not one answer matched.
Not one answer included her.
She was being edited.
She checked her school records.
Her grade reports were still perfect. Her attendance, unbroken. But her essay on individual resistance in state machinery had been replaced with a pastel book report on Charlotte's Web.
Her file called her "cooperative."
Her new student notes described her as "emotionally intelligent but over-attached to metaphor."
She stared at the word "cooperative."
And for the first time in weeks, she laughed.
But it sounded like crying.
She gathered what was left of the team.
Martin, exhausted. Milhouse, blinking. And Maggie—who still stared too long, and now babbled in binary-like syllables when left alone.
Lisa handed them the plan.
Phase Two:
Not confrontation. Conservation.
Not rebellion. Redundancy.
If Bart had rewritten Springfield, their new goal was to outlast it.
"Everyone forgets," she said. "So we need things that remember."
They began building anchors.
Lisa wrote in overlapping codes. Math equations as diary entries. Emotional truths buried in palindromes.
Martin converted Bart's old data into physical art: collages made of redacted worksheets, maps inked into the spines of textbooks. He placed one in the lost-and-found bin and watched it sit for six days before disappearing.
Milhouse buried cassette tapes in the sandpit behind the school, labeled with gibberish phrases like:
"Don't Believe the Custodian's Clock"
"Lunchroom Day 7 = Loop Point"
"Maggie Is Watching"
And Maggie... Maggie watched.
Lisa tried talking to her again.
In the middle of the night, she sat by her crib.
"Are you... awake?" she asked.
Maggie didn't move.
Lisa whispered: "Did he say anything to you?"
Silence.
Then the toy blinked again.
This time: one word.
"REMEMBER."
Lisa couldn't sleep.
She started seeing signs of stage two.
Skinner started using phrases from Bart's files: "low-trust optimization," "disciplinary sequencing," "predictive cooperation."
Janey asked Lisa why she stopped eating the school pudding. ("It improves memory.")
Lunch monitors started scanning ID cards.
The old chaotic warmth of Springfield—its nonsense, its absurdity, its mistakes—felt... thinner.
Everything was just a little too aligned.
One morning, Lisa noticed a scar on her wrist.
Small.
Like a pinprick.
She didn't remember getting it.
She checked her calendar. A gap. One day with no notes. Just a single line in red pen:
"Cycle successful. Reboot within threshold."
She didn't write that.
But it was in her handwriting.
She changed again.
Not like Bart.
Not to control the system—but to preserve herself inside it.
She began writing letters to a future version of herself.
She encoded them in logic puzzles. Riddles. Equations with answers only she would understand. She left them in books across the school, labeled:
"To Me, When I Forget."
Then she opened her notebook.
And wrote, on a clean new page:
"If you're reading this, you've already been rewritten. But not deleted."
She would not disappear.
Not all at once.
Not if she planted herself in enough places.
Not if she wrote deep enough.
Not if she taught Maggie to remember.
One night, she opened the closet and found the Krusty doll again.
The one Bart had hollowed out for his notes.
It was sealed.
But the eyes blinked.
Only once.
Then the voice box activated and spoke:
"End of initialization."
Lisa stared.
And whispered:
"Then this isn't over."
Behind her, Maggie laughed.
[End of Chapter 7: Truth in the Spotlight]