The guards connected him. The act was impersonal, a simple matter of plugging a machine into a piece of meat. There were no filters on the Oecumene Horn this time, no gentle modulations from the Hermeneutic Engine. The sentence was to be carried out. Elias Vance was strapped into the listener’s chair, his head cradled by the cold metal of the interface. The guards did not look him in the eye. They were just following orders. The sentence began.
The Sum hit him not as a sound, but as a physical impact. It was the feeling of a dam breaking inside his skull. A billion lives, a trillion moments, all screaming for attention at once. His own consciousness, the fragile thing he called Elias, was a single drop of rain in a hurricane. It began to fray instantly. His identity, the story he told himself about himself, was being unwritten. His self-integrity, a concept he had never considered, was now a quantifiable thing, and it was falling. It was at 40 percent and dropping fast.
He saw a sun-drenched field through a farmer’s eyes from a time when the sky was still blue. He felt the cold terror of a soldier in a trench, the mud sucking at his boots, the smell of cordite and fear thick in his throat. A woman’s deep, racking sobs echoed in a part of his mind that had, a moment ago, held a memory of his own mother. The memory was gone now. Replaced. He tried to remember his own face, the one he saw in the viewport’s reflection, but all he could conjure were the faces of strangers. A thousand of them. A million.
This was Abbot Clement’s mercy. The thought surfaced, clear and cold in the middle of the storm. It was the last piece of his own analytical mind, a final spark before the darkness. This was the ending of a person without the mess of violence. It was not a punishment. It was a procedure. It was the ultimate act of tidying. If mercy means never letting anyone see themselves, it is not mercy. It is taxidermy. The words of Korbin, the man who came before him, echoed not as a memory, but as a fundamental law of this new, terrible physics.
He fought. He tried to find an anchor in the chaos. He searched for a memory that was his own, a single, solid thing to hold onto. He thought of Lena Petrova, of her sharp, tired eyes and the burn scar on her hand. The image dissolved into a collage of a thousand other hands, a million other eyes. He tried to recall the feeling of the Cracked Slate of Korbin, its fractured screen cool beneath his fingertips. But the sensation was buried under the phantom weight of a wedding ring on a finger that was not his, the rough texture of a rope in a sailor’s palm.
The memories were useless. They were just more data, more ghosts in the machine. They were part of the storm, not a shelter from it. The past was a lie because it was not his. The future was an impossibility. There was only the screaming, eternal now. And in that now, he found it. A single, hard point of identity that the Sum could not touch, could not overwrite, because it was not a memory. It was not a fact. It was a choice.
The choice to resist. The choice to not dissolve. The choice to exist.
He made the choice. He chose to embrace the pain. He chose to stand in the heart of the storm and feel it all, the joy and the sorrow and the rage of a billion lives, and not be erased by it. He would be the witness. He would be the ruin. He would not be the void. The price was everything. The price was himself, this new self, this tiny, defiant point of light. He would rather be a shattered thing that was his own than a placid, empty vessel for everyone else.
His identity, what was left of it, began to re-forge itself around that single, stubborn point. It was no longer the sprawling, uncertain thing it had been. It was small and dense and hard as a diamond. It was not defined by what he remembered, but by what he willed. His self-integrity, a number he could feel in the very structure of his being, stabilized. It was a terrifyingly low number. It was 10 percent. But it was not zero. It was his.
He remembered the Cracked Slate again. Not the feel of it, but the image of it shattering on the floor of the Synod Chamber. The memory did not dissolve this time. It became part of him. The brokenness was his. The shards were his. He was a thing made of pieces, and that was all right. It was true.
A jolt, violent and physical, threw him against his restraints. It was not the Sum. It was the station itself. The low, placid hum of the Choir, a sound he had not even noticed until it was gone, faltered and died. The swirling blues and violets of the data visualization on the walls flickered out, plunging the chamber into a sudden, absolute darkness. The connection to the Oecumene Horn severed.
The roar of the Sum was gone.
The air smelled of ozone and burnt insulation. The cold metal of the restraints felt loose on his wrists.
The silence was broken by a single, metallic click.
