The blast doors boomed shut, and the sound was final. A heavy, metallic clang that sealed them inside the Choir. The strobing red alarm lights from the corridor were gone, replaced by the steady, low-wattage yellow of the emergency system. It was the color of sickness. The air was cold and carried the faint, sharp smell of ozone, a scent Elias now associated with his own unmaking.
Lena Petrova was already at the master control console, her hands a blur across the dark surface. Holographic schematics of the station’s communication systems flickered to life, their usual placid blue lines shifting to angry, rerouted reds. She was turning the entire Penrose Oratory into an antenna. Every speaker, every comms panel, every screen would become a mouth for the Oecumene Horn. She was arming the weapon. Ana Sharma stood beside her, a pale ghost in the jaundiced light, her eyes fixed on a power-level display, her knuckles white.
Then the pounding on the outside of the blast door began. Heavy, rhythmic thuds. Station guards. They were trying to break through. The sound was a physical pressure, a reminder that their time was a small, shrinking thing. Elias watched Lena work, her focus absolute. She was not a soldier. She was an engineer, and this was a problem of applied physics. A problem of making a truth loud enough to be heard.
The pounding stopped. A new sound took its place. A soft hiss, then the voice of Abbot Clement filled the spherical chamber, amplified by the Choir’s own internal speakers. It was calm. It was reasonable. It was the most dangerous sound in the universe.
— Elias. Lena. I know you can hear me. Think about what you are doing.
Elias said nothing. He watched the dust motes dance in the yellow light.
— You believe you are offering them freedom, — Clement’s voice continued, smooth as polished wood. — But what you are offering is a storm that scours the soul. A billion lifetimes of terror and sorrow and confusion screaming all at once. I have heard it. I have carried it so they would not have to.
Lena didn’t look up from her work. The red lines of the schematic were almost a complete circuit.
— This is not liberation. It is cruelty, — the Abbot said, his voice resonating with the absolute conviction of a man who believed his own lie. — Free will without informed consent is the highest form of violation. You will break them. You will create a station of eight hundred Oracles. Is that the world you want? A world of shattered minds?
Elias walked toward the center of the room. He walked toward the listener’s chair. It sat there in the gloom, a dark and simple thing. A throne of sacrifice. He remembered the feel of its cold restraints. He remembered the memory of the Cracked Slate of Korbin, the way it had shattered on the floor of the Synod Chamber. A broken thing that held a broken truth. Clement wanted to keep everything whole, even if the wholeness was a lie. Elias understood now. Some things had to be broken.
He sat in the chair. The material was cool against his back. He looked at the dark, sleeping bell of the Oecumene Horn. He was choosing to return to the place of his own erasure. The price of this choice was to offer himself up as a tool, to become a living part of the machine. He would be the conduit.
— There is still time, — Clement’s voice pleaded from the void outside the door. — Open the door. We can find another way. A gentle way. This is mercy, Elias. What you are about to do is not.
Elias reached for the interface connectors. His hands were steady. He looked at Lena. She paused, her work done, and met his gaze. Her expression was tight, exhausted, but resolved. This was their choice, made together.
He connected himself to the Oecumene Horn.
The pressure was immediate. Not the chaotic, dissolving storm he had felt before, but a focused, immense weight. It was the raw signal of the Sum, a torrent of unfiltered data seeking a mind to inhabit and shatter. The psycho-reactive safeguards in the Horn flared, detecting the overwhelming chaos. The system was designed to shut down, to protect the listener. But it was looking for a listener’s mind to measure.
It found Elias. And in Elias, it found a perfect, structural silence. His immunity, the thing Clement had called grace and Lena had called a glitch, was a form of neural noise cancellation. His mind was a perfect inverse to the Sum’s psychic resonance. He was not an empty room. He was a room filled with the exact opposite of sound. The safeguards saw his stable, flat-line neural feedback and registered a calm, functioning user. The system remained online.
He was the ballast. He was the living key that held the floodgates open. The strain was immense. It felt like holding up a collapsing mountain with nothing but bone and will. A dull ache began behind his eyes, the physical price of containing a billion screaming ghosts. He could feel their raw emotions beating against the walls of his silence: a flash of a sun-drenched field, the cold terror of a soldier in mud, the smell of cordite and baking bread. He held it all. He did not break.
He leaned toward the small comms microphone on the chair’s arm. His voice was quiet, but it would carry.
— You’re wrong, Abbot, — Elias said. The words were scraped raw from his throat. — Consent isn’t something you grant. It’s something you earn.
He looked at Clement’s unseen face in his mind’s eye. He saw the man’s certainty, his paternalistic pity. He saw the shepherd who loved his flock so much he had built them a beautiful cage.
— Consent is what happens after the silence ends.
He looked at Lena. He saw the trust in her tired eyes. He saw Ana, her hand over her mouth, watching him. He was no longer a novitiate. He was no longer a glitch or a miracle. He was a choice, made manifest. The memory of the cracked slate felt different now. Not like something broken, but like something opened.
He nodded. A single, sharp movement.
The broadcast mechanism was armed. The weapon was ready. The low hum of the stabilized Horn filled the chamber. The air was still and tasted of metal.
Lena’s hand moved toward the final switch.
