The broadcast ended. The end was not a fade, but a cut. A clean, brutal severing. The psychic roar of a billion human lives vanished, and the silence that rushed in to take its place was not empty. It was heavy. It was thick with the ghosts of what had just been heard.
Elias Vance sat in the listener’s chair, the metal cool against his skin. The connection to the Oecumene Horn was dead. The white-hot spike of pain in his skull receded, leaving behind a dull, throbbing ache and the coppery taste of blood in his mouth. A thin, warm line of it traced a path from his nose to his upper lip. He didn't wipe it away. It felt like a receipt. The price of his choice, paid in full.
Lena Petrova was at the master console, her shoulders slumped. The frantic energy of the last hour had drained out of her, leaving a profound weariness. Ana Sharma stood by the sealed blast door, her hand still resting on the control panel she had used to jam the Abbot’s commands. She was staring at the door as if she expected it to accuse her.
— It’s done, — Lena said. Her voice was a quiet, scraped thing, raw from the tension. She wasn't looking at Elias. She was looking at a diagnostic screen that showed a cascade of red system failures.
The Equilibrium Hum, the low, constant drone of the station’s life support, was gone. In its absence, the station felt dead. But it wasn't quiet. Through the thick metal of the Choir’s walls, a new sound began to filter in. It was the sound of weeping. Not a single cry, but dozens. Soft, broken, and terribly human.
Elias pushed himself out of the chair. His legs felt unsteady, as if he had forgotten how to use them. The Anamnesis Maze had taken his memories for a walk, and only some of them had come back. The self he was left with felt smaller, harder, a dense point of will forged in the storm. He had chosen ruin over anesthesia. Now he had to walk through it.
— I have to see, — he said.
Lena finally turned to look at him. Her grey eyes were dark with exhaustion and something else. Awe, maybe. Or fear. — Elias, wait. We don’t know what’s out there.
— I know what’s out there, — he replied, his own voice sounding distant to him. — I put it there.
He moved to the blast door. Ana flinched as he approached, then slowly, she retracted her hand from the panel. Elias keyed in the command to open it. The heavy door slid aside with a low groan, revealing a corridor lit by the flickering, sickly yellow of the emergency lights. The air smelled of burnt insulation and ozone. And sorrow.
He stepped out of the Choir. The weeping was louder here. It came from the open doorways of residential cells. It echoed from the direction of the Scriptorium. It was a sound that had been suppressed for generations by the gentle hum of the Cognitive Anchors. Now the anchors were useless, their placid calm shattered by the raw, unfiltered truth of the Sum.
He started walking. The long, curving corridors of the Penrose Oratory were littered with people. Some were curled on the floor, sobbing into their hands. Others sat with their backs against the wall, their faces blank, their eyes wide and unfocused as they stared at nothing. They were not mad, not like the Oracles had been. They were simply… open. The comforting story had been ripped away, and they were left shivering in the silence that followed.
A Canonist Monk, one of the men Elias had watched manufacture scripture, sat on the floor outside the Scriptorium. He was looking at his own hands, turning them over and over as if they were strange, alien objects he had never seen before. He had spent his life polishing a lie. Now he had nothing to hold onto.
Elias kept walking. He felt no triumph. He felt no guilt. He felt only a vast, quiet responsibility. He had not given these people a new truth. He had only taken the old lie away. The rest was up to them. This was the consent that came after the silence. The choice to build something new from the wreckage.
He passed a datapad lying face-down on the floor. Its screen was fractured, a spiderweb of cracks radiating from a single point of impact. It glowed with a faint, chaotic static. It looked just like the Cracked Slate of Korbin. A broken thing, showing a broken truth. Now everyone had one.
His steps were slow but steady. He was looking for someone. He needed to see one face in particular. He found him near the entrance to the hydroponic gardens, huddled in a small service alcove.
He found Leo Gallo.
His first friend on the station. The man who had turned away from him in the corridor, his face a mask of fear. Leo was not crying. He was just sitting there, his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth almost imperceptibly. His eyes were fixed on the opposite wall.
Elias stopped a few feet away. He didn't say anything. He just waited. The silence between them was different now. It wasn't the silence of fear or judgment. It was the silence of a shared, terrible knowledge.
After a long moment, Leo’s eyes slowly moved from the wall to Elias. There was no anger in them. No accusation. Only a profound, bottomless exhaustion. His face was streaked with tears, but his eyes were dry.
— I heard them, — Leo whispered. His voice was a child’s voice. — I heard all of them. The father… the voice… it wasn’t one. It was everyone.
Elias nodded. He had no comfort to offer. Comfort was the poison they were all recovering from.
— It was just a story, — Leo said, more to himself than to Elias. He looked down at the floor. A long, shuddering breath escaped him. — All this time. It was just a story.
He looked back up at Elias, and his expression was one of pure, unadulterated bewilderment. It was the face of a man who had woken up to find that the world he had lived in his entire life was a painted backdrop, and someone had just kicked a hole in it.
— What do we do now? — Leo asked. The question was not a demand. It was a genuine inquiry, stripped of all the certainty he had once worn like a uniform.
— I don’t know, — Elias said. And it was the most honest thing he had ever said.
Leo stared at him. A flicker of something new moved in his eyes. Not hope. Not yet. It was something smaller, more fragile. It was the understanding that "I don't know" was an answer. It was the first answer. It was the only answer that mattered right now.
— I don’t know, — Leo repeated, and the words were not a confession of failure. They were a prayer. A prayer without a priest, offered to a god that was no longer there. It was the first honest prayer said on the Penrose Oratory in a hundred years.
The age of certainty was over. The age of questioning had begun.
Elias left him there. Leo needed to be alone with his new, terrifying freedom. He walked on, his purpose for this journey complete. He had seen the cost, and he had seen the first, fragile glimmer of the reward.
The station was broken. The people were broken. The great, single lie had been replaced by two hundred fragile, human truths. It was a terrible, beautiful beginning.
The air was still and cool. The sounds of weeping had begun to subside, replaced by the low murmur of voices.
He knew that help, and trouble, were on their way.
