The appointment was in the Choir. Deacon Marcus led the way, his posture a straight line against the station’s unending curves. Elias followed, the quiet hum of the corridor a familiar pressure in his ears. They stopped before a heavy door that slid open into a different kind of silence. This was the Choir, the spherical chamber at the heart of the Oratory where the listening happened. It was colder here, the air scrubbed clean of any scent but the faint, sharp smell of ozone.
They were on an observation mezzanine, a narrow balcony that ringed the upper hemisphere of the sphere. Below them, suspended in the exact center of the vast, empty room, was the Oecumene Horn. It was a device that looked like a large, matte black bell hanging in zero gravity, absorbing all light, reflecting nothing. It was the instrument that translated the voice of the Sum from the chaotic pull of Terminus into something a human mind could perceive. Or fail to perceive.
A single chair sat on the lower platform, directly beneath the Horn’s silent mouth. A man was strapped into it. He was a senior monk, his white habit stark against the dark, padded material of the chair. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back. His body was rigid, trembling with a fine, constant vibration. He was listening. Elias had come here to witness the process, to understand the price of the story he had been offered.
Deacon Marcus stood beside Elias, his hands clasped behind his back. He watched the scene below with a serene, almost bored expression, like a man observing a well-rehearsed play. On a monitor near the mezzanine railing, a line of green light representing the monk’s neural activity was a frantic, jagged mess. It spiked and shuddered, pushing against the upper limit of the display, a frantic scribble that filled 98% of the screen.
The monk’s lips parted. A sound escaped, not a word but a long, ecstatic sigh. It was a sound of profound release, of a thirst being quenched after a lifetime of drought. His face, which had been tight with strain, went slack with a look of blissful surrender. He was receiving the message. He was hearing the voice.
"You see," Marcus murmured, his voice a low counterpoint to the hum of the machinery. "The soul must be strong enough. It must be prepared to be filled."
Then the monk’s eyes snapped open. They were wide and saw nothing in the room. The bliss on his face curdled into a mask of absolute terror. The sigh of ecstasy became a choked gasp.
He screamed.
It was not a human sound. It was the sound of a machine breaking, of metal tearing, of a circuit being overloaded to the point of melting. It had no top and no bottom, a column of pure, unshaped agony that filled the entire sphere, pressing in on Elias from all sides. It was the sound of a universe being unmade inside a single skull. The green line on the monitor went from a jagged mountain range to a solid, unwavering block at the absolute peak of the display.
The scream cut off as if a switch had been thrown. The silence that rushed back in was heavier, thicker than before. It was a dead silence, no longer peaceful but empty. The monk slumped in the chair, his head lolling to one side. A thin line of drool traced a path from the corner of his mouth down his chin.
"Vitals crashing," a flat, professional voice said from a speaker near the listener’s chair. "Disconnecting now."
Two figures in grey medical jumpsuits emerged from a hatch near the platform. They moved with a practiced efficiency that was more disturbing than the scream had been. There was no alarm in their movements, no rush of concern. This was a procedure. They uncoupled the connections from the monk’s head and arms, their hands moving with the swift, impersonal grace of factory workers on an assembly line.
They unstrapped the monk and lifted his limp body onto a gurney that had rolled out beside them. His limbs were loose, his eyes still open and vacant. He was an Oracle now. That was the station’s term for it. A mind that had been broken by the signal, a vessel shattered by the thing it was meant to contain. The med-techs covered him with a thin, white sheet and wheeled him toward the hatch he had just come from.
Elias watched them go. He noticed the dark scuff marks on the polished floor near the hatch, the faint arcs where the gurney’s wheels always pivoted. This was not an emergency. This was routine maintenance. He had not witnessed a tragedy. He had witnessed an industrial accident with a predictable, and apparently acceptable, rate of failure. The comforting story required a steady supply of broken minds. The price of faith was paid by others, and the cost was collected with quiet efficiency.
His gaze drifted from the closing hatch to the listener’s area below. The chair was empty now. One of the med-techs was wiping it down with a sterile cloth, preparing it for the next user. And there, on a small console beside the chair, something had been left behind. It was a data slate, the kind every monk carried.
But this one was different. Its screen was a spiderweb of fractures, a network of fine, dark lines radiating from a single point of impact. It was broken. It looked like a pane of glass that had been struck by a small, hard truth. The cracked slate was a perfect, silent echo of the monk’s shattered mind.
A hand came to rest on Elias’s shoulder. It was Deacon Marcus. His touch was gentle, paternal, but it felt as heavy as lead. Elias did not turn to look at him. He kept his eyes on the empty chair below, now clean and waiting.
"Every soul is tested, Brother Elias," Marcus said, his voice once again calm and instructive. He seemed completely unfazed by the man who had just been hauled away like a piece of faulty equipment. "Some are found wanting. Others are found to be pure vessels. We must discover which you are."
He gestured with his free hand toward the platform below.
"Now, it is your turn."
The words were not a question. They were a statement of fact, the next logical step in a process that had no room for hesitation. The empty chair waited. The black, silent bell of the Oecumene Horn hung in the air, ready to deliver its message. Or its verdict.
Elias felt the new implant at the base of his skull, the Cognitive Anchor, suddenly grow cold.
He was next in line.
