Months after the roar, the silence was the loudest thing on the Penrose Oratory. The Equilibrium Hum, the low, constant drone that had been the station’s heartbeat for a century, was dead. Its absence left a void that was filled not with peace, but with small, human noises. The scuff of a boot in the corridor. The distant hiss of a welding torch sealing a ruptured conduit. The murmur of conversation. The station breathed on its own now, a ragged, uneven breath.
The corridors were a patchwork of old and new. Smooth, sterile white panels sat next to plates of dull, unpolished metal, the scars of the Great Silence Breach. Elias Vance walked through them, his gait slow and deliberate. The dull ache behind his eyes was a permanent resident now, a souvenir from his time as a human conduit for the Sum. He passed a common area where, in the before-time, monks would have been gathered in silent, placid prayer.
Now, they were arguing.
About a dozen people sat in a loose circle on the floor. It was one of the new discussion circles, the messy, democratic replacement for the Abbot’s sermons. They were hunched over a datapad, its screen showing a waveform.
— It’s clearly about loss, — a former Canonist insisted, a man who had once varnished fear for a living. — The descending melodic structure is a classic signifier of grief.
— It’s a pop song from 2142, — Ana Sharma countered, her voice no longer timid. It was sharp with the earned confidence of someone who had helped break a world. — It’s about a commercial flight to Mars. The grief is that he missed his connection.
Elias paused in the doorway, unseen. He watched them lean in, their faces earnest and alive with disagreement. They were treating a fragment of the Sum not as a commandment, but as a historical document. A piece of art. A puzzle with no single right answer. They were building their own meaning, one argument at a time.
He moved on before they could see him and ask his opinion. He had no opinion to give. His new job was not to provide answers. It was to make sure people remembered they were allowed to ask the questions. He was a facilitator, not a priest. The station had had enough of priests.
He was headed for the Choir. The spherical chamber was no longer the station’s spiritual heart. It was its public library. The single, throne-like listener’s chair that had once dominated the center of the room was gone. Elias himself had helped disassemble it, piece by piece. The act had felt less like a revolution and more like taking down old, dangerous machinery.
In its place stood four simple listening stations. They were little more than comfortable chairs with a built-in interface and a privacy hood, arranged in a gentle curve. They looked like study carrels. Access to the Sum, the raw, chaotic archive of human history, was now open to anyone who wanted to listen. The only price was a headache and the risk of hearing something you couldn’t forget.
A young woman, one of the novitiates who had collapsed during the broadcast, sat at one of the stations. She looked up as Elias entered, her expression a mix of concentration and frustration.
— Brother Elias, — she said, the old honorific still clinging to her speech like a habit.
— Just Elias, — he corrected gently.
— Elias. I found something. A voice. A woman, I think. She keeps repeating a series of numbers. I thought it might be a code. A message.
He walked over to her station. On her screen, a fragment of the Sum was looped, a jagged line of audio data. He could feel the faint psychic pressure of it even from here, a whisper of someone else’s life.
— What does it feel like? — he asked.
She frowned. — What?
— The feeling. Not the numbers. What’s the feeling behind the voice?
The woman closed her eyes, listening again. Her face softened. — She’s not sending a message. She’s… counting. To calm herself down. She’s afraid of something.
— Then that’s the truth of it, — Elias said. — The truth is the feeling. The numbers are just the tool she used to survive it.
He left her with that thought, letting her find her own way through the fragment. He had no special insight. His immunity was just a quirk of neurology, a key that had fit a lock. It didn’t make him a prophet. It had just made him the first one to have to face the silence.
He stood in the center of the changed room. The air was cool and still. He remembered the smell of ozone and terror, the weight of Clement’s certainty, the feeling of his own identity dissolving like salt in water. He had chosen ruin over the placid calm of the Cognitive Anchor. He had chosen to feel everything. The station had paid the price for his choice. They had three days of air left when the first Sector Authority ship had answered their distress call.
The Authority had been… efficient. They had stabilized the life support. They had delivered supplies. They had asked a great many questions, which Lena, with her newfound political skill, had answered with a mix of technical data and carefully worded omissions. The investigation was ongoing. The station was, for now, a protectorate. A curiosity. A failed experiment whose survivors were being studied.
Elias looked at the polished floor where the listener’s throne had once been bolted down. He saw his own reflection, a thin, tired man in a simple tunic. For a moment, the light from the new stations caught the floor in a way that fractured his image, a spiderweb of cracks spreading across his face. It looked like the Cracked Slate of Korbin, the broken thing that had started it all. Then he shifted his weight, and the reflection became whole again. The truth was still broken into a million pieces, but he was not. He was just here.
The great, single lie of Abbot Clement was gone, replaced by two hundred fragile, human truths. It was a mess. It was difficult. It was honest.
A soft chime echoed through the chamber, a new alert tone Lena had programmed. It was a sound he had not heard before. On the main diagnostic screen, a new icon appeared. It was a ship’s registry code. A military vessel. Not the supply freighter they had been expecting.
He felt Lena’s presence beside him before he saw her. She was looking at the screen, her face grim.
— They’re early, — she said.
— They’re not the ones we were waiting for, — he replied.
The new ship was hailing them. It was a formal, encrypted signal. The kind you used when you weren't sure if you were talking to friend or foe. The age of questioning was about to get a lot more complicated.
The silence of space was absolute. The silence inside the station was full of whispers.
He knew new trouble was on its way.
