The command was not a question. Elias descended the short, spiral stair from the observation mezzanine, his hand trailing along the cold metal rail. Each step echoed the finality of the choice he was being forced to make. Below, the listener’s chair waited, a dark shape in the center of the vast, spherical room. It had been wiped clean, but he could still see the ghost of the man who had just been hauled away, a mind unmade by a sound Elias was now ordered to hear. The image of the cracked data slate he’d seen moments before—a spiderweb of fractures on a dark screen—felt like a premonition. A map of the place he was about to go.
He reached the platform. The air was colder here, scrubbed of all scent except the faint, sharp smell of ozone from the surrounding equipment. He stopped before the chair. It was made of a dark, padded material, worn smooth in the places where bodies had been strapped down. He sat. The material was still faintly warm. His status had changed. He was no longer an observer of the station’s rituals. He was a participant. The price of his new life was being called due, and he had to pay it right now.
A woman in a dull grey technician’s jumpsuit approached him. She moved with a quiet efficiency that had no room for ceremony. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe knot, and her face was pale with a fatigue that seemed etched into her skin. This was Lena Petrova, the lead civilian contractor who kept the station’s strange machinery running. She was a mechanic, not a priest, and she held a set of neural contacts in her hand like they were spark plugs.
She met his eyes for a fraction of a second. There was no pity in her gaze, only a flat, professional assessment. She was here to do a job.
"This will feel cold," she said. Her voice was low and even.
Lena worked quickly, her fingers deft and impersonal. She attached the contacts to his temples and the base of his skull, right over the faint scar where the Cognitive Anchor had been implanted. The metal was, as promised, cold against his skin. She connected a final lead from the chair to the console beside it. The system was now a closed loop, with his mind as the final, fragile component. He was the antenna.
She stepped back to the diagnostic panel, a bank of screens that glowed with a soft green light.
— Signal integrity is at one hundred percent, — Lena announced to the room, her eyes on the readouts. — Engaging the feed.
Elias closed his eyes. He braced himself. He thought of the monk’s scream, a sound that had torn a hole in the world. He expected the roar of a trillion lives, the psychic storm of the Sum that broke minds and made Oracles. He expected whispers, or songs, or the crushing weight of forgotten history. He expected God, or he expected madness.
He got nothing.
There was only a profound, unnerving silence. It was not the engineered quiet of the station, filled with the low Equilibrium Hum of life support. This was a deeper silence. A structural silence. It was the sound of an empty room. It was the sound of a bell that had been struck but refused to ring. The psychic storm he had been promised was absent. He felt no pressure, no whispers, no chaotic collage of memory. There was only himself, alone in his own head.
He opened his eyes. The great, matte black bell of the Oecumene Horn hung above him, inert and silent. It was supposed to be translating the voice of a black hole. For him, it was doing nothing at all. He had come here for an answer, and the universe had given him a dial tone. This was not the story he had been sold. The loss of that certainty was a price he hadn't known he would have to pay.
He glanced at the side console. Lena Petrova was frowning, her brow furrowed in disbelief. She tapped the edge of the neural feedback monitor, a gesture one might make to an old, faulty machine. But this was not an old machine. It was the most sensitive instrument ever built.
Elias followed her gaze to the screen. It displayed a single, horizontal line of green light. It was perfectly straight. Perfectly still. It was the kind of line you saw on a medical monitor when the patient was no longer a patient.
"That’s not possible," Lena muttered, more to herself than to anyone else.
Her hands flew across her console, her professional calm cracking to reveal a sharp, focused urgency. She was no longer a passive operator. She was a scientist confronted with an impossible result. She initiated a full system diagnostic. The low hum of the Choir deepened as the Oecumene Horn ran its internal checks. On her screen, lines of code scrolled past, all of them ending in the same green, nominal status report.
The diagnostic finished. The hum returned to its normal pitch. Lena stared at the results, her face a mask of confusion.
"The diagnostic is clean," she said, her voice tight with a new kind of tension. She turned to look at Deacon Marcus, who still stood on the mezzanine above. "There’s nothing wrong with the feed."
The implication hung in the cold, silent air. If the machine was perfect, and the signal was perfect, then the fault was not in the hardware. The anomaly was the soft, human component strapped into the chair. The problem was Elias.
Deacon Marcus descended the stairs slowly, his serene composure gone. He looked from the flat line on the monitor to Elias’s face, his eyes searching for some sign of ecstasy or agony. He found neither. Elias just sat there, a man listening to nothing. This was not in the scripture. This was not part of the comforting story. A miracle was a sign from God. A broken mind was a sign of human weakness. But a blank space—that was a challenge to the entire system. It was a fact that did not fit the narrative.
Lena Petrova did not wait for the Deacon to interpret the event. She followed protocol for an unprecedented system failure, even if the failure was human. Her hand moved to a separate, smaller panel on her console. She pressed a single, red-lit button.
A new sound entered the Choir. It was a soft, clear chime, a priority-1 alert that echoed once through the vast sphere and then faded. It was a sound reserved for only the most critical of events. It was a summons.
The Abbot was coming to tell him what it meant.
