The door to his cell slid shut, the sound a soft hiss that was immediately swallowed by the station’s engineered quiet. Elias stood in the sterile white box that was his home. On the small, built-in desk, he placed the two halves of his new world. One was the scripture datapad issued by the Scriptorium, its surface smooth and its standby light a serene, pulsing blue. The other was the Cracked Slate of Korbin, a dead block of black composite, its screen a shattered map of some forgotten violence. He had to decide which one was telling the truth.
He ran a hand over his face, the fabric of his novitiate’s tunic rough against his skin. He went to the small dispenser by the door and drew a cup of water. It was, as always, perfectly tasteless, perfectly pure, recycled from the breath and sweat of the two hundred souls on board. It was a closed system. Just like the Abbot’s faith. He drank it down, the cold liquid doing nothing to settle the knot in his stomach.
First, the lie. He powered on the scripture datapad. The blue light washed over his desk, painting the white wall in a placid, even glow. Text scrolled up the screen, the words chosen and polished by the Canonist monks in the Scriptorium. It spoke of the Sum as a gentle father, a voice of guidance that rewarded those who emptied themselves of doubt and fear. It was a story of profound peace, a promise that if you were quiet enough, you would be safe.
The scripture was beautiful. It was also hollow. It was a skeleton that had been stripped of all its messy, inconvenient flesh. There was no pain in these verses, no confusion, no rage. It was a god made of smooth stones. Elias stared at the flowing text, the words blurring into a meaningless blue river. It was a comforting story. Deacon Marcus had been right about that. It was a story you could build a life inside, as long as you never tried to open a window.
He switched the datapad off. The blue light vanished, leaving the cell in its normal, shadowless white.
Then, the truth. He picked up the Cracked Slate. His fingers traced the sharp geography of the fractures. Lena had given it to him in the humming guts of the station, a secret passed in the dark. The price of taking it had been the end of his ignorance. He was holding a dead man’s last words, and the weight of that felt real in a way the scripture did not. He powered it on.
Lena’s work had bypassed the encryption. The screen flickered to life, not with a clean menu, but with a chaotic desktop of corrupted files. It was a digital ruin. There were audio logs with garbled timestamps, fragmented images that were mostly static, and long strings of text in languages he didn’t recognize. He tapped a file at random. It was a sound file.
A woman’s voice, raw and broken, filled the silence of his cell. She was sobbing. Just that. A deep, gut-wrenching grief that needed no translation. He quickly shut it off, his heart pounding. He opened another. It was a lullaby, sung softly by a man with a rough voice. It was tender and sad and achingly human. He opened a third. A string of curses from a soldier in a trench, the sound of explosions in the background. It was the static. It was the Sum. It was not the voice of a god. It was the sound of everyone.
He compared the two experiences in his mind. The datapad was a placid, manicured garden. The slate was a primal forest, overgrown and dangerous, but alive. One was a theory of humanity. The other was the thing itself, in all its terror and beauty. The scripture was a painting of a storm. The slate was the storm.
So this was what they edited, he thought. This was what they varnished.
He thought of the two words that had been used to define him. Abbot Clement had called his silence divine grace. A soul so clean it didn’t have the static of a self. Lena Petrova had called it a glitch. A one-in-a-trillion case of neural noise cancellation. A quirk in his brain’s wiring. A saint or a statistical error. Both were neat boxes. Both were answers provided by someone else.
Grace meant he was a symbol, a holy relic to be studied and revered, but never understood. It meant living as a testament to the Abbot’s power. A glitch meant he was a problem to be solved, a fascinating specimen for Lena’s science. It meant living as a puzzle. Neither definition allowed him to simply be a man, lost and searching like everyone else. He was a text, and they were the only two people allowed to translate him.
He would not be a text. He would be the one who reads.
The choice was no longer a choice. It was a simple, physical law. He could not un-hear the woman’s sob. He could not un-feel the dead man’s warning. To accept the Abbot’s story now would be an act of self-destruction, a deliberate blindness. The price for that comfort was his own soul. He could stay in the garden and pretend the forest wasn’t there. Or he could take the dead man’s broken map and walk into the trees.
He chose the trees. He chose the risk. He chose the sharp, broken edges of the truth.
The decision landed in his body like a stone. It was not a moment of joy or relief. It was a cold, heavy finality. He was no longer a novitiate waiting for instructions. He was no longer a passive anomaly. He was an active agent. His life was his own to define, and his own to lose.
He stood up and looked around the small, perfect cell. Behind the nutrient paste dispenser, a small maintenance panel sat flush with the wall. He’d noticed it weeks ago. A tiny imperfection in the seamless design. A place for secrets.
He powered down the Cracked Slate. The chaotic light of its screen died, and it became a block of dark glass once more. It was a tool now. A weapon. He wrapped it carefully in a spare off-white tunic, the cloth of the order now serving to hide its heresy. He pried the panel open. It came away with a soft click. Behind it was a small, dark void, filled with wiring and the faint smell of warm insulation.
He placed the wrapped slate inside, pushing it deep into the station’s hidden anatomy. He sealed the panel. It clicked back into place, perfectly flush. The slate was gone. The commitment was made. The truth was now a secret he carried alone.
It wasn’t enough to see the truth through a broken window. Korbin had listened. The Oracles in the Infirmary had listened. He had to do the same. His immunity, the thing they were all trying to define, was neither grace nor a glitch. It was a key. It was a tool that would let him stand in the heart of the storm without being torn apart.
He would go back to the Choir. He would find a way to bypass the filters and the safeties. He would connect himself to the Oecumene Horn and listen to the raw, unedited voice of the Sum.
The low, steady hum of the station’s life support filled the silence. The clean, white walls of his cell felt like the inside of a bone.
He would hear what their God really had to say.
