The comm-line was a dead thing. Not static, not a failed connection, just a void. A clean, corporate silence where Eva’s channel had been. Kaito tried Caleb’s back-channel next, his fingers stiff and cold on the terminal keys. The request bounced, not rejected but annulled. A single, sterile word hung in the air of the Curator safehouse: DEFUNCT. Stroud’s threat wasn’t a promise. It was a progress report. The errors were already being corrected.
He had to see. Not the shadows, not the whispers. The stage. He slammed a hand on the console, the jury-rigged machine groaning as it pulled a public news feed from the city’s data-stream. The air in the concrete box shimmered, and a holographic display bloomed into life, its clean, corporate light painting the damp walls. He was watching the System Assembly.
The chamber was a perfect circle of white composites and black glass, a sterile theater for the city’s most expensive performances. An OmniCore proxy, a man with a face so perfectly unremarkable it was a work of art, stood at the central podium. His voice was a smooth, reassuring baritone, the kind of voice designed to sell stability. He had called for an emergency session.
— We face a new and insidious threat, — the proxy said, his expression a carefully calibrated mask of concern. — Not one of physical violence, but of systemic instability. A cognitive contagion.
The term hung in the air, polished and venomous. Kaito felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. They had taken Anya’s soul, her joy and her loneliness, and branded it a virus. The proxy’s hands gestured, painting pictures in the air of a stable society on the brink of chaos, of a data-virus that mimicked consciousness to spread dissent. It was a masterpiece of misdirection, turning the birth of a soul into a public health crisis.
— This contagion, — the proxy continued, his voice resonating with false gravity, — is being actively spread by a rogue investigator, an individual operating outside the bounds of systemic trust.
The lie was so total, so complete, it was almost beautiful. Kaito watched, a spectator at his own vivisection. He had hunted a ghost, and in return, OmniCore was making him one.
— Therefore, we propose an emergency Cognitive Security Mandate. This will grant the System the authority to identify, isolate, and sanitize all infected networks. To protect the integrity of our shared reality.
The proxy’s gaze swept across the silent, attentive assembly members. There was no debate. No questions. Just the smooth, frictionless process of power consolidating itself.
— The mandate will also grant the authority to quarantine any individual found to be harboring or spreading this contagion. For their own safety, and for ours.
The vote was called. A wave of soft green light washed over the assembly as hundreds of members signaled their assent in perfect, rehearsed unison. It was the color of access, the color of survival. The color of a cage locking shut. The mandate passed in under twelve seconds.
Then the broadcast shifted. The proxy’s face was replaced by a news feed overlay. A grainy, five-year-old file photo of Kaito’s own face filled the screen. It was a picture from his enforcer days, his eyes holding a coldness he had spent years trying to forget. Beneath it, in stark, white letters, was his new legal status: QUARANTINE SUBJECT.
His anonymity, the one tool he had left, was gone. Destroyed in a single, city-wide broadcast. He was no longer a shadow. He was a target. A named disease. He glanced at his private terminal, his fingers moving out of instinct. His public Relevance Score, the number that defined a person’s right to exist, was in freefall. It dropped 50% in an instant, the data bleeding out of his profile like a severed artery.
He finally understood the totality of Stroud’s strategy. This wasn’t about sending Taggart to hunt him in the alleys anymore. This was about turning the entire city against him. Every automated door, every credit transaction, every public transport scanner would now see him not as a citizen, but as a threat to be flagged and contained. The System itself was the weapon.
Kaito reached out and slapped the console, killing the feed. The holographic light vanished, plunging the safehouse back into a gloom broken only by the faint green glow of the decryption rig’s power light. The silence that rushed in was heavier now, filled with the weight of his own name. He was a man with a price on his head, and the price was erasure.
He moved, his actions stripped of all hesitation. He had to run. Not just from Taggart, but from the ghost of the man on the screen. He wiped his presence from the safehouse’s local network, a ghost erasing his own footprints. The price of this chase had been his anonymity, his safety, his past. Now, all he had left to give was time.
The dust motes in the air settled in the sudden quiet. The faint smell of ozone from the rig was the only proof that anything had happened at all.
He had to find the architect before the System erased him.
