Lena Solheim’s fingers moved with the placid certainty of a physicist solving a known problem. Her goal was simple: to introduce a paradox where none should exist. She had gained access to a primary terminal in the Union Weapons Lab, a sterile white chamber deep in the heart of Aethelburg where the air tasted of ozone and chilled metal. The lab housed the command and control system for the Disruptor Network, Hanno Valberg’s monstrous inversion of Jian’s music. Her objective was to cripple it from within.
On the terminal’s cool blue interface, she initiated the upload. The file was her life’s secret work, a virus that was not a virus. It was a piece of composed logic, a digital schism static designed to infect the Disruptor’s targeting system. It would command the weapon to observe its target as both existing and not existing, forcing its own elegant mathematics to tear itself apart in a feedback loop of pure contradiction. It was a song of impossibility, and she was its conductor.
The progress bar crept forward. Ten percent. Each increment was a small victory against the cold, hard logic of the Union, a philosophy she had once championed. The only sound in the room was the near-silent click of her inputs and the low, steady hum of the facility’s life support, a sound as constant and unquestioned as a physical law. She felt no fear, only the cold, clean focus of a necessary calculation. This was the price of her complicity: to become the flaw in the proof.
The hum stopped. The clinical white lights of the lab died and were instantly replaced by a pulsing, accusatory red. A security lockdown. The progress bar on her screen froze, then began to reverse, the virus being neatly excised from the system as if it had never been there. Her intrusion was not just detected; it had been permitted. It was a trap.
The terminal screen went black for a half-second, the darkness rippling with a faint, glitching pattern of geometric noise, a visual echo of the schism static she had tried to unleash. Then, it resolved into the face of Hanno Valberg. He was not angry. His expression was one of placid, academic curiosity, the look of a biologist examining a specimen pinned under glass.
— Dr. Solheim, — Valberg’s voice was a calm, resonant baritone, devoid of any emotion. It filled the small room, seeming to emanate from the walls themselves. — An elegant attempt. The logic is almost beautiful. A weapon that commits suicide by trying to solve an impossible equation.
Lena said nothing. Her objective was gone. Her tactic had failed. She stood back from the terminal, her hands falling to her sides. There were no more moves to make. The silence was her only remaining defiance.
— Did you really think I wouldn’t place a watcher on my own chief theorist? — Valberg asked, a rhetorical question that needed no answer. — Especially one with a known affection for a certain rogue composer. Your loyalty to the project has been a decaying variable for months. I simply waited for it to reach zero.
The virus upload was not just terminated; it was reversed, every trace of her code purged from the Disruptor Network. The system was secure. Her gambit had cost her nothing but her freedom, because she’d never had it to begin with. Valberg had not been hunting a traitor. He had been cultivating one.
The doors to the lab slid open with a soft hiss of hydraulics. Two Union guards in grey armor stepped inside, their movements economical and precise. They did not raise their weapons. They did not need to. Lena’s defeat was absolute. But Valberg’s face remained on the screen. He was not finished.
— An arrest is too simple. Too… inefficient, — Valberg said, his eyes narrowing slightly as he shifted to his new purpose. — You are a resource, Doctor. A tool. And I have a new application for you.
He did not order the guards to take her to a cell. Instead, the terminal screen behind his face split, one half showing her own image, captured by the room’s internal sensors. The other half showed a live feed of the system-wide broadcast network. He was not making a record; he was preparing a stage. He was turning her capture into a piece of political theater.
— Dr. Lena Solheim, a traitor to our survival, — Valberg’s voice now boomed with public authority, his words broadcast across the planet, from the sterile towers of Aethelburg to the neutral channels of the refugee flotillas. Her face, pale and defiant under the red emergency lights, was now an object of public scorn. He was destroying her reputation, un-writing her life’s work with a single, damning pronouncement.
The broadcast continued, Valberg’s face a mask of cold, righteous certainty.
— She will be held pending the return of her collaborator, Jian Li.
The trap was not for her. It had never been for her. It was for Jian. She was the bait. The price of her rebellion was not her own life, but the impossible choice she had just forced upon the one person she had tried to save. She had tried to give him freedom, and instead, she had become the bars of his cage.
The guards stepped forward, each taking an arm. Their grip was firm but impersonal. She did not resist. As they led her from the lab, she saw her own face on the public monitors lining the corridor, a ghost in the machine.
At the Doppler Carillon, the broadcast cut through the haze of battle. On his data slate, Jian saw Lena’s face. He saw her taken into custody. He heard Valberg’s terms. The weight of it was crushing, a physical force that buckled his knees. He had been so focused on his choice between two futures that he had never considered the past could be held hostage.
Back in the weapons lab, Valberg ended the broadcast. The red lights ceased their pulsing, returning to a cold, steady glare. He looked at the empty space where Lena had stood, his expression unchanged. The trap was set. The variable was isolated. The logic was, to him, inescapable.
The lab was silent again, the air still and cold. The only sound was the faint, electronic hum of a system waiting for its next command.
Now the composer would come to him.
