The dust was the only honest thing left. It settled on the spines of paper books and the casings of scavenged screens with quiet, democratic indifference. Sineus wiped a film of it from a dark monitor with the heel of his hand, a small, routine act of order in the heart of Das Gewirr, the city’s forgotten basement. The air in the shielded library, a tomb of paper and silence beneath Moscow’s sterile avenues, smelled of decaying glue and the faint, clean scent of ozone from Ansel’s jury-rigged air purifiers. He preferred it to the engineered floral notes of the arcologies above.
He touched the activation plate. The screen flickered to life, not with the warm amber of their own network, but with the cold, placid blue of the Ministry of Public Harmony. The light bleached the color from the rows of books behind him, turning their rich reds and greens to shades of grey. It was a ritual he hated. A necessary poison. To know the enemy’s story, you had to let it into your home. The screen hummed with a familiar draw of thirty-five watts, a sound like a distant, placid insect.
The face that appeared was perfect. Symmetrical, serene, its features algorithmically tuned for maximum trustworthiness. It was the face of the Consensus Chorus, the voice of the world’s single, unending broadcast.
"…a regrettable disruption of civic harmony in the Kalanchevskaya Arcology," the anchor said, her voice a soothing balm meant to numb. "Authorities are classifying the event as a memetic terror attack."
The screen cut to fabricated footage. It was him. Or a perfect copy. The face was his, but the eyes were wrong, lit with a cruel, hollow fanaticism he’d only ever seen on state-sanctioned villains in the propaganda films he used to direct. This counterfeit Sineus stood on a balcony, arm outstretched, as a wave of shimmering un-reality rolled across a city block below. The lie was broadcast to 1.2 billion screens across the planet. His name, once a rising credit in the arts, was now tied to mass murder.
He watched as the architecture dissolved. The intricate brickwork of a pre-collapse apartment building went smooth, its history erased in a silent, geometric tide. Windows became blank squares. A playground melted into a featureless plane of grey. The broadcast displayed the estimated civilian casualties in a calm, scrolling chyron at the bottom of the screen. Four thousand five hundred persons. Not people. Persons. A unit of accounting for the Ministry. The number was a punch to the gut, delivered with the polite disinterest of a weather report.
He couldn't watch anymore. He turned from the screen, the anchor’s voice still murmuring about stability and resilience. He faced the dark, inactive monitor beside it, seeing only his own reflection in the black smart-glass. His face was pale, his jaw tight, but it was his own. The heart in his chest was a frantic drum against his ribs, a biological fact at odds with the placid monster wearing his skin on the news. He was forced to see himself, here and now, and reconcile that image with the public effigy being burned for the world. The price of turning away from the lie was having to look at the truth of his own face.
Then, something flickered. Not on the screen, but in the reflection. Behind his own image, the reflection of the bookshelf wavered for a half-second. It was a Datenspuk, a ghost in the data, a scar left by an old, edited memory. For an instant, the rows of books were replaced by a crowd of people. Their faces were indistinct, their mouths open in silent shouts. They held homemade banners he couldn’t read, their protest from a decade ago bubbling up through the cracks in the present. The flicker was a whisper of a deeper, older lie.
The image was gone as quickly as it appeared, the reflection returning to the dusty spines of the books. The symbol was clear. A flickering reflection showing a truth that wasn't supposed to exist. He stood frozen, the cold of the glass seeping into his fingertips. The lie on the Chorus broadcast was new, a sharp and personal violence. This other lie, the one that haunted the very glass of his sanctuary, was ancient, foundational.
He processed the two falsehoods at once. The system hadn't just created a new monster with his face. It was built on a graveyard of forgotten truths, a foundation so rotten that the ghosts were starting to break through the floor. His identity hadn't just been stolen. It had been repurposed as a tool by the very power that had erased those protesters, a power that owned not just the present, but the past. The problem wasn't just clearing his name. It was questioning the very script of the world.
The quiet of the library returned, the hum of the screen now a malevolent whisper. The smell of old paper was the only thing that felt real.
The system was not just lying. It was hunting him with his own face.
