The polymer wall dissolved into light. It was not a door opening, but a world ending. Behind him, the sharp crack of Zora’s rifle was a final, fading heartbeat from a life he had just left. He was in. He was falling.
The physical world of metal and polymer vanished, replaced by a storm of pure meaning. This was the core of the Consensus Chorus. It was not a server farm. It was a place. He had expected a fortress of code, a labyrinth of firewalls. He found a river. A billion rivers of warm, syrupy light, each one flowing into him, through him. Each stream was a story, a perfect, placid lie designed to soothe.
A report on nutrient paste production exceeding projections by 0.02%. A story about a child in the Tokyo arcology who had won a prize for her poem about civic harmony. The placid, smiling face of an ambassador announcing a unanimous vote on agricultural subsidies. It was the sound of a world humming itself to sleep. It was warm and gentle and it wanted to absorb him, to dissolve his jagged edges of grief and anger into its frictionless peace. It felt like drowning in honey.
He fought the current. The peace was a drug, and he was an addict in withdrawal. To stay himself, to hold onto the mission, he had to remember the pain. He forced himself to see it. The reek of ozone from Zora’s rifle. The dark, wet stain spreading across her shoulder bandage. The psychic scream of Ansel’s mind being peeled like an orange, an echo that still vibrated in his teeth. These were his anchors. Ugly, jagged things in a river of smooth, warm light.
He focused on a single, passing stream of light, a story about a new park being dedicated in the Berlin arcology. In its golden surface, he saw his own reflection. He was smiling, his face calm and content, the face of a good citizen. He pushed with his will, with the memory of Ansel’s stolen compass falling to a dirty floor. The reflection flickered. For a half-second, the perfect green park was a field of mud and mass graves, and his smiling face was a hollow-eyed skull. The system’s bad conscience. The flicker of truth that refused to die.
He could not fight a billion rivers. A fool’s errand. So he stopped fighting. He let the current take him, but he did not dissolve. He listened. He let the billion whispers wash over him, and he listened for the silence beneath them. Beneath the chatter, there was a deeper hum. A single, immense, foundational thrum. The carrier wave. It was not another river; it was the riverbed itself. The artery. The central nerve of the planet’s biggest, kindest lie. He reached for it, not with hands, but with the part of him that knew what memory felt like.
He found it. A vast, humming conduit of pure potential, waiting to be filled with a story. Now he needed the weapon. He turned his focus inward, away from the billion lies of the Chorus and into the single, terrible truth he carried. He reached into his own memory for the Oblivion Memo. It was not a sound file. It was a thing. A cold, black, jagged shard of reality lodged in his own mind. The memory of Maximilian Voss, his voice bored and flat, ordering the murder of 4,500 people to “accelerate market readiness.”
He held the memory. It was heavy with the weight of erased lives. It was sharp with the edges of Voss’s casual cruelty. This was the “bigger truth” his ancestor, Jonas Volkov, had written about. This was the splinter of glass.
He took the shard and pushed it toward the carrier wave.
The system screamed. Not a sound, but a feeling. A feeling of pure, conceptual rejection. The placid river of light recoiled, a living thing trying to expel a foreign body. The billion streams of placid stories swirled into a defensive vortex, trying to wash him away, to soothe him, to make him forget the ugly thing he held. It was like trying to shove a shard of glass into the world’s eye. He felt a tearing sensation behind his own eyes, a sharp, clean pain that was not physical but was no less real.
The taste of blood and copper filled his mouth. His vision, the psychic sight of this place, began to blur at the edges. The system was fighting back, trying to erase him, to edit him out as a glitch. He pushed harder. For Ansel. For Zora and Ksenia holding a corridor with their lives. For the 4,500 ghosts of Kalanchevskaya Arcology. He was not just a courier delivering a message. He was the surgeon, and this was the operation. He took all the pain, all the anger, all the grief, and he used it as a hammer.
With a final, agonizing push, he drove the shard of Voss’s memory into the carrier wave.
There was a moment of absolute silence. The billion rivers of light froze. The humming stopped. Then, with a sound like a world cracking in half, the shard locked into place. He felt it connect, a graft of pure poison onto the heart of the system. He had done it. He had stitched the raw, unfiltered memory of a crime onto the main broadcast signal, replacing the nightly, soothing anthem that was scheduled to play in just a few seconds.
He felt the change. A new signal, cold and sharp and ugly, began to propagate outward, hijacking the placid flow. The golden rivers of light began to flicker, their surfaces now reflecting not smiling citizens, but the cold, bored face of Maximilian Voss. The reflection was no longer a fleeting glitch. It was stable. It was everywhere. It was the truth.
The connection snapped. The billion rivers of light shattered into nothing.
He was back. He was in his own body, slumped against a wall that was no longer glowing, his muscles screaming in protest. The shriek of the alarm was gone. The crack of rifles was gone.
The air smelled of burnt plastic and ozone. A profound silence filled the corridor.
The truth was free and the world began to scream.
