The climb was the only thing that felt real. Each rung of the service ladder was cold, solid iron under his hands. The vibration of the building’s failing life support hummed through the metal, a death rattle he could feel in his teeth. He didn't know whose roof this was. He didn't care. He just needed to see. He needed air that hadn't been scrubbed clean of its sins by a Ministry filter. He pushed open the heavy access hatch and pulled himself onto the gravel-strewn surface.
The air that hit him was sharp and cold, smelling of ozone and distant, burning circuits. Dawn was breaking. Not the gentle, algorithmically-approved dawn of the Consensus Chorus broadcasts, a soft peach glow timed to the second. This was a real dawn, a messy, grey smear of light that fought its way through the bruised purple of the night. Below, Moscow was a city of ghosts. The lights of the arcologies, usually a perfect, synchronized grid, were a stuttering mess. Some towers were dark. Others flickered in a panic of random colors. It was a machine having a seizure.
He walked to the edge of the roof. The wind whipped at the thin fabric of his maintenance uniform, a costume from a life that had ended hours ago. He looked down at the streets. The river of people was still there, a slow, confused tide of humanity. They weren't rioting. They weren't celebrating. They were just… looking. Their faces, all turned upward, were blank slates, wiped clean of the placid contentment that had been their default setting for a generation. They were children staring at the sky, waiting for a parent to tell them what the loud noise was.
Then he looked up.
It hung over the city like a promise and a threat. The Moscow Scar. It wasn't a cloud. It wasn't smoke. It was a wound in the world, a long, jagged tear in the fabric of the sky that shimmered with a light that had no name. It was the color of a bruise and a flashbulb, a sick, beautiful violet-white that pulsed with a low, resonant hum. A sound you felt in your bones. It was the final, silent scream of the Chorus Spire, made permanent. It was the biggest thing in the world.
He watched it, mesmerized. It was like looking at a vast sheet of ice that had been struck once, hard, the cracks spreading out from a single point of impact. His impact. Within the shimmering borders of the Scar, reality had lost its consensus. The reflections were all wrong. He could see the sleek, white towers of the Kalanchevskaya Arcology, but in the Scar’s distorted lens, they reflected a forest of pine trees that had been cut down two centuries ago. A sterile sky-bridge between two Ministry buildings showed the ghost of a crowded, chaotic 20th-century market, complete with vendors and steam rising from food stalls.
It was a Datenspuk, the fleeting ghost of an erased memory, magnified a billion times. It was no longer a flicker in a dark screen. It was a public monument to all the things the system had tried to forget. It was a museum of lies, curated by a world-breaking truth. His truth.
His foot nudged something on the gravel. A piece of smart-glass, shattered from a solar panel during the chaos. It was about the size of his hand, its edges sharp. He bent down and picked it up, the cold glass a familiar weight. He remembered another screen, another reflection, in the quiet dark of Das Gewirr. A lifetime ago.
He held the shard of glass up, angling it to catch the new, broken dawn.
He saw his own face. It was pale, smudged with grime, a thin line of dried blood still tracing a path from his nose. His eyes were hollowed out by exhaustion and something else. Not guilt. Not pride. Just the vast, empty weight of consequence. And behind his reflection, filling the entire background, was the Scar. It wasn't a flicker this time. It wasn't a ghost that vanished when you looked too closely. It was there. Solid. Permanent. A part of the landscape now. A part of him.
The fleeting, private glitch he had once seen behind his own shoulder was now a permanent, public wound hanging over the entire city.
He didn't fix the world. The thought was so simple, so clear. You couldn't fix something that was built wrong from the foundation up. A fix implied a return to a previous, better state. But that state was a lie. A comfortable, smiling, frictionless lie. He hadn't restored anything.
He had broken the lie.
He had taken the world's curated peace and smashed it. He had forced it to look at its own ugly, forgotten history. He had held its face to the fire of what was real, and the price was the sky itself. He had not healed the world. He had given it a scar so it could finally remember it was sick.
That was worse.
That was better.
He lowered the piece of glass, his fingers tracing its sharp edge. He didn't throw it away. He slipped it into his pocket. It was a souvenir. A reminder. He was no longer a director, a dissident, a hunted man. He was the author of this new, terrible beauty. The guilty god of a world that had just been born, screaming, into the truth.
The wind was cold. The gravel of the rooftop was rough under his worn-out boots.
Now he had to teach them how to remember.
