The Aegis Spire did not have windows. It had viewports. A window was a passive thing, a hole in a wall for seeing what was already there. A viewport was an instrument, a curated aperture for observation. Maximilian Voss stood before the central viewport in his command center, a seamless wall of black glass that currently showed him the planet Earth. It was a perfect, blue-and-white sphere, exactly as it had appeared in every approved textbook and corporate prospectus for the last fifty years. A product with excellent brand recognition.
Three days had passed since the incident. Three days since Sineus, the sentimental little artist, had thrown his tantrum. Down on the surface, markets were in freefall. The Ministry of Public Harmony was issuing contradictory statements every hour. The Consensus Chorus was broadcasting nothing but calming ambient music and archival footage of waterfalls, its primary function of narrative control having been so thoroughly broken. There was panic. There was confusion. There was, Voss assumed, a great deal of weeping. He had watched the initial reports with the detached interest of an engineer studying a catastrophic structural failure.
His personal stock in MemTech had lost 40% of its value. Several board members were calling for his resignation. His face, alongside Sineus’s, was now a symbol of the single greatest disruption to consensus reality in a generation. A lesser man would have been angry. A lesser man would have been pacing, shouting, throwing things. Voss was not a lesser man. He was a senior executive. He was observing.
He gestured, and the viewport’s display changed. The perfect blue marble of Earth was gone. In its place was a live, multi-spectrum analysis of Moscow. It was a mess. The data streams, usually so clean and predictable, were a chaotic tangle of red and yellow alerts. He had the audio feed piped directly into the ambient sound of the room. It was a low, collective moan, the sound of a billion Autonomic Ledgers all trying to process a feeling for which they had no file.
— Fascinating, — Voss murmured. The word was quiet, clinical. It was the sound of a biologist discovering a new and interesting virus.
He gestured again, and the display zoomed in, pushing through the atmosphere. The image resolved on the Moscow Scar. It was not a physical object, not smoke or debris. It was a wound in the Memorum field itself, a permanent reality-fray hanging over the city like a jagged piece of broken glass. The edges shimmered with a sick, violet-white light. The data flowing from it was pure noise, a torrent of unstructured memory that defied every analytical model he had.
His analysts had been calling it a weapon. A memetic bomb. They were fools. They were looking at the explosion and missing the point. Voss instructed the viewport to isolate a section of the Scar’s edge. He magnified it. There, in the shimmering distortion, was the ghost of something else. A reflection of the Kalanchevskaya Arcology, but instead of its clean ceramic lines, the reflection showed a dense forest of pine trees that had been gone for two hundred years. A flicker. A ghost. A Datenspuk made solid.
Sineus hadn’t used a weapon. He hadn’t destroyed anything. He had created something.
— He didn’t erase the lie, — Voss said to the silent, sterile room. — He made the lie impossible.
This was not destruction. This was product innovation. Sineus, in his sentimental, righteous fury, had stumbled upon a new form of Oblivion. Not the cancerous, eating void that Voss had been studying, the void that erased things completely. This was different. This was a stable void. A contained wound that didn't erase, but instead endlessly replayed what had been erased. It was a monument to loss.
And monuments could be sold.
Voss turned away from the viewport. The rage he had felt in the first few moments of his public humiliation had long since cooled and settled into something far more useful: a business plan. The world had changed. The market had changed. The old product—frictionless, curated reality—had just suffered a catastrophic recall. The consumers were terrified. They were lost. Their reality had been proven to be a fragile, editable script.
What does a terrified, lost consumer want more than anything else? Certainty. Safety. A guarantee.
He walked to his primary console, a slab of black obsidian that rose from the floor. He brought up a new project file. The cursor blinked on the clean, white page. He had lost a battle. He had lost face. He had lost a significant amount of money. These were acceptable operational expenses. In return, Sineus had given him something far more valuable. He had given him a new market.
The title of the document appeared in crisp, corporate font: "Market Analysis: Monetizing Persistent Reality Frailties."
He began to type, his fingers moving with calm, deliberate speed. His mind was already outlining the product lines, the marketing strategies, the subscription tiers.
First, "Stability Insurance." A premium MemTech service. For a monthly fee, a client’s personal reality would be shielded by a localized, high-energy consensus field. Proximity to the Moscow Scar or other, future "frailties" would no longer cause cognitive dissonance or reflective anomalies. Their teacups would reflect teacups. Their mirrors would show only their own faces. It would be expensive. It would be essential.
Second, "Grief Integration." The Kalanchevskaya atrocity was a public relations disaster. But every disaster creates opportunity. MemTech would offer a compassionate, proprietary service to the families of the victims. They would not erase the memory of the loss. No, that was the old way. They would re-weave it. They would transform the raw, ugly trauma into a beautiful, poignant story of sacrifice and resilience. A memory they could live with. A story that made them feel strong, not broken. He would sell them back their own pain, but with better lighting.
Third, and this was the most elegant, "Historical Tourism." The Scar was a museum of erased history. A chaotic, dangerous, uncurated museum. MemTech would offer guided tours. Using a new line of personal viewers, clients could safely look into the Scar and witness the ghosts of the past. See the forgotten protests. Walk the streets of a 20th-century Moscow that no longer existed. It would be thrilling. It would be educational. It would be completely safe. He would take Sineus’s symbol of rebellion and turn it into a theme park.
He paused, rereading his notes. It was a solid quarter-one strategy. It reframed MemTech not as a purveyor of lies, but as the sole provider of stability in a world that had been proven to be unstable. He had created the disease, yes. But now he was the only one selling the cure. Sineus had wanted to force the world to remember. Voss would sell them a better way to forget.
He closed the project file. The silence of the Aegis Spire settled around him. It was the clean, perfect silence of a laboratory, a place where messy things like morality and sentiment were filtered out along with the carbon dioxide.
He walked back to the viewport and looked at the scarred planet hanging in the void. The rage was gone. The humiliation was gone. All he felt was the clean, pure thrill of a new venture. The thrill of an untapped market, vast and terrified and ready to buy.
He brought up a secure channel to his board of directors. He would need to re-acquire their confidence. It would be easy. He had a new presentation. He had new projections. He had a new product.
And he had a new world to sell it to.
