The chime was a single, clean note that cut through the dust and silence of the library. It was a sound that did not belong among the quiet ghosts of paper and ink. It meant they were already dead, and just hadn't been notified yet. Ansel Stern froze, his hand hovering over the useless brass compass he was polishing. Zora Kos stopped sharpening her blade, the rhythmic scrape of stone on steel replaced by a sudden, sharp silence. Ksenia Morozova looked up from her maps, her face a mask of calm analysis.
The sound came from Ansel’s scanner, the jury-rigged box of wires and scavenged parts that sniffed the data-winds for predators. A single, critical alert flashed on its dirty green screen. It was not the slow creep of a pattern-tracker. This was a spike. A memetic energy event so massive it was off the scale. The machine had no number for it. It just screamed.
"What is it?" Zora asked, her knuckles white on the hilt of her knife.
Before Ansel could answer, the world answered for him. Every screen in Das Gewirr, from the main scavenged monitor to the tiny diagnostic displays on Ansel’s workbench, flickered. The pirated entertainment feed they’d been siphoning died, replaced by the sterile, globally recognized sigil of the Ministry of Public Harmony. The Consensus Chorus was overriding every channel. The system’s placid, all-seeing eye had swiveled to stare directly at something, and it wanted the whole world to watch.
The sigil dissolved into a live broadcast. It was not a studio. It was a sky-view of a Moscow district Sineus didn't recognize. One of the newer residential arcologies, a place of clean lines and synthetic parks. And it was dissolving. It wasn't an explosion of fire and smoke. It was a subtraction. A quiet, orderly erasure. A Lacuna Cascade.
A building made of intricate, pre-collapse brickwork went smooth, its history wiped clean in a silent wave of shimmering air. A street full of people, their faces unique and worried, blurred into a crowd of featureless manikins, their colorful clothes fading to a uniform, functional grey. The world was being un-rendered, its details deleted by an invisible hand. The sound from the broadcast was a low, pervasive hum, the sound of nothing. The price of this event was the innocence of every person watching, a currency they didn't know they were spending.
"My God," Ansel whispered, his face pale in the glow of the screen.
Ksenia wasn’t watching the horror. She was watching the data. Her eyes were narrowed, focused on a faint overlay of analytical graphics the broadcast was trying to suppress. She was a former archivist for the state, and she knew how to read the margins of their narrative. She saw the energy wave, the ripple of un-reality, and she was tracing its form. The light from the screen cast a wavering, unsteady reflection on the glass of a nearby display case filled with forgotten 20th-century cameras.
"The signature," Ksenia said, her voice a flat line of ice. She pointed a steady finger at the screen. "The memetic decay pattern. It’s a 99.97% match."
She turned her head and looked directly at Sineus.
"To yours."
The air in the library became thin and cold. Sineus stared at the screen, at the wave of erasure that wore his face, his soul, his deepest self as a mask. It was a perfect, flawless mimicry of his innate memetic pattern. A psychic fingerprint he had only ever shown to a handful of people in his life. He was the weapon.
"That’s not possible," Zora breathed, her anger momentarily replaced by disbelief. "Who could do that?"
"Fewer than five people have ever seen him work raw," Ansel said, his voice grim. He had stopped fiddling with his compass. His hands were perfectly still. "Me. You three. And maybe one or two others, years ago. This wasn't a stranger. This was personal."
Ksenia shook her head, her eyes still locked on the data stream.
"This isn't a natural cascade. It's too clean. The energy dispersal is controlled, focused. It’s targeted. Deliberate."
She was right. It was a weapon. A Void Catalyst. A device that didn't just cause a Lacuna Cascade but aimed it. And the person aiming it had just signed Sineus’s name to a war crime that would be measured in an estimated 4,500 civilian casualties. He watched the featureless manikins wander aimlessly through their un-rendered streets, and he felt the weight of every erased life settle on his shoulders. He was a pawn in a game he was only now beginning to understand.
He looked at his own reflection in the dark glass of the main screen. For a half-second, it flickered. His face, pale and shocked, was replaced by the twisted, fanatical mask the Ministry had broadcast before. The lie was now a part of him, a ghost that lived in his own reflection.
As if on cue, the broadcast shifted. The image of the dissolving arcology was replaced by the calm, authoritative face of a Ministry news anchor. Her voice was soothing, a balm meant to calm the terror she was about to unleash.
"We interrupt this program with an urgent public safety announcement," she said, her expression one of deep, practiced sorrow. "The memetic terror attack on the Kalanchevskaya Arcology has been perpetrated by the fugitive artist and known dissident, Sineus."
His old director’s headshot appeared on the screen next to her, now plastered with the word TERRORIST in bold, red letters.
— A city-wide alert is now in effect. Sineus is to be considered a mass murderer. He is armed, and his abilities represent a clear and present danger to the stability of our society. Any citizen with information regarding his whereabouts is required to report it immediately.
The anchor’s face was replaced by Sineus’s again, this time a full-body shot from the fabricated footage. The manhunt was active. The priority was alpha. There would be no trial, no investigation. The verdict was in, broadcast to a billion screens. The full, smiling, placid weight of the state was now dedicated to his extermination.
The honey pot had been kicked over. The flies were scattering.
But they weren't just being hunted anymore.
They were being flushed.
