The air in the service node was thick enough to drink. It tasted of ozone from decaying insulation, wet concrete, and the metallic ghost of a billion forgotten data packets. They were three kilometers beneath the clean, smiling streets of Moscow, huddled in a concrete box that the city planners had misplaced a century ago. The only light came from a portable lamp, casting long, dancing shadows that made the cramped space feel alive. Zora was asleep, a restless, pain-filled slumber, her wounded shoulder crudely bandaged. Ansel was a few meters down the tunnel, a silent, brooding statue keeping watch.
Sineus had the Volkov Codex open on his knees. The book was an obscenity in this world. Its pages were real paper, thin and dry, and they smelled of dust and time. He ran a thumb over the text, feeling the slightly raised lines of ink. This was his inheritance. Not a fortune, not a title, but a book full of dangerous ideas written by a dead man. He was looking for a weapon.
Ksenia Morozova knelt beside him, her expression as focused as a laser. She pointed a slender finger at the page. Her own book, a datapad, lay dark beside her, useless against this pre-digital artifact. She had been an archivist for the state, a keeper of the official story. She knew how to read between the lines, even when the lines were made of shimmering, impossible ink.
"Here," she whispered, her voice a dry rustle in the humid quiet. "It’s not random. I’ve seen this in early 20th-century cryptographic texts. A keyed substitution cipher, but the key isn’t a word. It’s a rhythm. A cadence."
Sineus leaned closer. He had read this chapter, “Narrative Dominance,” a dozen times. It was a philosophical rant about the nature of truth and power. It was inspiring. It was also, he had thought, completely useless. He had been looking for instructions. Ksenia was looking for a system.
— He’s hiding it in the meter, — Sineus murmured, a slow realization dawning. It was not what the words said, but how they were arranged. The long sentences and the short, punchy ones. The repetition of certain phrases. It was a code hidden in the author’s very voice. His ancestor’s voice.
— Exactly, — Ksenia confirmed. She began to tap a sequence on her thigh, her brow furrowed in concentration. — If we can map the pattern, we can derive the key. It will take time.
Time was the one resource they were spending just by breathing. Every minute they spent in this concrete tomb was a minute their enemy could use his predictive models to narrow their location. It was a minute his hunters could get closer. Sineus felt the pressure of it, a physical weight on his chest. He made the choice. The price was the risk of being found, paid in sixty-second increments.
— Show me, — he said.
They began to work. It was a strange duet. Ksenia, the logician, broke the text down into components, assigning values to sentence length and syllabic stress, her mind a cold, beautiful engine of analysis. Sineus, the innate, did something else. He closed his eyes and read the passages with his senses, feeling the flow of the Memorum baked into the ink. He felt the intent behind the words, the emotional spikes and lulls that Jonas Volkov had embedded there over a century ago.
— This section is angry, — Sineus said, his finger hovering over a dense paragraph. — The rhythm is faster. The key should shift here.
— The sentence length shortens by an average of 4.2 words, — Ksenia countered, already inputting the data into a decryption matrix she’d sketched on a spare sheet of paper. — The frequency of plosive consonants increases. It fits.
They were two halves of a single thought. Her logic built the cage, and his intuition showed her where the bird was hiding. For hours, the only sounds were the drip of water, the scratch of Ksenia’s stylus, and the murmur of their voices. The lamp cast a flickering reflection of their focused faces onto a puddle of stagnant water on the floor. For a moment, the wavering image wasn’t of them, but of a needle-thin tower, impossibly tall, piercing a sky of pure static.
Then, Ksenia stopped.
— I have it, — she said. It was not a cry of victory. It was a statement of fact. She had found the key.
The decoded text was not a long passage. It was a series of technical notes and a crude, hand-drawn diagram that made the hairs on Sineus’s arms stand up. It was the practical application of “Narrative Dominance.” It was a theory for a weapon.
The theory was called “piggyback.”
It was elegant in its brutality. It was not a hack. Hacking was for children playing with code. This was a plan to hijack the very carrier wave of the Consensus Chorus, the planetary broadcast that lulled billions to sleep every night. It described a method to splice a stream of raw, unedited Memorum—a pure, weaponized memory—directly onto the signal. It would bypass every firewall, every censor, every AI curator, because it wasn’t data. It was reality. It would pour directly from the Chorus Spire into the mind of every person in the world.
Sineus stared at the diagram. It was a schematic for a miracle. A terrible, beautiful miracle. This was the bigger truth. This was the proactive reclamation he had chosen in the tunnel. Not to run, not to hide, but to seize the enemy’s loudest voice and make it scream.
He saw a small, handwritten note in the margin, in a script even more hurried than the rest. It was from Jonas Volkov. A final thought. A warning.
— What does it say? — Ksenia asked, leaning in.
Sineus read it aloud, his voice low. — “It will feel like shoving a splinter of glass into the world’s eye.”
The silence that followed was heavier than before. The drip of water seemed to stop. They both understood. This wasn’t a clean weapon. It wouldn’t just expose a lie. It would wound the world. It would leave a scar. He looked at Ksenia, and she met his gaze. There was no fear in her eyes. Only a calm, terrifying clarity. Their partnership, born of necessity, was now sealed in the shared knowledge of this awful, magnificent power.
The lamp flickered, and for a second, Sineus saw his own reflection in the dark screen of Ksenia’s datapad. The image was sharp. The wavering uncertainty was gone, replaced by the solid, heavy weight of what he now knew was possible.
The knowledge was the first part of the weapon. But it was only a part.
— This is how, — Sineus said, tracing the diagram of the Chorus Spire. — But it’s not enough.
Ksenia nodded, her mind already moving to the next set of variables. — The theory is here. The engineering is not. To splice a raw Memorum stream requires a specific kind of interface. The technology to replicate your signature, the hardware used to create the Lacuna Cascade… it would have to be based on the same principles.
The conclusion was simple. It was obvious. It was a wall in front of them.
— MemTech, — Sineus said.
They had the schematic for the gun. But the trigger, the firing pin, the very bullets themselves, were locked in the armory of their greatest enemy.
He had a plan to shout the truth at the entire world.
But first, he needed a traitor to help him build the microphone.
