The Architect stood at the central podium. The Assembly Floor was a perfect circle of white ceramic and brushed metal, a room designed to have no corners where doubt could hide. Fifty seats were filled. Fifty faces, illuminated by the soft, indirect light, were turned toward him. The air was recycled, scrubbed of all scent, all humidity, all memory. It was a clean machine for making clean decisions. His goal was simple. He was here to restore order.
He placed his hands on the cool, smooth surface of the podium. He did not need notes. The logic was self-evident.
— We have a security threat, — he began. His voice was calm, amplified just enough to fill the space without echo. It was the voice of reason. — It is not a threat of physical violence. It is not a threat to our infrastructure. It is a threat to the system itself. A threat to the integrity of the Productivity Loop.
He paused. He let the silence work. The members of the Assembly, executives and stakeholders from every division of Optima Consolidated, were masters of the productive pause. They understood its value.
— For generations, we have enjoyed a society free from the inefficiencies of the subconscious. We replaced the chaotic, useless process of sleep with a managed state of productive non-consciousness. We gave humanity stability. We gave it purpose.
A low murmur passed through the room. It was the sound of agreement. It was the sound of money feeling safe.
— But a contagion has been introduced into the system, — The Architect continued. — A psychological contagion. We have identified pockets of what can only be described as Imaginative Deviance.
He let the term hang in the sterile air. It was a good term. It sounded like a medical diagnosis. It sounded manageable.
— These are individuals who are actively cultivating non-productive thought. They are creating chaotic, unstructured data within their own minds. It is a snarl of useless, frayed threads interfering with the clean, efficient grid of our society. It is an error state that, if left unchecked, will cascade.
He saw them nodding. They understood error states. They understood cascades. They were men and women who spent their lives optimizing systems. They hated bugs.
— This is not dissent. Dissent is a function of logic, and can be addressed with superior logic. This is a sickness.
A single light on the circular dais brightened. It was the signal for a registered query. The Ambassador from the Client Bloc, a man whose entire function was to ensure the smooth flow of goods and data, had a question. The Architect gave a slight, permissive nod.
— Ambassador.
The Ambassador’s voice was smooth, polished by a thousand trade negotiations. He represented the corporations that bought the output of Circadia’s nightly loops. He did not care about souls. He cared about supply chains.
— Architect, — the Ambassador began, his tone one of respectful concern. — My principals appreciate the candor. Our agreements, however, depend on stable and predictable productivity metrics. This… contagion. What is its current impact on output? And this proposed countermeasure… is it predictable? Is it contained? Instability is bad for trade.
The question was a scalpel. The Ambassador was asking if the cure was worse than the disease, but he was asking it in the language of quarterly reports. The price of this escalation was the Client Bloc’s confidence. The Architect had to manage their fear of risk.
— An excellent and necessary question, — The Architect replied, his voice a placid lake. He turned his body slightly to address the Ambassador directly, a gesture of inclusion. — The current impact on output is negligible. Less than one-tenth of one percent. But the rate of spread is exponential. We are not addressing a current loss. We are preventing a future collapse.
He let that sink in. Collapse was a word they understood.
— As for the countermeasure, it is not a blunt instrument. It is a surgical tool. Think of it as a new form of cognitive sanitation. It is designed to identify and neutralize only the sources of the contagion, leaving the surrounding system untouched. The process will be entirely predictable.
He was selling extermination as a software patch. He saw the Ambassador’s shoulders relax a fraction of an inch. The man was satisfied. The risk had been quantified and mitigated. The product was sound.
— To that end, — The Architect said, turning back to the Assembly as a whole. — I would like to show you the scale of the problem.
He touched a control on the podium. The lights in the Assembly Floor dimmed. In the center of the room, a holomap bloomed into existence. It was a three-dimensional schematic of Circadia, a ghost city of pale blue light. It was clean. It was perfect.
Then, ten points of angry, pulsing red light appeared within the grid. They were scattered, but Corbin Shaw’s analysis had shown they were connected. They were the psychic signatures captured from the honeypot. The leadership of the rebellion, rendered as ten unambiguous targets.
— These are not people, — The Architect said, his voice dropping to a more serious, clinical tone. — These are the primary nodes of the infection. They are the sources of the chaotic data. They are the origin of the Imaginative Deviance. Each one is a threat to the stability of millions.
The room was silent. The red lights pulsed like sick heartbeats in the clean blue city. The members of the Assembly were no longer looking at a political problem. They were looking at a pest control problem.
— We have the means to sanitize these nodes. But to do so efficiently, to do so with the surgical precision the Ambassador rightly demands, we require a new mandate. A new protocol.
He raised his voice, letting it fill the room with the weight of his authority.
— I am asking this body to authorize the Iron Sleep Protocol.
The words settled. Iron Sleep. It sounded strong. It sounded final. It sounded like security.
— The protocol grants my office emergency powers to conduct city-wide cognitive sweeps and to deploy sanitation assets—the Cognitive Stalkers—at our discretion, without requiring session-by-session approval. It is a vote for efficiency. It is a vote for stability. It is a vote to protect the greatest achievement in human history.
He looked around the room, meeting the eyes of the stakeholders. He saw no doubt. He saw only the cold, hard calculus of risk management.
— I call for a vote.
On the small terminal embedded in the arm of each chair, the proposal appeared. A simple question. Authorize Iron Sleep Protocol: YES / NO.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the results flashed on the main screen behind the Architect. The vote was unanimous. Fifty votes for YES. Zero votes for NO.
The axis of the war had just shifted. It was no longer a hidden thing of whispers and secret sessions. It was now a sanctioned, open conflict. The machine had just been given permission to purge its own ghosts.
The Architect allowed himself a single, slow nod. It was not a gesture of triumph. It was a gesture of completion. A task on a list had been checked off. He had spent his political capital, and he had his mandate. The Ambassador was watching him, his expression unreadable, but it did not matter. The decision was made. The system would be protected.
The holomap of Circadia faded, leaving the room once again in its clean, white light. The Architect looked out through the armored glass of the Spire, down at the endless, ordered city below. On a massive public information screen miles away, a line of static flickered for a fraction of a second. It looked like a single, wavering thread against the perfect grid of the productivity data. An imperfection. A loose end.
The sight filled him with a brief, cold flicker of annoyance. The work was not yet done.
The white light of the Assembly Floor was pure and absolute. The silence that followed the vote was the sound of a system returning to its optimal state.
Now he could begin the real sanitation
