The Architect stood at the central podium on the Assembly Floor. The room was a perfect circle. It was designed to have no corners where doubt could hide, no shadows where inefficiency could breed. Fifty Assembly members sat in their designated seats, their faces impassive, their attention a resource he had requisitioned for this specific purpose. His purpose was to secure the Iron Sleep Protocol. He had come to ask for a weapon, but he would call it a tool. He would call it progress.
He made a subtle gesture, and the floor beneath him came to life.
A three-dimensional holomap of Circadia bloomed in the center of the room, a silent, shimmering ghost of the city. It was a web of clean, white light. And now, it was sick. Ten points of pulsing red light appeared, scattered across the grid. They were ugly. They were messy. They were the psychic signatures of the rebellion’s leadership, captured and tagged by the honeypot. The data was a gift they had been all too eager to accept.
— This is not a rebellion, — The Architect said, his voice calm and amplified, filling the sterile space. It was the voice of a machine explaining its own function. — It is a systemic threat. A psychological contagion that has breached containment.
He let the image of the ten red lights hang in the air. Ten points of failure. Ten sources of chaos. He could see the data streams they represented, not as clean vectors, but as a chaotic weave of unstructured thought. It was like a frayed, useless thread snarled in the gears of a perfect clock.
— The subjects responsible for this instability have been identified, — he continued. — Their methods have escalated. Their impact on the system is no longer theoretical. It is measurable.
The Ambassador of the Client Bloc, a man whose name was irrelevant but whose function was critical, leaned forward. His voice was smooth, polished by a thousand trade negotiations.
— And your proposed solution, Architect? This… cognitive sanitation. Is it predictable? Our partners value predictability above all else. An unscheduled dip in productivity, even a minor one, creates market jitters.
This was the obstacle. The only obstacle that mattered. The clients did not care about souls. They cared about supply chains. The Architect had anticipated the question. It was the only question they ever asked.
— It is a surgical instrument, — The Architect replied, his gaze unwavering. He gestured, and a small simulation appeared next to the main holomap. It showed a single red light being approached by a shadowy construct. The construct touched the light. The light did not explode. It simply went out. — It removes the error without damaging the system. There is no collateral disruption. The process is clean.
He had their attention now. He had reframed the problem in their language. Not war, but maintenance. Not killing, but debugging.
— The sophistication of this contagion has grown, — The Architect said, bringing up a new data window. It displayed a single, stark number. — We captured a data packet from one of their operations. 1.21 gigabytes. It was a trap they believed they had set for us.
A low murmur went through the Assembly. 1.21 gigabytes of unsanctioned thought was an obscene figure. It was an act of profound inefficiency.
— My office has assessed the threat level to system integrity at ninety-eight percent, — The Architect stated. The number was an exaggeration, but a necessary one. Fear was a useful lubricant for political machinery. — Current protocols are insufficient. They are reactive. They are slow. We are losing time, and time is the only asset we cannot reclaim.
He paused, letting the weight of that truth settle. In a world without sleep, time was everything. It was the raw material, the finished product, and the currency of their entire civilization. Wasting it was the only true sin.
— I am therefore requesting emergency powers under a new mandate: the Iron Sleep Protocol. This will grant my office the authority to conduct city-wide cognitive sweeps and to deploy sanitation assets at my discretion, without requiring session-by-session approval.
This was the choice. He was asking them to trade a sliver of their collective oversight for the promise of absolute security. The price was a concentration of power in his hands, a risk they would only take if the alternative seemed worse. He was betting his entire career, all his accumulated political capital, on their fear.
The fifty members of the Assembly looked at the holomap. They looked at the ten red lights. They looked at the clean, silent simulation of a mind being erased. The lights were no longer a tangled mess in The Architect’s view. They were a simple, actionable list. Ten threads to be snipped.
The Assembly Chair, a woman whose face was a mask of pleasant neutrality, spoke. — The floor recognizes the motion. We will now proceed to a vote.
Fifty small lights glowed on the arms of the fifty chairs. For a moment, the room was a constellation of indecision. Then, one by one, the lights began to turn from white to green. There were no red lights. There were never any red lights. Dissent was inefficient.
The final light turned green. A small chime, clean and sterile, echoed in the chamber.
— The motion carries, — the Chair announced. — Unanimously. The Iron Sleep Protocol is authorized.
A wave of polite, dry applause filled the room. It was the sound of fifty hands clapping in perfect, metronomic rhythm. It was the sound of a machine approving its own upgrade. The Architect felt nothing. No triumph. No relief. Just the quiet satisfaction of a system returning to its optimal state. The axis had shifted. The hidden resistance was over. The open war had been legally sanctioned.
He turned away from the podium, his back to the applauding Assembly. He spoke a single, quiet command into his personal comm-link, his first order under the new protocol.
The air in the perfect, circular room hummed with the sound of recycled oxygen. The polished floor reflected the clean, white lights without distortion.
His first order under the new protocol was to deploy a city-wide cognitive sweep.
