The data did not scream. It arrived on the black glass of his office wall as a quiet, elegant anomaly. A single thread of encrypted CI-Div traffic, leaking from a channel that should have been silent. Dr. Thaddeus Vole’s intelligence network, a far more sophisticated parasite than any that festered in the Sprawl, caught it, isolated it, and cracked it in less than four seconds.
He leaned forward, the white ceramic of his console cool beneath his palms. The decrypted text was pathetically brief. 'Third rail maintenance shaft. Go. Be a rebel.' A name was attached: Dr. Oran Kennet, the CI-Div’s resident sentimentalist. The recipient was the Hybrid, Julian Croft.
Vole felt a flicker of something, a low-frequency irritation that was the closest his curated neurology came to anger. Sentimentality. It was the most persistent and useless of the human mind’s legacy code. A biological flaw that compromised otherwise efficient systems. Kennet, a man tasked with managing a walking paradox, had instead chosen to encourage it.
This was the cost of allowing the state to manage pathology. Their methods were crude, their agents compromised by misplaced empathy. They saw a man to be saved. Vole saw a dataset to be closed. He had allowed the CI-Div to play their game, to chase the Hybrid through the city’s guts, but their sentimentality now threatened to let his prize escape. The Weil Theorem was too valuable to be lost to such foolishness.
He would have to add a personal touch.
He opened a secure channel, his fingers barely grazing the console. A single name appeared on the black glass: Joric Stahl. His chief of security. A man who understood that efficiency was the only real morality.
— Joric, — Vole said, his voice a calm, even baritone that the room’s acoustics rendered perfectly flat. — Our targets are being directed to an exit point. Third rail maintenance shaft, Sector Delta-Nine.
— Understood, — Stahl’s voice was gravel, stripped of any inflection. — My team is four minutes out. The CI-Div team is closer.
— The CI-Div team is a blunt instrument, — Vole stated, watching the tactical display. The blue icons of Hasek’s Scrubber team were converging, clumsy and predictable. — They will attempt containment. We will not. Reposition your team to the surface exit of that shaft. I want a kill box. No one emerges.
— And the CI-Div operators?
Vole considered this for a moment. Collateral damage was messy. It created paperwork. But subtlety was a luxury he could no longer afford. The price of this intervention was plausible deniability, a resource he was now willing to spend.
— They are part of the contamination, — Vole said. — Ignore them unless they interfere. Our primary objective is the erasure of the Hybrid and the rogue. And the recovery of their data.
— Acknowledged. Moving to position. — The channel closed.
Vole leaned back, the single chair in his sterile office adjusting to his posture. He took a sip of chilled, nutrient-laced water from a thin glass. It had no taste. It was simply hydration, delivered with maximum efficiency. He watched the red icons of his Acquisition Team flow across the map, a scalpel moving to excise a tumor.
But a scalpel might not be enough. Croft was an anomaly. His file was a testament to his unpredictability. Vole recalled a captured image from the Hybrid’s own internal monitoring, a bizarrely symmetrical schematic of neural activity labeled REM Diagram. It looked like a blueprint for a cathedral of madness. A pattern of pure chaos. Vole had dismissed it as a symptom. Now, he saw it as a warning. An anomaly could not just be contained. It had to be overwhelmed.
He pulled up a new file on his console. A schematic glowed on the black glass: an experimental weapon Panacea had developed for extreme market corrections. It was a high-energy Scrubber variant, a device that did not simply erase a memetic parasite. It broadcast a resonance frequency that destabilized the host’s entire neural architecture, turning the brain to homogenous sludge. It was messy. It was overt. It was final.
He authorized its use.
His motive, he admitted to himself, was no longer entirely professional. It was personal. The Eudaimonia+ Collapse had been a public humiliation, a perfectly designed product for boosting productivity through self-acceptance, undone by a counter-meme deployed with uncanny precision. Intelligence that had been provided, he later learned, by a young CI-Div analyst named Julian Croft. Croft was not just an anomaly. He was a rival.
— An anomaly should be studied, — Vole murmured to the empty, silent room. — A rival must be erased.
He opened the channel to Stahl again.
— Joric, I’ve authorized the use of the Resonance Scrubber. I want you to deploy it.
There was a pause. A full two seconds of silence. It was the longest Stahl had ever taken to respond to an order. It was the sound of a professional killer processing a command to use a tactical nuke on a street corner.
— Sir, the collateral cognitive damage will be… extensive.
— That is the point, — Vole said, his voice unchanged. — I want to be sure the data is sterilized. There can be no trace of the Theorem left on their persons. No ghost in their meat. Do you understand?
— Understood, — Stahl’s voice was flat again, the brief flicker of humanity extinguished. — Deploying the Resonance Scrubber.
— Good. Report when the trap is set.
The channel closed. Vole watched the tactical display. A new icon, a small, pulsing star, appeared with Stahl’s unit. It moved with them to the maintenance shaft exit. The trap was no longer just a kill box. It was an abattoir.
A soft chime indicated Stahl’s team was in position. They were crouched in the rain-slicked alleyway around the rusted metal hatch of the maintenance shaft, invisible. The Resonance Scrubber was charged, its low hum masked by the storm. The geometry was perfect. All variables were accounted for.
The air in the office was cool and still, smelling of nothing. The black glass of the wall reflected Vole’s own calm, composed face, a mask of perfect, absolute control.
Croft and Sabine were climbing toward a quiet, waiting death, and they thought it was an escape.
