The roaring static in his head had collapsed into a low, steady hum. It was the sound of two incompatible engines idling in perfect, hostile opposition. For the first time since the outbreak, the space between them was his own. He could feel the Equity-Aggressor coiled to his left, a knot of pulsing, righteous certainty. To his right, the Patriot-Primal waited, a thing of cracked earth and barbed-wire instinct. They were there. But they were quiet. He was the listener now, the silent administrator of his own internal civil war. The new sanity was fragile, a thin sheet of ice over a boiling sea, but it was his.
He felt the cold of the utility tunnel’s concrete wall against his back, the damp seeping into his uniform. Beside him, Sabine’s breathing was a small, steady rhythm in the absolute dark. The memory of the REM Diagram, his clean white room, was a phantom limb. A place he could no longer go, but whose shape he still felt. A ghost of pure reason. He didn't need the room anymore. He had to become the room.
He looked at the shape of Sabine in the oppressive blackness.
— Hasek wants purity, — Croft said, his voice a raw whisper. The words felt strange, formed by his own volition, not served up by a parasitic ghostwriter. — He wants to scrub the world clean until it’s a sterile, white, silent slate. Like Kennet.
Sabine shifted, a rustle of worn fabric. She didn’t speak.
— Vole wants control, — he continued, the analysis clicking into place with a clarity that was both exhilarating and terrifying. — He wants to package belief, sell it, and create a closed system where the only thoughts you can have are the ones you subscribe to. They see my condition as a disease. A system failure.
He paused, the hum of his internal engines a familiar weight. The thought arrived fully formed, a piece of alien code that was entirely his own.
— But what if it's an engine?
Sabine’s breath caught. It was a tiny sound, almost lost in the drip of water somewhere down the tunnel, but he heard it. It was the sound of a scientist hearing a new, impossible hypothesis. He could feel her turn toward him in the dark.
— What did you say? — she asked, her voice tight with a new kind of tension. Not fear. Curiosity.
— The broadcast mesh Vole used on us, — Croft said, the idea accelerating, building its own logic. — It amplifies emotion. It’s a carrier wave for cognitive states. He used it to make us paranoid, to turn us against each other. He gave us the gun.
He could almost see her mind working, the quick, sharp movements of a master engineer assessing a new schematic.
— The feedback would kill you, Julian. Pumping your raw neural state into a city-wide network… your brain would cook.
— My old brain would, — he countered. — The one that was trying to suppress them. The one that was fighting a war on two fronts. But I’m not suppressing them anymore. I’m just… listening. What if I don’t fight them? What if I just open the floodgates?
He felt a tremor of excitement from the Equity-Aggressor, a low growl of approval from the Patriot-Primal. They liked the idea of being unleashed.
— The system’s firewalls are designed to stop one ideology, — Croft pressed on, the plan unfolding like one of the Analyst’s forgotten diagrams. — A single, coherent memetic threat. They’re not designed for a paradox. They’re not built to process a signal that is simultaneously demanding absolute social equity and rugged, violent individualism. The system will try to parse it, find a logic that isn’t there. It will try to resolve the contradiction.
— And it will crash, — Sabine finished, her voice a bare whisper of awe. — It will crash the whole damn thing.
— We’ll turn my internal civil war into a city-wide cognitive cascade, — he said, the phrase tasting of terrifying, symmetrical justice. — We’ll use Panacea’s own network to broadcast pure, weaponized absurdity. Hasek’s comms will fill with nonsense. Vole’s kill-teams won’t be able to tell friend from foe. We’ll blind them all with the noise they created.
The price of the plan was immediate and absolute. If they did this, they weren’t just fugitives anymore. They were a weapon of mass cognitive disruption. They were the outbreak.
Sabine was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the drip, drip, drip of water, a slow, indifferent clock. He could feel her weighing the variables, calculating the odds, the sheer, beautiful insanity of it. Her hand found his in the dark, her grip firm.
— You’re right, — she said, and her voice held no trace of doubt. — It’s not a system failure. It’s a proof of concept. Let’s show them how it works.
They would not hide. They would not run. They would become the storm that provided their cover, a single, desperate act of rebellion. The only obstacle was the broadcast tower, the most secure structure in the city.
The plan was perfect. And it was impossible.
He squeezed her hand.
— We need a ghost to get us inside the machine.
She knew exactly who he meant. The one person they owed a debt to, the broker who dealt in beautiful flaws.
Their next move was clear: they had to call Echo.
