The authority was a cold fact in his terminal, a string of green text that cost RosNova 40% of its political capital. A necessary price. Sineus sat in the cramped, dusty dark of the comms-relay junction, the air thick with the smell of ozone and burnt circuits. The chaos of the Assembly vote was a distant echo, already fading. His focus was singular, a sharpened point aimed at the next layer of the past. He had the freedom to pursue the truth. He pulled up the encrypted archive file from Elina Petrova’s logs, the one labeled simply: The Poison Pill.
His fingers moved, dismantling the layers of pre-war encryption. The code was elegant, a complex architecture of logic gates and dead-language protocols. It resisted for a moment, then yielded. The terminal screen went black, then resolved into a face. Elina Petrova. She was older than in the first log he had seen, the one where she pitched her dream of a perfect archive. The fierce idealism in her eyes had been burned away, leaving something harder, more brittle. Her hair was pulled back severely, and the lines around her mouth were etched by stress, not age. Her lab coat was pristine, but her posture was rigid, a woman holding herself together against a crushing weight. The system logged her stress metrics at a level of seven out of ten.
The recording was a secure conference, the frame showing only Petrova. The other participant was a voice, filtered through layers of distortion, but the cadence was unmistakable. General Ivan Morozov, the military backer who had funded her project. His voice was a cold instrument of command.
— The identity-wipe function is non-negotiable, Doctor, — the voice stated, devoid of warmth. — The consortium requires a final deterrent. A tool to enforce consensus where negotiation fails. We need the capacity to neutralize not just a combatant, but the very concept of their opposition.
Petrova’s face remained a mask of professional calm, but Sineus saw the micro-expressions. A tightening of the jaw. A fractional narrowing of her eyes. She did not argue. She did not protest. She simply absorbed the command, a scientist forced to watch as her instrument of perfect memory was hammered into a weapon of absolute erasure. The lie was being injected directly into the heart of her creation. She was being ordered to build a gun, and her silence was the price of continuing her work.
— It will be implemented as specified, General, — she replied, her voice level, betraying nothing. The official recording ended there, a clean record of compliance.
But the file was not finished. A hidden partition, nested inside the primary log like a virus, began to decrypt. A new recording flickered to life. This was a personal log, filmed with a low-quality, stationary device in what looked like her private quarters. The light was dim. Petrova was alone, hunched over a secondary screen displaying a cascade of complex code. She was designing a countermeasure.
As she worked, a faint, transparent phantom flickered over her shoulder. It was a ghost of her younger self from the first log, its face alight with idealism, its hands gesturing with passion. The palimpsest of her own compromised purpose haunted the recording, a silent testament to the price of her work. She was building a backdoor, a subversive command hidden within the weapon she was being forced to create. The code was not a simple kill-switch; it was a complex pivot, a way to turn the weapon against its masters.
She looked up from her work, her eyes finding the lens of her recording device. The exhaustion was still there, but beneath it was a core of cold, unyielding fire. The ghost of her past self faded. She was no longer a dreamer. She was a saboteur.
— They want a sword, — she whispered, her voice a raw, quiet thing meant only for the future, for the person who would one day find this message. — I’ll make it a mirror.
The recording ended. The terminal screen went dark, leaving Sineus in the sudden, profound silence of the junction box. The low hum of the habitat’s generators rushed back in to fill the void. He sat motionless, the meaning of her words settling in him like a piece of cold iron. The Aletheia Kernel was not just a weapon to be secured or destroyed. It was a tool that could be turned. His mission was not containment. It was subversion. The endgame had fundamentally changed. He was not a guard dog sent to retrieve a dangerous object for his masters. He was the executor of a dead woman’s will, the final gear in a plan set in motion decades ago.
The choice was no longer about preserving a controlled lie or simply unleashing a chaotic truth. Petrova had given him a third option: to weaponize the truth, to make it a mirror that would force the world to see its own reflection.
The dust motes in the terminal's green light danced and settled. The low hum of the habitat's generators felt like a distant pulse.
He closed the file and pulled up the Kausal Compass. It now pointed to a place where the past had been physically erased.
