The door to the ops-theatre hissed shut, sealing him in a world of sterile white and conditioned air. The silence was a physical presence, a clean void after the constant, wet noise of the undercity. Sineus moved across the polished floor, his boots making no sound. The room was a perfect cube, its walls seamless data-screens currently displaying a cool, neutral grey. It was a clean room for clean lies.
Dr. Aris Vance, RosNova’s head of neuro-archaeology, stood beside the primary wall-screen. His movements were precise, economical, as if calibrated to conserve energy. He gestured, and the screen resolved into the file for the smuggler in Sector Gamma-9. Data scrolled in crisp columns. A red, block-letter stamp materialized over the file: CLOSED.
— The physical evidence aligns with the report, — Vance stated, his voice as flat as the screen. — Random street violence. The local network shows no anomalies. The file is closed.
His words hung in the filtered air, a neat summary that erased the cracked, silent ghost Sineus had seen. The official lie was now reinforced at the command level, another layer of concrete poured over a wound in reality. The report was his own fabrication, a necessary amputation to prevent a wider infection of questions.
— You call that closed?
The voice cut through the sterile quiet. Lena Petrova, a freelance consultant whose contract gave her a voice in these debriefs, stepped forward from the room’s edge. Her dark hair was pulled back, and her eyes held an intensity that the ops-theatre was designed to neutralize. She was the grand-niece of a ghost, a physicist from a dead timeline, and she carried that history like a weapon.
— That wasn’t a mugging, Aris. It was an erasure. A sloppy one. There are signs of a phantom, a reality bleed. You can’t just close the file on that.
Vance turned his head slowly, a motion of pure logic confronting an unwanted variable. — The phantom is an uncorroborated sensory artifact. The data is clean. The network is clean. Therefore, the event is clean. We deal in metrics, Lena, not apparitions.
— So we ignore it? — she pressed, her hands tightening into fists at her sides. Her objective was clear: to force them to acknowledge the consequence. — We just keep cutting pieces out of the past to stabilize quarterly reports? One real memory outweighs a thousand curated myths. This isn't just data, it's an amputation.
The word hung in the air. Amputation. It was the right word. Sineus felt a dull throb behind his right eye, the physical residue of witnessing the phantom. The strain of perceiving a contradiction the universe was trying to forget. He had seen the cost of both paths. He knew the price of Lena’s chaotic truth and the price of Vance’s ordered lie.
Mikhail Volkov, his handler and a veteran of the Memory Wars, shifted in the central command chair. The chair hissed under his weight. He was a man made of ferrocrete and hard choices, his face a map of old loyalties. He lifted a cup of black, bitter-smelling coffee to his lips and took a slow sip. He set the cup down with a quiet click.
— Philosophy is a luxury, — Volkov’s voice was gravel, worn smooth by decades of command. — Results are not.
His gaze was fixed on Sineus, a silent question. Sineus gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. The report stands. The lie holds. The price of that choice was the continued decay, the slow rot that men like Vance refused to measure. Volkov accepted the nod, his expression unchanging. He had not gotten to his position by chasing ghosts.
Lena opened her mouth to object again, but Volkov raised a hand, silencing her. His tactic was simple: absolute authority. The debate was over. The status in the room snapped back to a military hierarchy.
— The file is closed, — Volkov repeated, his voice leaving no room for argument. He gestured to the wall-screen, dismissing the smuggler’s file with a flick of his wrist. The screen went blank for a second, then resolved into a new display.
A single, pure-white line cut across a star-field map. It was clean, perfect, and utterly alien. It pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, a heartbeat in the void.
The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the low hum of the life support systems. The light from the screen was sharp and clear, reflecting in four pairs of watching eyes.
A new priority had just overridden all other traffic.
