The safe house was a forgotten utility node in the Undercity’s guts, a concrete box smelling of ozone and damp metal. Sineus sat on a crate, his back to the wall, the Kausal Compass inert on the floor beside him. The fractured needle was a problem, but it was a symptom. The disease was a lack of information. To filter the noise his rivals were creating, he needed to understand the signal’s origin, not just its direction. He needed history.
He unspooled a fiber-optic cable from his personal data-deck, the connector clicking into a rusted port on the wall. The port was a dead-end, a severed capillary of Vertikalgrad’s old network, but it still had a physical connection to the RosNova data-spines miles above. It was a back door, forgotten and unmonitored. A risk, but a necessary one. The price of knowledge was always exposure.
His fingers moved across the deck’s surface, the worn keys silent. He wasn't hacking. He was authenticating, using clearance codes buried so deep in the system they were geological features. He bypassed the outer layers of commercial and civic data, the networks humming with the managed lives of millions. He pushed deeper, into the cold, black ice of RosNova’s core archives. Security daemons, algorithmic constructs designed to shred unauthorized access, registered his passage as a system function, a ghost in their machine.
He ran a search string. A single name: Elina Petrova.
The system returned thousands of hits. Public records, academic citations, redacted security files. He filtered them, adding a second term: Aletheia. The results narrowed to a single file, locked behind an encryption level labeled only as 'Maximum'. The file was old, a relic from before the Memory Wars had been named. Its title was simple. 'Project Aletheia - Historical Context'. He initiated the decryption. His data-deck whirred, its internal temperature climbing as it brute-forced generations of forgotten security protocols. For two minutes, the system pushed back. Then, with a final, silent click of a digital tumbler, the file opened.
It was not text. It was a memory log, a full-sensory playback captured and stored in a lossless format that no longer existed. The concrete walls of the utility node dissolved.
Sineus was in a vast, sunlit room. Polished wood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows showing a clean, blue sky—a sky he had only ever seen in simulations. A dozen figures in sharp, archaic business suits sat around a long table. The air was still, the light warm. At the head of the table stood a young woman, her dark hair cut in a severe, functional style. Her eyes, a deep, clear brown, burned with an intensity that felt raw and dangerous. This was Elina Petrova. She looked barely thirty.
The recording’s quality was unnervingly perfect, yet to Sineus’s sight, it was flawed. A faint, grey flicker clung to Petrova’s outline, a pre-echo of a Palimpsest Phantom not yet born. It was the ghost of her own hope.
— The problem is not history, — she began, her voice clear and steady, carrying a conviction that bordered on religious faith. She gestured to the men at the table, figures whose faces were now stamped on currencies and corporate sigils. — The problem is the imperfection of its record. We fight over what was said, what was done, what was intended. We build empires on interpretations, on myths, on lies.
She paused, letting the weight of her words settle in the quiet room.
— The Aletheia Kernel is not a database. It is a perfect archive. A ledger. It will record every event, every action, every quantum state, from the moment of its activation. Not a version of the truth. The truth itself, written into the fabric of spacetime. An incorruptible, un-editable record of causality.
Her idealism was a physical force in the room. It was the most alien thing Sineus had ever witnessed.
— Think of it, — she continued, her hands shaping the air. — No more border disputes based on falsified treaties. No more wars fought over manufactured insults. No more financial collapses built on fraudulent data. The Kernel will provide a single, absolute baseline of reality. It will not tell us what is right or wrong. It will only tell us, with perfect certainty, what is. This isn't a weapon. It's the end of historical dispute, the end of lies.
A man at the far end of the table, his face partially obscured by shadow, leaned forward. He wore a dark, high-collared military uniform, its insignia from a nation-state that had long since been dissolved and absorbed into a corporate bloc. His voice was smooth, a layer of polished gravel over cold steel.
— An admirable goal, Doctor. Truly. A world without lies.
The man smiled, a thin, predatory curve of his lips. It did not reach his eyes.
— But a tool that can perfectly record truth can also, presumably, identify a lie. And a system that can identify a lie can be taught to enforce the truth. We'll also require certain... deterrence features.
The shift in the room was instantaneous. The warm sunlight seemed to cool. The air grew heavy. The price of her dream was being named, and it was its own soul. Petrova’s expression didn't change, but Sineus saw the flicker of the phantom around her brighten, the grey light becoming a shroud. The lie had found its way in. The project would be funded, but it would be born a monster.
— Deterrence, General? — Petrova asked, her voice losing none of its strength, but gaining a new, brittle edge.
— A function to correct... inconsistencies, — the general clarified, his hands steepling. — To ensure that destabilizing elements, false identities, and rogue ideologies are not allowed to corrupt the integrity of the primary record. A way to enforce consensus. For the greater good, of course.
The recording ended.
The sunlit room dissolved, and Sineus was back in the cold, damp concrete of the Undercity node. The smell of ozone returned. He sat in the dark, the information settling not as emotion, but as tactical data. The Aletheia Kernel was never pure. It was a weapon from its inception, a tool of peace deliberately and immediately co-opted for control. Petrova’s idealism was the engine, but the military’s cynicism was the chassis.
He now understood the machine he was hunting. It was a paradox: a device built to create a single, absolute truth, but with a built-in function to enforce a lie. Elina Petrova’s dream versus the general’s reality. Erase or Archive. It was a choice embedded in its core logic.
And he, Sineus, was the only one who knew of a third option. A hidden command. A way to turn the weapon not on a single target, but on the entire system.
He closed the file, wiping the local cache on his deck. The encryption on the master file snapped back into place. He had what he needed. The Kausal Compass would show him the physical path. Elina Petrova’s ghost had shown him the moral one.
He stood, coiling the fiber-optic cable. His destination was set. The chase for the Kernel's location now led to the lawless, floating markets of Float-Hab 7.
