The room was far too still for a pitch meeting.
A woman stood near the center of the glass chamber, datapad in hand, posture eager but contained. Her synthetic scarf flickered once - reactive fabric picking up mild tremors in her pulse. She'd been told not to be nervous. That Maxim Cutter was precise, not cruel.
She wasn't sure that was better.
Cutter sat at the far end of a long, narrow table, hands clasped under his chin, face unreadable. Behind him, Sovereign City crawled below like a living circuit board. He hadn't spoken in over twenty seconds, so she did.
"Project LUX has reached second-phase trial viability," she began. "We've established cognitive stability across five civilian profiles, each in emotionally stressful conditions. The LUX protocol enhances post-event emotional clarity by 43% - no chemical suppressants, no neural degradation."
Silence.
She smiled, softer. "We're not editing memory. We're... anchoring it. Giving people a way to make peace with pain in real time."
Cutter nodded once. She waited, but again, there was nothing. She cleared her throat. "We think this could be... huge. Especially in recovery districts. Trauma response, misinformation resiliency, even civic unity - if people feel more secure in their own perceptions - "
"That's what you think you've built?" Cutter asked gently.
She faltered, then straightened. "Yes. Sir."
"No," he said, just as gently. "You've built an emotional clock. And like all clocks, it doesn't tell time. It enforces it. You're offering the illusion of closure, but at scale."
She blinked. "I'm - sorry?"
"You're not healing people," Cutter said, almost with warmth. "You're smoothing them. Making their edges palatable. Their grief... efficient." He tilted his head slightly. "You're not correcting emotional instability. You're paving over it with manufactured catharsis."
"I - I don't think that's fair. This was reviewed by the ethics panel at - "
He raised a finger. Not to silence her. Just to pause the performance.
"I read your trials. I read every transcript. You ran 16% of them in sectors we flagged for broadcast compliance issues. And you mirrored post-event memory anchors with Sovereign-approved narratives."
She hesitated. "We didn't alter those narratives - "
"No," Cutter said, almost with approval. "You just helped people agree with them faster."
Her voice dropped. "That wasn't our intention."
Cutter leaned forward, slow, deliberate, still calm.
"Your intention doesn't matter. Your function does. And you've created something very useful. Because what Sovereign City needs right now is not truth. It needs consistency. It needs people to hurt on schedule and move forward exactly when we ask them to."
Her pulse spiked as her scarf glitched pink.
"I'm authorizing Project LUX for integration into civilian mental health nodes," Cutter said smoothly. "With adjustments. You'll be reassigned to the Directive Composure Division. We'll rename the project."
She took a breath. "And the credit?"
He looked at her, then smiled - faint and clean.
"You can keep the original name. We'll make sure history remembers it."
He stood as the door behind her hissed open. She hadn't even seen him signal. She didn't speak again as she left the boardroom. Not long after, the door slid open again - this time for a uniformed secretary carrying a polished black folder and two clear data cards clipped to its edge. She moved with practiced quiet, setting the materials on Cutter's desk with a nod.
"The engagement metrics, as requested," she said. "The latest projection models on Purist-aligned skirmishes in the Outer Ring. Civilian sentiment is dipping in zones 9 through 11."
Cutter ran one gloved hand along the folder's edge. "And reaction latency?"
"Thirty-six hours on average. Still within our control bands."
He nodded once, then tapped the data pad from earlier.
"The LUX protocol will be reassigned to Directive Composure, Subdivision Epsilon," he said. "That team hasn't been operational in several years - but they maintain infrastructure. They're quiet. Useful."
The secretary blinked. "Subdivision Epsilon? Are we burying it? I thought that group was - "
"Outdated?" Cutter finished. "Yes. That's why it's perfect. No attention. No expectation. Just space."
He turned to face her fully. "We'll say we're testing rollout compatibility. A few small trials, buried in public health reports. Credit her as promised. Have the final designs filed by end of cycle."
The secretary's smile was polite now, uncertain. "But... if it works - "
"If it works," he said, "I'll know exactly when to let the world see it."
The secretary nodded again, and made her way back to her desk. Not 20 minutes later, the air inside Cutter's office was dropped three degrees colder than comfortable. It was a deliberate adjustment - it shortened meetings. He could've set his system to automate the process, but it was so much more rewarding knowing that his secretary did it on purpose at his request.
The glass doors again opened to the long, quiet chamber, and in stepped a man who seemed almost made of a different time - pressed vest, pocket watch on a brass chain, and a cane more for style than support. His boots rang clean on the floor, not military issue but hand-tooled leather. Mud still clung to the soles, a signature he wore without apology. A laborer by the clothes, and definitely a farmer by the smell.
"Mr. Cutter," the man said, tipping his wide-brimmed hat in the direction of the desk. "Now I do appreciate you makin' time for a simple man with complicated hopes."
Cutter didn't rise. He simply motioned to the seat opposite. "Time is a neutral resource," Cutter said. "How it's used is what makes it costly."
The Purist chuckled, deep and polite. "That sounds like something from them Greek boys. Marcus Aurelius or one'a those stoic fellas. You read history, Mr. Cutter?"
"Extensively."
"Well then. Let me speak plain. The outer districts are stirrin'. We got folk patchin' up water grids with torch kits and faith. Mothers nursin' their babies under blackout lamps. I Ain't askin' for Sovereign sympathy. But I reckon, if we want to keep the Purist banner from tearin' apart at the seams, we're gonna need some rope."
Cutter folded his gloved hands.
"You're asking for funding."
"I'm offerin' a partnership," the man corrected, flashing a gold-capped smile. "Independent supply lines. Minimal oversight. We'll handle the maintenance, the security, and all the minds. All I need's a greenlight. And about two hundred thousand volts."
"And in return?"
"In return," the man said slowly, "you get stability in the Ring. You get a proud community that doesn't riot. Doesn't scream. Just holds the damn line."
Cutter paused, then tapped once on the desk interface. A holographic map shimmered into the air—sectors nine through eleven, heat signatures overlaying known Purist enclaves.
"You know who else asked for independence?" Cutter said, tone mild. "The city of Vienne in 2123. Proposed full off-grid status. Built it, even. Solar arrays, wind vaults, bio-filtration. The entire system was autonomous. Do you know what happened next?"
The man leaned forward slightly. "I suspect I'm about to."
"They dissolved within three fiscal quarters. No riots. No coup. They just… forgot how to manage their own complexity. Autonomy didn't make them strong. It made them fragile."
The Purist tapped the head of his cane against his boot. "Well, the difference between them and us, Mr. Cutter, is that we ain't tryin' to disappear from the system. We just want our corner of it to stop bitin' us in the ankle every time we reach for a tool."
Cutter gave the faintest smile.
"You're charming. That makes you dangerous."
"I've been called worse," the man replied. "And more than once by the same preacher."
Cutter stood then, walking slowly toward the window. The skyline pulsed quietly below.
"You have influence," he said. "Enough that I took this meeting. Enough that if you vanished tomorrow, two dozen people would suspect something. That's useful, and so is your voice. Controlled dissent provides pressure, and pressure creates structure."
The man squinted. "That's a polite way of callin' me a controlled burn."
Cutter turned back, smiling faintly. "Not yet. But if you overextend your flame, I'll have no choice but to collect the ashes."
The tension hung for a breath. The Purist laughed - full, booming. "Lord, you are cold as a banker's heart at a debtor's funeral." The Purist stood, smoothing his coat. "I'll take that as a maybe. And I'll keep my people in line, if you keep your ledger open."
Cutter nodded once. "Submit your utility proposal to the Level-2 infrastructure office. I'll see it finds its way into the correct drawer."
The Purist tipped his hat again. "Much obliged, sir."
As the door closed behind him, Cutter returned to his seat. He didn't look at the proposal on the desk. He'd already filed it, under a dummy index set to flag if it ever re-emerged. He didn't need the Purists quiet. Not yet. He just needed them to believe they were about to be heard.
The outer doors of the enclave let out a tired wheeze as they opened, and the man stepped through like he'd never left the century that raised him. Same coat. Same boots. Same brass chain swinging loose across his vest like a preacher's rhythm gone rogue - and the same voice - sweet, smooth, soaked in the syrup of old-country manners, followed with him.
"Well now," he drawled, tipping an imaginary hat toward the approaching silhouette, "ain't it just good to be back in proper company. You wouldn't believe how cold that Cutter fella keeps his office. Man could freeze a confession outta the righteous."
The boots clicked steady down the concrete hall. His cane tapped in triple-time beside them - polished, unnecessary, theatrical.
Helena waited at the end of the corridor, arms crossed, lab coat half-streaked in graphite and solder burns, hair drawn back in its usual long braid. The hallway behind her flickered with ambient red from a wall-length relay monitor.
"You delivered the pitch?" she asked, voice clipped, unreadable.
The farmer nodded with a slow, theatrical grin. "Oh, I gave it to him sweeter than a sermon in summer. Told him we needed rope, power, and just a lil' faith to keep the Ring from splinterin'. He bought it like day-old bread on discount."
"And?" Dr. Voss's eyes sharpened, already calculating.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled a sealed packet - black paper, red thread.
"Authorization for sector-wide power stabilization," he said. "Including utility transfer routed through Cutter's own clearance channel. Signed, indexed, and logged under 'civil preservation'." He handed it over.
Dr. Voss scanned it once. Her thumb paused on the sector designation. Then, finally, she nodded. "You did it."
"That I did," he said, still in that same sunny cadence. "Though I'll admit, I mighta oversold the charm by a hair. Man looked at me like he was tryin' to freeze-dry a memory. But he never called the bluff."
There was a pause. A subtle change in the air.
Dr. Voss raised one eyebrow. "And how long are you going to keep talking like a tavern ghost from 1883?"
The man grinned.
His shoulders rolled back. The slack in his posture disappeared. The cane stopped tapping. His eyes, once half-lidded and soft, locked into perfect focus.
And when he spoke again, the drawl was gone - replaced by crisp, clinical articulation that didn't so much echo as cut.
"The mission objective itself was achieved in under 43 minutes, feel free to add that to the leaderboard. Cutter requested no follow-up engagement and dismissed the proposal with a public-facing neutral verdict. Privately, he categorized me as a controlled dissent mechanism and filed the utility order."
Dr. Voss didn't blink. "Any suspicion?"
"None. He thinks I'm a personality profile, not a threat. The character did its job."
He set the cane gently against the wall. Dr. Voss folded the packet and tucked it into her coat. "You powered the grid," she said. "That sector will light up in the coming days, of which the first TBN node goes live at 18:00."
He smiled - his real smile this time. Tighter, sharper, no gold tooth, no theater.
"Ain't it funny," he said, letting just a trace of warmth creep back in, "how a man can sell a story about being powerless, and end up walkin' out with a whole damn district lit up."
Dr. Voss stepped forward and looked him in the eye. "You were convincing," she said.
"I was honest," he corrected, tone level now. "Just… through another accent."
Dr. Voss allowed herself a half-smile, the kind she rationed for victories no one else would see or understand.
"Get cleaned up," she said. "You'll be assembling the first broadcast. We're going to show people what Cutter funded without anyone realizing it."
He turned without a word, picked up his cane, not to use it, but to own it - and walked down the hall with silent precision. Behind him, the lights above the enclave hummed softly as systems began to power cycle. The signal was coming. And this time, truth was dressed for war.
The light outside had changed twice since the agent returned. Inside, the enclave moved like a machine, silent, tense, alive. Time bound forward in measured ticks - system checks, signal scrubs, final scrambles. By nightfall, the enclave had gone still. A calculated thirty-five percent of the city was about to listen. When the signal timer reached its final hour, no one looked away.
The chamber they were in pulsed with a barely-contained readiness - rows of cold-glass consoles glowing in low amber, server walls breathing heat through honeycombed vents. A bank of monitors blinked in staggered rhythm, each tuned to a different frequency band: consumer ads, local municipal news, neural implant feeds, child-safe learning streams. Harmless, familiar, and all of them about to fracture in ways no one was anticipating.
Micah stood at the central terminal, hands methodical over the console. The back of his neck was damp, too much focus for too long - but he didn't show it. Every line of code, every signal scrubber, every packet routing trick was clean.
"This uplink node will only hold about thirty-five percent," he said. "We can't mask the broadcast entirely. It'll be seen, but so will we."
"That's fine," Helena replied. "We don't need silence. We need signal."
She leaned over his shoulder, scanning the feed matrix. Her white coat was creased with long hours and streaked in fresh ink from notes rewritten five times over. Her hands still smelled faintly of solder. Always the engineer, rarely the orator.
Layla was behind them, seated cross-legged atop an old surveillance crate, her chin propped in one hand, eyes dancing between preview monitors. One screen flickered through static and resolved into a hospital room, an older woman, neural augmentation scars around her temples, blinking slowly.
"She looks like my aunt," Layla managed to eek out. "Same posture. Same weight."
"She's dead now," said the agent from the shadows, leaning against a support beam. "Three weeks after that recording. Induced manic disorder, neural collapse, seizure. Her augment turned her cognition into a slot machine."
No one replied.
Micah flipped the final switch.
The room deepened into an electric silence, then the signal deployed. All of them held their breath.
In Sector Nine, an ad for enhanced joint stabilization blinked mid-pitch - replaced by a video of a boy with synthetic elbows trying to button his shirt, hands trembling.
In District 11, a home monitor playing a midday game show shuddered, then cut to a quiet interview room, where a man sat with his face half-replaced by chrome, recounting how the upgrades helped him hear the thoughts of strangers until the screaming never stopped.
On a public board beside a transit terminal, a graph appeared. It wasn't stylized. No colors. Just black and white. Titled:
Incidence of Late-Onset Psychosis in Neural-Linked Populations (Post-Age 40)
And below that:
Source: Sovereign Medical Archive / Redacted Studies Division
A voice accompanied it - low, feminine, not robotic but composed. Steady. It wasn't Dr. Voss's voice, but someone she trusted. Someone human.
"You were not asked. You were told this was progress. You were shown gods and sold parts. But parts break."
Cut again, to a waiting room. To a mother holding a child with ocular implants twitching out of sync. To a man in a half-mechanical wheelchair screaming into his lap while his own exoskeletal legs crushed the chair beneath him.
"This is not evolution. This is deployment. And deployment is never for your benefit. It's for theirs."
One screen cut to a handheld recording - shaky, raw, clearly filmed from a trench or debris-ridden street. A man in makeshift body armor leaned into the frame. His voice was low, brittle, barely holding together.
"They called us obsolete before the war even started," he said. "Said we couldn't keep up. So they gave the other side neural aim-correction and bone reinforcement. We got nothing but grit."
The camera shook slightly as something exploded in the distance.
"They don't even bleed the same," he continued. "I shot a man center-mass. Watched him stand up smiling." "You think that makes them strong? Nah. Makes 'em ghosts. You can't talk to a ghost. Can't reason with one either."
He looked into the camera, eyes glassy.
"You want to know why I fight for the Purists? 'Cause we're still human enough to scream when we're hurt."
The screen faded to a child's bedroom, tidy, quiet, with a dim nightlight casting slow orbits across the ceiling. A voice played over a static image: a diary log, voice-recorded, timestamped three weeks before the child's death. A girl's voice, maybe ten. Light. Curious.
"Today I heard music in my head again. Not real music. Not like in the house. It's the implant. It hums sometimes. It told me a story about stars. But the stars were all made of numbers."
A pause. The recording crackled faintly.
"I tried to tell Mom but she said it was the machine learning my feelings. She said it'll make me better."
Another pause, longer.
"It hurts when I sleep now. It sings louder then."
The log ended mid-sentence. The image lingered, then vanished.
Back in the enclave, no one spoke. Micah's jaw clenched slightly, but he said nothing. Layla had stopped fidgeting entirely. Her gaze was locked to the screen. Dr. Voss watched with surgical stillness, eyes narrowed like she was watching a pulse. And the agent… he only smiled, small and private. In homes, offices, courtyards, people didn't scream. They didn't cry. They watched.
A man in a transit hub leaned forward. A woman paused her call mid-sentence. A boy with a half-modded face turned to his mother and whispered, "Is that real?"
No one answered. But no one turned away. The broadcast ended just minutes later. The screens flickered back, and the ads resumed. Programs restarted. Everything pretended to go back to normal. But a seed had been planted. Not an explosion, rather a splinter of the mind. And in the enclave, beneath layers of signal scrubbing and environmental dampeners, Helena finally spoke.
"Phase One complete," she said. "Begin compiling impact profiles."
Layla exhaled. "You think it'll stick?"
"Oh it'll stick. ," the agent replied. "But even more than that, I think it'll itch."