The safe house was a Berlin flat filled with the scent of stale air mixed with fresh coffee. Leo remained on a couch holding a cup he hadn't sipped. The first wave of shock had faded, replaced by a lingering unease. Devon was seated opposite him having sent away the interrogators. What he required was a talk, not a report.
"They said it was a deceleration " Devon started, his tone intentionally steady, blending with the room's lighting. "Not an annihilation."
Leo's gaze fixed, not on Devon but far ahead, in the distance. "It's a deceleration " he repeated, his tone empty yet resolute. "Nichole described it. The world… it's like a machine. Overworked. Speeding toward a failure. The friction—the conflicts, the economies, the ceaseless, desperate drive to create and be noticed—it's producing heat that will destroy everything."
He drew a trembling breath. "You recognize the code. You understand when a process is using every resource on the brink of a failure. The sole ethical decision is to end the process. To… to apply a force."
"Belphegor " Devon spoke.
"A heat sink " Leo amended, a glimmer of his sharp intellect reemerging. "They don't revere a demon. They are… system administrators. Flavio he… he helped it all become clear." Leo's eyes eventually locked with Devon's. "He mentioned that we've been conditioned to believe action is virtue.. What if our highest act, our deepest gift is to embrace inaction? To intentionally exclude the productive, inventive and driven minds from the scenario. To lower the system's overall CPU usage."
Devon experienced an unrelated to the room's climate. It was the methodical reasoning, behind it. Not arbitrary wickedness. A bleak pragmatic calculation. "You were the sacrifice."
"I served as a brake " Leo murmured his voice laced with both wonder and terror. "My intellect—my capacity to enhance, construct, to pilot the very apparatus that's incinerating—that was what made me valuable. By yielding it to the quiet I wasn't merely discovering calm. I was offering my calm. Forming a zone of energy. A resistance factor, against reality."
He bent forward suddenly energized by its grace. "Consider Kane, the philosopher! His writings analyzed the insanity of existence. By silencing him they transformed a critique into a mute memorial. A memorial that validates the criticism. Vogel's creations, Mercier's strategies, Van Dort's revamped capitalism… each served as a high-impact hub within the system. Every pause they cause is akin to…, like tripping a circuit breaker. To prevent a city-wide blackout."
The reasoning was warped, flawless and grounded in a distorted affection, for the world. It wasn't nihilism. It was a type of compassion. A mercy killing of momentum.
". You thought you were able to assist?" Devon inquired.
"What other option is there?" Leo's voice cracked. "To continue drafting code that enhances ad platforms' addictiveness? To keep 'creating' methods to waste resources? To persist in a system where the goalpost shifts daily? I was a cog, in an overheating machine. Taking myself out… it was the moral act left." He slumped down exhausted. "You didn't rescue me. You merely reinserted a piece into the apparatus."
A heavy silence ensued. Devon was unable to provide any encouragement regarding Leo's abilities or the positive impact he might have. Within the cult's ideology, that very "good" was the issue.
"Who goes after these 'high-output nodes'?" Devon asked softly. "What criteria do they use to select them?"
Leo shrugged vaguely. "The forum. We… they… exchange profiles. Not of targets. Of… prospects. Individuals whose work or art clearly exposes the system's flaws. Flavio mentioned that true initiates see themselves in the analysis. The recruitment isn't about convincing. It's… an invitation, to reasoning."
"And Nichole Neil? His role?"
"Acolyte. A mentor. He assists you… in recognizing the pattern within your existence. He transforms the leap into something that doesn't seem like suicide. Rather… a concluding, graceful demonstration." Leo glanced down at his hands more. "He mentioned the ultimate phase, the Conjunction would occur when sufficient resistance was applied to produce a drag. A universal exhale. A deceleration in the stock market in news flows, in the… the momentum of all things."
Devon's satellite phone vibrated. A brief note from Pamela: Market irregularities observed. Mysterious simultaneous drops in high-frequency trading systems, on five exchanges. No economic explanation. Analysts are terming it "the Glitch."
The sacrificial brake. Not a metaphor. An emerging reality.
He gazed at Leo the individual diminished by his brilliant intellect to a mere element, in a universal formula. The cult wasn't promoting peace. It was promoting purpose—a ultimate purpose that rendered all other efforts meaningless.
"You wanted a reason for why I continue to compile " Devon stated, rising from his seat. His fatigue now felt like a burden he bore with a stubborn lucidity. "I don't possess a reason that fits neatly into your equation. My reason is the mistake. The glitch. The illogical wasteful affection, for the overheating screaming world. The love that opts for the pain of engagement."
He moved toward the door. "Your code has a mistake, Leo. It overlooks that aspect. Perhaps that defect is the thing remaining to contend with."
He abandoned the developer alone in the silent chamber, a potential victim trapped between two torments: the torment of the machine and the bliss of the tomb. Meanwhile Devon stepped into Berlin's ambitious night burdened with the grim realization that the adversary's greatest weapon was neither an emblem nor a relic but a straightforward crushing question which now had an organized solution: How do you rescue the world?
By letting its best and brightest minds go silently to sleep.