The quiet, in the recovery room ceased to be void. It became a conduit. Devon remained motionless allowing the deep drone of the Engine—Javier's intensified exhale—to flow through him. He did not resist. He absorbed it.
His attention was not on the mood of defeat but rather on the underlying texture. Within any feedback cycle there exist anomalies. Distortions. Reverberations from events, to the loops initiation. He concentrated his hearing, the profiler's intellect analyzing the mental static for a sequence that seemed out of place.
Time merged seamlessly. He recalled Javier in Oxford not during the act of yielding but earlier. The intense vitality, the workspace, the bright fervent curiosity that resembled a form of affection. He infused that recollection into the quiet, not as defiance. As a question. A soft nudge, against the exhale.
Javier. The sand, in water. You mentioned it settles.
Nothing.
He attempted more concentrating on a clearer recollection: Javier's shaking hands upon initially encountering Kane's workbook. The dread, yet the desire. The academic's greed, for knowledge.
The calculation simply resolves. Yet initially Javier it has to be tossed.
A vibration. Not within the room. In the atmosphere. A wavering in the background noise a musical discord that caused the hairs, on his arms to stand. It vanished in an instant, masked by the Engine's computational strength.
But it had been there.
Devon rose, his heart pounding a human beat against the cosmic melody. He had established contact. Not with Javier the person. With the specter, within the machine—the shattered mind conscious of its perpetual captivity.
He lacked any interface or keyboard. Just his concentrated. The overwhelming medium of the Broadcast itself. It was akin, to attempting to whisper a secret within a hurricane.
He shut his eyes forming a recollection with searing vividness: the pair, half a decade earlier, in Geneva positioned among the debris of the initial rough ceremony. The atmosphere buzzing with power the aroma of ozone and dread. Javier, gaze widened not in calm. In the chilling excitement of revelation. He uttered, his tone low and filled with wonder and fear: "It's a calculation of surrender, Devon.. Every formula possesses a reverse. For each decline, toward stillness there needs to be a vector moving away. We simply… have not discovered it yet."
Devon transmitted that memory into the quiet. The opposite. The vector outward.
The reply was not noise. It was agony. An abrupt piercing jolt of torment that pierced Devon's temple—the specter's cry softened by layers of calming algorithms. It was immediately succeeded by a surge of correction, from the Engine, a shield of neural white noise.
In the brief moment separating the scream and the static, a surge of data shot straight into Devon's mind. It wasn't speech. It was organized knowledge—a mathematical symbol, glowing with unfathomable intricacy and a fierce forceful vitality. It contrasted the calming swirling nature of Calculus. This was sharp, uneven, a schematic of conflict. It seared itself onto the rear of his eyelids.
And with it, a name, seared into his mind like a brand:
THE AROUSAL ALGORITHM.
Next came a murmur, faint and tense like a cable on the verge of breaking spun from the static aiming to obliterate it: "Kane… concealed it… in the initial evidence… the cry, inside the breath… they merely seized… the breath…"
The bond broke apart. The continuous drone resumed its suffocating uniformity. The specter fell quiet sinking back into its cycle of capitulation.
Devon gasped, grasping his head. The ache faded,. The glyph—the Arousal Algorithm—persisted burned into his mental vision with dreadful sharpness. It wasn't calm. It was a wail. A blueprint, for ignition. The reverse function. The path away.
Kane hadn't merely uncovered the Lethargic Calculus. He had uncovered its inverse.. Aware of the risk he concealed it within the initial proof, a mental trap, for anyone attempting to use the Calculus without grasping its complete essence. Somnum in their arrogance had taken the sigh. Ignored the scream failing to see they were two parts of one unstable entirety.
Devon hurriedly leapt from the bed. The calm resignation moments earlier was obliterated. He possessed a weapon. Not a discordanter,. A noise-maker. The antidote.
However it remained trapped within his thoughts. A mental design, without any expression. He had to illustrate it to give it shape. He required a canvas, a material of containing such fierce purpose.
He scanned the room. Empty. Then his gaze landed on the tray Hugo had brought. The water carafe. The moisture, on its glass exterior.
With a shaking finger he started to sketch the Arousal Algorithm on the nightstand employing the condensation as his ink. The strokes were intense, urgent, serving as a counter-spell to the spirals decorating Somnum's realm. Once the last sharp angle was finished the water evaporated instantly whispering quietly leaving behind just a subtle crystalline mark, on the wood. The design had absorbed energy interacting with the surrounding air.
A gentle ring at the entrance. It signaled the moment, for another "counselling session" or a meal. He took seconds.
He seized the carafe and shattered it against the wall. He picked up the most pointed piece of glass. Not to harm anyone.. To use as a writing tool.
He faced the light wall of the recovery suite. Then he started to engrave.
He didn't draw. He carved, with bleeding concentration transferring the blazing symbol from his thoughts through the glass fragment into the plaster. It wasn't art. It was an act of rekindling. He was embedding the Arousal Algorithm into the core of the Silence Reserve.
As the final line was etched into the wall the shard slipping from his bloodied fingers the door swung open.
Hugo remained motionless his kindly smile stiffening before breaking into a look of bewilderment followed by a rising catastrophic terror as his gaze landed on the sharp furious mark marring the peaceful wall.
He refrained from summoning Enforcers. Instead he staggered backwards bringing a hand to his forehead as though just seeing the finalized Algorithm was a hit, to his finely tuned mind.
Devon, panting hard with blood dripping from his hand locked eyes, with him.
"You missed the part of the formula " Devon said, his tone hoarse. "You grabbed the sigh. You abandoned the scream."
Outside the room, deep in the bowels of the Engine, the perpetual, placid hum of Javier Jeffrey's surrender faltered. Stuttered. For the first time since its inception, the Quiet Engine encountered a syntax error it could not smooth over. A scream was trying to wake up from inside its dream.