"They want us to live in fear. They want us to doubt the world we have built. We will not let them. We will not be broken."
It was a masterful performance.
He took the city's collective trauma and gave it a face, a motive, and a name. He transformed them from victims of a terrifying, incomprehensible event into soldiers in a righteous war.
The fear that had been directed at the sky was now redirected toward a single, unseen enemy.
But his speech was not just about inspiration.
It was about control.
To fight this unprecedented threat, he announced, unprecedented measures were necessary.
"The Rogue hides among us," he said, his voice hardening.
"They draw their power from the dissonance of our own minds. To defeat them, we must become more unified than ever before. We must achieve a new level of Consensus, a perfect harmony that leaves no crack for the enemy to exploit."
To this end, he announced the implementation of the Concordance Protocol.
It was, in effect, a city-wide form of thought-policing. The passive psychic monitoring that had been in place since the Inversion was being upgraded to an active, regulatory system.
The Harmonizer network would no longer just soothe anxiety; it would actively identify and neutralize "destabilizing" thoughts and emotions. Fear, extreme doubt, radical dissent these would now be classified as "cognitive threats" and would be automatically dampened by the network.
"This is not an erosion of your freedom," Silas assured the public, his tone softening into that of a concerned father. "It is a shield to protect your minds from the enemy's influence. It is a temporary, necessary sacrifice to ensure our collective survival. When the threat is eliminated, all measures will be rolled back. Until then, we must stand together as one mind, one will, one city."
For Yohan, listening to the broadcast in his apartment, the speech was the most terrifying event yet. It was a brilliant, cynical power grab, using the city's fear to justify the imposition of total psychic control.
Silas was not just lying about the cause of the crisis; he was using the crisis to consolidate his power and enforce a city-wide state of manufactured mental obedience.
The moment the Concordance Protocol was activated, Yohan felt it.
It was a distinct, undeniable pressure in his mind, a feeling of being constantly watched, constantly judged. It was a subtle but persistent force that pushed his thoughts toward a placid, agreeable baseline.
When a flicker of his own fear about the future surfaced, he felt the network gently, insistently trying to smooth it over, to replace it with a feeling of calm trust in Silas's leadership.
When his mind strayed toward Lyra's terrifying revelations, he felt a psychic friction, a gentle nudge to think about more "constructive" things.
He could fight it, of course.
His own training as a Harmonizer gave him the mental discipline to maintain his cognitive independence, but it took a constant, draining effort.
He had to actively shield his own thoughts, to build a wall around his own mind, in his own home, and he knew that for the average citizen, who lacked his training, the pressure would be irresistible.
They would be gently, inexorably guided into a state of passive, unthinking contentment.
He now knew, with absolute certainty, that Silas was not just a misguided leader. He was a tyrant. He was not protecting the city from a great lie; he was the author of it.
The reactions, the cover-ups, and now it was all part of a desperate, century-long effort to hide the truth of their existence, at any cost.
The "Rogue Harmonizer" was the perfect scapegoat, a phantom enemy that could be blamed for the system's own catastrophic failures, an excuse to impose the very control needed to keep the dream from falling apart.
Yohan felt a profound sense of being trapped.
He was an enemy of the state, a heretic in a city that was now actively policing heresy at the speed of thought.
He was a Harmonizer, but he was now in direct opposition to the very network he was a part of.
He looked at the crawling static in his eye, the scar from the Echo.
He had once seen it as a wound. Now, he began to see it as something else.
It was a mark of his separation, a symbol of his immunity to the great lie.
In a world of enforced harmony, his personal dissonance was the only thing keeping him sane.