Three days after completing the Roth narrative, Alexei received unprecedented commendation. His work had increased Ironblood recruitment by twelve percent and improved civilian production efficiency in war-supporting industries.
The Poet found it sickening. The Analyst found it insufficient.
That night, he returned to the Memory Library alone. The cavernous underground facility stretched beneath the Babel Tower like a catacomb, temperature carefully regulated to preserve the delicate crystal matrices containing harvested memories. Few had authorization for unsupervised access, but Alexei's value to the NCD granted him exceptional privileges.
"Working late again, Narrative Architect Voss?" The librarian—a woman with augmented eyes that glowed faintly in the dim light—barely looked up from her terminal.
"Research for Director Krause," Alexei replied, the lies coming easily.
She nodded, inputting the authorization. "Extraction Room Three is prepared."
The extraction rooms were designed for both comfort and clinical efficiency—plush chairs with neural interfaces disguised as ergonomic headrests, medical monitoring equipment concealed within tasteful wall panels. The illusion of luxury couldn't quite mask the underlying purpose: the systematic harvesting and categorization of human experience.
Alexei settled into the chair, initiating the system with his credentials. The interface displayed thousands of memory crystals, each representing a soldier's experiences. He bypassed the curated collections, navigating instead to the raw archive—memories deemed too mundane or traumatic for standard propagandistic use.
He selected a crystal labeled only with a designation number and basic metadata: Infantry-Class Combat Memory / Middle-Belt Conflict / Casualty Event. Nothing special—just one of thousands of similar deaths recorded and preserved.
The neural interface activated. The world dissolved again.
The weight of standard-issue boots. Too much weight. Mud sucking at every step. The squad moving through ruined streets. Buildings like broken teeth against gray sky. The name of the town already forgotten—just another objective on the tactical display. The quiet worse than gunfire. Hayes whispering something about his daughter back home. The blip on the proximity scanner coming too late. The explosion not like in the recruitment videos—not a clean bolt of light and energy. Just pressure and noise and confusion. The world sideways now. Legs no longer responding to mental commands. Hayes no longer speaking about his daughter. The copper taste. The growing cold. The certainty that no one would remember what happened here because it wasn't important enough. Not a strategic location. Not a decisive battle. Just another day in a war without end. The unfairness of that truth bringing tears as consciousness faded. The last thought: This didn't mean anything.
Alexei disconnected, trembling. This memory wouldn't be used in any official narrative—deaths without glory or strategic significance weren't useful for morale. Thousands of similar experiences filled the archive, souls preserved but stories untold.
A terrible understanding formed within him. The NCD didn't just control the narratives of the living—it controlled which deaths had meaning. Some soldiers became heroes in carefully crafted propaganda; others vanished into numeric casualty statistics, their experiences archived but irrelevant.
He moved to another terminal, accessing a different section of the Library. Here were older records—historical archives from before the Great Collapse. Literature, film, personal accounts of conflicts centuries past. Few in the NCD bothered with them; modern psychological techniques were considered superior to ancient wisdom.
But Alexei had long suspected these archives contained dangerous truths. He found himself drawn to a collection of writings from a conflict called "World War I"—a quaintly specific designation from when wars were still numbered rather than perpetuated.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.
He absorbed fragments through the neural interface, experiencing warfare through lenses unclouded by modern propaganda techniques. The raw honesty startled him—these accounts spoke of futility, confusion, and disillusionment without redemptive narrative frameworks. They presented war not as glorious necessity but as human catastrophe.
Why had such perspectives been preserved but not disseminated? The answer formed clearly in the Analyst's cold logic: because they were dangerous. Because they presented war as something to be ended rather than managed. Because they reflected a time when peace was considered not just possible but preferable.
Hours passed as Alexei moved between the ancient literature and the modern memory crystals, building connections, seeing patterns, understanding how thoroughly the current system had divorced warfare from its human cost while pretending to honor sacrifice.
When he finally emerged from the Library, the gray light of dawn was breaking over the city. The Witness had integrated these new understandings, but it was the Poet who whispered the dangerous question that would change everything:
What if we told the truth?