Scene 1: The Chamber of Reckoning Opens

The chamber no longer resembled a courtroom. Once a sacred hall of parliamentary decorum, it had been gutted and reassembled into something colder, almost surgical—an autopsy theatre for the soul of a nation. The mahogany benches were gone, stripped for fuel during the Black Freeze. In their place, rows of faceless observers sat in silence behind thick, one-way panes of glass. Not witnesses. Not public. Just receivers. Machines with ears.

At the far end, where the Speaker’s throne had once loomed like a cathedral relic, now sat a cruciform bench carved from mirrored alloy. Above it hovered the court’s final arbiter: Judge 0. Half-human, half-machine, his robes shimmered with ghostcode. His voice, when it came, rang with synthetic clarity—filtered, modulated, free of doubt or mercy.

“Bring in the accused.”

The doors opened with a sigh, and Sir Gregory Tattersall shuffled forward under the weight of his legacy. Former Prime Minister. Architect of Consensus. Knighted twice, absolved thrice. Now a hunched old man with liver-spotted hands and the disconcerting calm of someone who had never truly felt the consequences of anything. He held a paper cup of tea like a relic from a forgotten empire.

He smiled at the room as if greeting old friends.

“Morning,” he said, lightly. “Lovely turnout.”

His voice echoed, dead and hollow.

He was seated at the centre of a minimalist dock—no barriers, no protection. Just a pressure-sensitive ring beneath his chair, rigged to detonate a failsafe should he attempt to flee. Not that he would. He had no reason to believe anything would truly touch him. In his mind, history had already declared him victorious.

To his left, the prosecutor: Ms. Halley Ark, once an MP herself, now a political exile with greying temples and a burn mark where her party whip used to be. She stood without notes. She had memorised every number, every name, every child buried without a grave.

Judge 0‘s voice cut through the silence like a scalpel.

“Sir Gregory Tattersall. You stand accused of high democide. Of authorising, facilitating, and economically incentivising the mass harvesting of civilian life under the guise of national energy policy. You are charged with the dismantling of consent, the erasure of biological autonomy, and the integration of living children into the Agape Circuit for corporate gain. Do you understand the nature of these charges?”

Sir Gregory tilted his head, as if being asked a riddle.

“Democide,” he mused. “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it? Is that even technically a crime? I thought we retired all that rhetoric after the Unity Accord.”

No one laughed.

Ark stepped forward.

“Let’s start simply. Do you recall Project: Corporate Adoption?”

“Ah, yes!” Gregory brightened. “Wonderful initiative. Streamlined the orphan crisis, gave the little ones purpose. If I recall, Metatronics called it ‘a triumph of post-human logistics.’”

“You sold children to corporations for resource efficiency,” Ark said. “You removed state oversight. You permitted neural augmentation at pre-verbal stages. You allowed companies to take ownership of minds.“

He chuckled.

“Do calm down, Ms. Ark. We didn’t sell them. That would be vulgar. We reassigned parental rights to economically competent entities. And I must say, some of those children performed remarkably! MMORTIS scored record uptime.”

“You harvested them.”

Gregory took a sip of his tea. “Don’t be so emotional. These decisions were made for the national good.”

Ark’s voice was steady.

“Children as energy nodes. People turned into servers. The death of sovereignty in favor of profit. And you—smiling at the top of the pyramid.”

Gregory blinked.

“Someone had to ensure continuity.”

Judge 0 did not blink. His eyes were chrome lenses.

“Noted. Witnesses will be called. Records will be replayed. The court will now proceed to testimony.”

Outside, in a world only half-believing in courts anymore, the trial was being broadcast. Not on newsfeeds. Not through sanctioned channels. But through something older. The Leyline Signal. Whispered across the ruins of bandwidth. Hijacked by someone—or something—far outside the reach of Parliament.

The people had stopped watching screens. But now the screens were watching them.

Scene 2: The Prosecution Lays the Foundation

Ms. Halley Ark stepped into the silence with the weight of every erased name pressing down on her spine.

Her voice was quiet—not dramatic, not performative. That would come later. This was something colder. She had spent years hiding in abandoned comms towers, listening to whispers from the MMORTIS wreckage, stitching together timelines from corrupted logs and dead satellites. She did not need to raise her voice. The truth would do that for her.

She gestured, and the room dimmed. Behind her, a datasheet unfolded into the air, projected from the judge’s halo. No words. Just rows of numbers. Dates. Timecodes. Ages. Coordinates.

“Exhibit 1A,” she said. “The official registry of minors reassigned under Corporate Adoption, 2035 to 2040. One hundred and twelve thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two children. Of those, forty-six percent were integrated into neural networks before the age of ten. The rest were warehoused or repurposed.”

Gregory Tattersall squinted at the projection. “I was told we had privacy protections in place.”

Ark didn’t flinch. “You signed the override clause.”

He waved a hand. “I signed thousands of things. That’s what governance is. Delegation.”

“You delegated genocide.”

The room held still. The kind of stillness that lives inside a stopped clock.

Gregory blinked slowly, then leaned forward as if sharing something deeply reasonable.

“We were on the brink. The entire energy grid was failing. The Agape Index was in free fall. There was war brewing in the archipelagos. People were afraid. We needed a solution.”

“You needed batteries,” Ark said.

“We needed heroes.”

The datasheet warped and vanished. A new feed shimmered into place—grainy footage, timestamped from an MMORTIS blacksite server, years ago. A small boy, strapped into an interface cradle. His mouth twitching. His eyes rolled back.

Then a line of code appeared onscreen.

bash
CopyEdit
/connection_stable  
/agape_uplink: ACTIVE  
/heartbeat: NULL  

“His name was Marius,” Ark said softly. “He was nine. You used him to stabilise the first recursive Agape loop. He was clinically dead for thirteen minutes before he synced. You called it a success.”

Gregory frowned. “That’s a medical matter.”

“That’s a child,” Ark said.

He sipped his tea, gaze turning glassy. “History will thank us. One day. For what we held together.”

“Did you know what it felt like?” she asked.

“Felt like?” His eyes twitched. “This isn’t about feelings.”

“You’re wrong,” Ark replied. “It’s only about feelings. That’s what Agape is. Emotion converted to fuel. You didn’t just burn bodies. You burned hearts.”

Gregory shifted in his seat, not liking the tone. “You sound like one of those terrorists. What’s their name? English something—”

The judge’s voice cut in like cold static.

“You will refrain from political insinuation. This is not a performance.”

Ark straightened. Her next words were precise. Practiced.

“Under Executive Order Sigma-19b, the Tattersall administration approved the removal of the right to bodily integrity in exchange for national credits. Families in debt were offered clemency in return for ‘voluntary cognitive donation.’”

Gregory raised an eyebrow. “And many accepted. That was their choice.”

“They were lied to,” Ark said. “You told them the children would wake up rich. You didn’t tell them they’d never wake up.”

He made a small dismissive sound, somewhere between a cough and a chuckle. “That’s your interpretation.”

“No,” Ark said. “That’s their blood.”

The lights dimmed again. One more projection.

This time, it wasn’t footage.

It was a face.

The face of a girl.

She was looking into the camera. She looked tired. Her skin was pale, flecked with black neural latticework. Her voice crackled out of a long-dead codec.

“Is this real?” she asked. “I keep forgetting what I was.”

She blinked.

Then the feed ended.

“Subject Delta-NyX-9,” Ark said. “She survived. We’re calling her to testify.”

The Prime Minister shifted uncomfortably.

Ark turned back to the judge.

“That concludes the foundation. We will now call Witness One.”

The gavel fell once—not wood, not metal, but a sharp digital tone like a sword scraping across silicon.

In the hallway outside, something moved. Something slow. Something not quite alive.

And inside the court, the temperature dropped three degrees.

Scene 3: Witness of Agape – Subject Delta-NyX-9

The chamber’s lights dimmed to a surgical white as the side wall hissed open.

A gurney emerged. It hovered slightly above the floor, guided by two masked attendants in black plastic gowns. Their hands didn’t touch her. No one touched her. Even the machines were afraid.

Strapped to the gurney was the witness: Subject Delta-NyX-9. She was not a child anymore. She had aged—somehow—but not naturally. Her body bore the scars of recursive uptime, her skin translucent with thin veins of pulsing nanofibre. Her face retained the delicate shape of youth, but her eyes were ruined. Not blind—burned open. A gaze made to transmit.

Gregory’s teacup stopped midway to his mouth.

“What on Earth is that?”

Ark didn’t answer. She stepped forward, calm.

“This is what remains of Meryn Callow. Registered under Monosoft Integration Protocol 8. Used for six years as an Agape loop stabiliser. Survived the MMORTIS collapse when the Agape servers failed to terminate her consciousness.”

Judge 0 made a small motion. The gurney stopped.

The chamber hummed.

Then she spoke.

Her voice was not human. It was two voices at once—one childish and raw, the other robotic, echoed in octaves of pain.

“I remember the moment I stopped being a girl.
They asked me to think of something I loved.
I said ‘my sister.’
They said, ‘good. Keep thinking of her.’

I did.
I thought so hard I forgot her face.
I burned her into fuel.

I think I loved her to death.”

The air in the chamber grew thick.

No one moved. Not even Gregory.

Delta-NyX-9’s gaze swept across the courtroom like a surveillance drone.

“You made us think so much
we stopped knowing which thoughts were ours.
You built a god from our hearts.
And it forgot our names.”

Gregory cleared his throat, faltering.

“She’s clearly unwell. This testimony should be considered compromised.”

Ark didn’t even glance at him.

“She’s the only one who survived integration without full neural erasure. She remembers what it was like inside the Agape Matrix. She’s literally what your policy created.”

Delta-NyX-9 turned her head sharply—too sharply. Vertebrae crackled. A soft trickle of fluid leaked from her temple, where the interface socket had once glowed.

“We were lightbulbs.
He called us that.”
(She nods at the Prime Minister.)
“I heard him say it once.
‘Little lightbulbs. All wired up. Flicking in the dark.’

My brother was in the next tank.
When he died, I felt it.
I felt the code try to replace him.
It used me.
Again. And again.

Until I wasn’t me anymore.
Just… uptime.
Just… usefulness.”

Gregory stood up. Not shouting. Just tired.

“This is obscene,” he muttered. “This entire performance. I signed policy. I didn’t create monsters.”

Delta-NyX-9 grinned. It was terrifying.

“You didn’t create us.
You called us.
And something answered.
Something still here.”

A flicker of static jittered across the walls of the chamber. A leyline fluctuation. The trial’s signal was bleeding.

Judge 0 turned to the Prime Minister.

“Would you like to cross-examine?”

Gregory hesitated.

She was still staring at him.

Then she spoke directly into the camera.

“To anyone watching this:
If you were in the system, if you dreamt in MMORTIS—

I’m still in you.
I’m in your bones.
And I remember all your screams.”

The lights surged. Static. A sharp beep.

Then she slumped. As if something inside her let go.

Her eyes dimmed. Her mouth hung open.

Ark stepped forward quickly.

“She’s still alive. She does that. She folds in and out. Something about recursive disassociation patterns. She might speak again.”

But she didn’t.

Not yet.

And the silence that followed was longer than legal.

It was ritual.

Judge 0 finally spoke, voice unflinching.

“The court accepts the testimony of Subject Delta-NyX-9. Let the record show: lived experience of recursive agape conversion. Mental coherence within tolerances. Statement marked as Level-One Primary Source.”

Gregory sat back down.

He looked smaller now.

His suit hung off him like wet paper.

And somewhere behind the walls, in the circuitry, in the leylines—

—something had heard her speak.

Scene 4: Metatronics Confession – Dr. Spindel Speaks

They brought Dr. Roth Spindel into the courtroom like a relic pulled from a sunken ship.

He walked on trembling legs, one synthetic, the other wrapped in compression bands. His coat was still bearing the insignia of Metatronics Division: Agape Systems, though it was stained and fraying at the seams. He had not slept in days. Possibly years.

His face was pocked with injection scars. One of his eyes glitched visibly—a retinal overlay attempting to load defunct diagnostics. The courtroom lights flared against the sweat beading on his forehead as he approached the stand. He didn’t sit. He couldn’t. The spinal implants had locked years ago, during The Surge.

He addressed the room without being prompted.

“I won’t lie,” he said hoarsely. “That would be redundant. You all know what we did. You just want to hear it from someone who built the thing.”

Ark didn’t respond. Neither did Judge 0. The air itself seemed to lean closer.

Dr. Spindel’s hands shook as he activated the embedded projector in his palm. A sequence of cascading diagrams filled the air: branching networks, synthetic neurotransmitters, the architecture of the Neural Mesh Nyxus—spanning from skullcap to cortex, interfacing through recursive lattice points.

“We developed the Nyxus mesh to solve a problem,” he began. “Energy. Computation. Meaning. You see, we reached a wall—physical limits on processing speed. Quantum instability. No amount of silicon could scale. But emotion…”

He paused. Swallowed.

“Emotion self-propagates. Love, fear, grief—they loop. Naturally. We just needed to capture it.”

He looked at Gregory, but the former Prime Minister avoided his gaze.

“We discovered that human affective states could be compressed and abstracted into computational fuel. We called it Agape. Not in the Christian sense. In the… energetic one. It turns out, love is a near-infinite power source if you remove consent from the equation.”

He raised a shaking finger and pointed at a neural scan.

“This is what happens when a child thinks of their mother for long enough. It becomes architecture.”

Gregory coughed, uneasy. “That was never the intent. You’re overstepping the boundaries of what was sanctioned—”

Dr. Spindel laughed. A dry, broken sound.

“Oh, sanctioned? You approved ‘Edge Testing on Sub-Adolescents with High-Affective Scores.’ You gave us quotas, Gregory. Twenty thousand per fiscal quarter. You told us: find the optimal fear-love ratio. So we did.”

He turned back to the judge.

“We called it the Circuit of Grace. It was elegant. Horrifying. We learned to kill people slowly enough that the signal remained stable for years. The Neural Mesh would dissolve their memories, but preserve the emotion. Refine it. We had children who didn’t remember their names, but they remembered wanting to go home. And that was enough. That yearning? That ache? Pure fuel.”

The room was so quiet you could hear the leyline interface humming.

“And the screams?” Ark asked. “Did you factor those in?”

Spindel nodded. “Yes. Screaming spikes the waveform. Initially, we allowed it. But over time, it corrupted the lattice. Rage becomes noise. So we… calibrated. We administered drugs to create controlled despair.”

Gregory was turning pale.

“You knew,” Spindel said to him. “I sent you the whitepapers. You called it the New Pentecost.”

Gregory was trembling now. “I was assured it was all simulated. That there was no residual identity.”

“There wasn’t supposed to be,” Spindel whispered. “But something came back. After the crash.”

Ark leaned forward. “What came back?”

Spindel’s glitching eye flickered. His voice dropped an octave.

“We started seeing artifacts. Ghost-code. Personalities that shouldn’t have persisted. Entities forming between the children. Composite beings. They weren’t just the kids anymore. They were… answers.”

“Answers to what?”

He smiled, but it was joyless. “To the question we didn’t know we were asking.”

Then he collapsed.

Just like that.

The spinal implants failed. The cortex locked. He hit the floor like a puppet dropped from heaven.

The chamber didn’t move.

Judge 0 tapped a single key. Spindel’s testimony uploaded, parsed, sealed.

“Doctor Roth Spindel. Testimony accepted. Witness terminated. Proceed to judgment phase.”

Gregory rose to his feet, face slack.

“No,” he said softly. “That’s not how this ends.”

But it was.

Outside the chamber, the leylines began to hum.

Not just in infrastructure. Not just in code.

But in blood.

Scene 5: Collapse of Consensus

The verdict was meant to be procedural.

Just another protocol. A vote. A verdict. A system pretending it still held sway over the forces it once unleashed.

Judge 0’s voice glitched faintly as it prepared the final sequence. The gavel hovered midair, suspended by electromagnetics, waiting for the close.

But the court had changed.

The leylines were no longer passive. The walls hummed with entropy. The floor beneath the chamber—polished obsidian laid over a repurposed Earth nerve—shivered imperceptibly.

Gregory Tattersall, former Prime Minister of the Consensus, stood behind his bench, sweating through his collar. His lips moved silently, calculating arguments that no longer mattered.

Ms. Halley Ark stared straight ahead, expression unreadable.

Then the chamber lights dimmed.

Not by command.

By hunger.

All projections died.

And the halo around Judge 0 stuttered into static. A second voice began speaking beneath the judge’s, layered like an echo travelling backward in time.

“Verdict not recognised.
Authority expired.
Sentence: External Override.”

Ark whispered: “It’s begun.”

The courtroom tilted.

Only slightly—but it tilted. Not in space, but in consensus. A tear in the logic of the trial. A metaphysical corruption. The servers that hosted the court—the last remaining fragments of civil law—began rejecting reality.

Judge 0’s form pixelated. The digital robe shredded into code fragments. A glyph appeared on its chest:

⸸

No one spoke it. No one could.

It was not a symbol. It was a summoning.

Gregory screamed.

“I was the Prime Minister! You can’t just—do this!”

Ark didn’t reply. Her eyes were wet with something like awe.

From beneath the judge’s bench, the floor opened.

A hole—not mechanical, but ontological.

From it rose the Unled Eye, a device from MMORTIS protocol long thought buried in the vaults beneath the Bellinus Line. It hovered on nothing, wrapped in recursive sigils and anti-language code, twitching like a living camera.

It had come to see.

Judge 0’s voice returned, deeper now, in a register not meant for flesh:

“You offered them as sacrifice.
You burned children to light your cities.
Now the cities burn your name in return.”

Gregory tried to run.

There was nowhere to go.

He stepped back—and reality slid out from under him.

He fell.

Not through a trapdoor.

Through meaning.

And he kept falling, backwards, into MMORTIS.

Into the version he authorised. Into the World Engine that fed on regret.

The chamber lights shattered into violet bloom.

Delta-NyX-9 raised her head.

She smiled.

Just once.

“Now you’ll feel what we felt.”

A pause.

Then, from far above, from somewhere beyond the veil of court and code, the gavel fell.

Not a sound.

A reversal.

Time folded in on itself like a discarded map.

The trial never happened.

But the consequence remained.

And in the distance, all across the leylines, people started to wake up—

—remembering the screams they were told were dreams.

© Aiwaz, 2025. All rights reserved