I’m over my five-thousand-word limit already. What else should I cram in before I go? The Bridger parts are true. There’s proof. Unlike Mycroft, I won’t let you get away with pretending it’s madness. Don’t trust the gendered pronouns Mycroft gives people, they all come from Madame. The coup is happening, don’t let anybody tell you different. As for the resistance, I’m not expecting most of you to volunteer to fight and die, but if you support my side, all it means is that you love your Hive, and that you’ll cheer for us when the deed is done. The First World War was the moment humanity learned to count its casualties in millions, but as a Humanist I must ask, as my bash’ founders asked: which changed the world more? The loss of millions or of that handful who would have been the next generation’s heroes? Wilfred Owen left behind a tiny collection of poems, not enough to even make a book, but still the most upsetting things I’ve ever read; if Owen had lived they might have revolutionized literature, spurred presses and politics away from the guilt-laden bravado which would light war’s fire again, or driven countless readers to suicide. Karl Schwarzschild corresponded with Einstein from the trenches and deduced the existence of black holes while rotting knee-deep in muck; if Schwarzschild had lived they might have accelerated physics by fifty years, enabled Mukta two generations earlier, or given the Nazis nukes. Owen and Schwarzschild; calculate carefully which firebrands to snuff and one death can redirect history better than any battle. That was the foundation of O.S.

—Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, Thirteenth O.S., May 23rd, 2454

* * *

END OF RESTRICTED SECTION. PUBLIC ACCOUNT RESUMES.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

O.S.

“Your Grace President Ganymede, O.S. is here.”

“Send them in.”

This fifth day of my history plunges us into a sea of scenes I did not witness. I was a prisoner, trapped at Madame’s by Dominic’s orders, and by the certainty I would be lynched if I ventured on the streets, where murmurs of the Seven-Ten list theft, corruption at Black Sakura, the dread Canner Device, all had been swept away by the shockwave revelation unleashed by warmonger Tully Mardi: Mycroft Canner hides among the Servicers. Dominic Seneschal now carried my tracker in his pocket like a trophy, deactivated ‘for my mandatory rest’ by order of my court-appointed sensayer Julia Doria-Pamphili. I was blinded, mute, trapped without even the lifeline of a newsfeed. But I am not cut out for objectivity. I fill in: an expression I did not see, words I heard only in paraphrase, a gesture I know was there, though no witness can prove it. Why do I do this? Because, imaginative reader, you are human. You will fill in for me, invent faces and personality as you invent your own Alexander, your own Jack the Ripper, and your own Thomas Carlyle. You have never met the people I describe, so your imaginings will be less accurate than those of someone who has toiled beside them in these rooms, and seen them sweat. Caught between two lies I give you mine, which has more truth immixed.