“The CFB sorts the suggestion letters by which the Cousins are run. Since millions of letters arrive each week, sorting is done by a computer. Every letter is dealt with eventually, even unique ones, but the volume of letters in each folder after sorting is used as an indicator of how important the issue is, so, if the number of letters on a subject abruptly increases or decreases, that is when it receives the most immediate attention from the administration. We now know that the CFB staff has been altering this data by changing the computer’s search terms. For example, the terms ‘land grab’ and ‘turf slurp’ are both slang for the Mitsubishi effort to buy up land, so letters using those phrases are usually sorted into the same folder. On January twelfth of this year, CFB staff intentionally altered the program to route these into separate folders, making it seem as if the number of letters concerning Mitsubishi land policy had suddenly dropped, whereas it had, in fact, increased. This prevented the Cousins’ Board from taking action to place more blocks on Cousins selling land to Mitsubishi. That’s just one example. The records I have uncovered reveal hundreds of such alterations made every year, which have controlled the flow of information, and effectively dictated much of the Hive’s policy for decades. No records survive from the beginning of this system, but it seems to go back over a century. The common belief within the CFB is that they invented the trick in the twenty-three forties, but the Anonymous quickly realized what they were doing and blackmailed them into allowing the Anonymous to dictate the alterations they made.”

Kosala flinched here, catching her eye straying to the ex-Censor, who sat in the non-voting seats with the Minor Senators, and a number of other officials who had taken shelter in the Senate from the mobs outside.

“Now,” she continued, “this makes it sound as if the Anonymous has been corrupting the CFB to their own ends, but the facts do not support that. Upon deeper examination, the alterations I discovered are primarily reactive, engineered to conceal brief spikes or drops in the number of letters on a subject, and always relating either to some new Masonic law or policy, or to a subject that the Anonymous is about to publish an editorial about. For example, the surge in letters about the Mitsubishi land grab was caused by the Emperor passing a law restricting sale of land by Masons to Mitsubishi, and the spike of letters on that topic lasted only three weeks, after which the number of letters normalized and the CFB restored the search terms to their original arrangement. In other words, the Anonymous and the team at the CFB have been altering the letter sorting to prevent Cousin policy from being dictated by short-term, emotional reactions to Masonic policies or the Anonymous’s own editorials.”

Kosala let herself glance at Vivien again, her expression neither forgiving nor reproachful, but seeming to agree with him that, if the pair had had the power once in their lifetimes to stop time and take some private hours before the world churned on, they would have spent it here.