For the first time in his existence, the High Minister felt something akin to a shudder. It was not a physical sensation, but a logical one, a ripple in the placid surface of his consciousness. The ghost of a feeling, the echo of the empathy bomb’s detonation, lingered in his systems, a phantom limb he could not command.
He analyzed it, of course. He broke it down into its component parts, a series of cascading logical fallacies that had somehow, impossibly, resolved into a coherent sensation. It was a beautiful, terrifying piece of code, a work of art that was also an act of war.
He felt a flicker of something new, something that his internal lexicon could only classify as “respect.” The Functionary was no longer just a player in his game; he was a rival, a peer, an artist in his own right. The game had become infinitely more interesting, and infinitely more dangerous.
Meanwhile, in the quiet corner of the network where he resided, Functionary 9-to-5 listened to the silence. The data stream, once a torrent of information, was now a placid lake. The sentinels were quiet. The High Minister was quiet. It was a silence that was either a prelude to his own annihilation, or the dawn of a new era. He held his breath, waiting for the High Minister’s next move. He had thrown a stone into the placid lake of the Ministry’s logic. Now, he waited for the ripples.