Nova Arcis E 5
The Tangled Web
The broadcast returned to the vibrant, neon-lit night of the Varna-Kovacycy Concourse on Nova Arcis. For a moment, the peaceful, orderly scene of the plaza felt fragile, a precious island of stability in a galaxy that, just a few centuries prior, had been a screaming wilderness of piracy and fear.
Cokas Bluna and LYRA.ai had resumed their walk, moving away from the quiet efficiency of the public service counters and heading towards the plaza’s energetic, commercial heart. Ahead of them, dominating one entire side of the vast, curved concourse, was a colossal, shimmering media-wall. It was a living, breathing tapestry of light and information, a hundred meter wide, displaying a constantly shifting mosaic of dozens of live feeds from the Horizon and OCN networks. News headlines from Amara, commodity prices from Barnard’s Star, cultural broadcasts from the Wolf-Pack, and vibrant, chaotic art streams from the Outskirts all vied for attention in a beautiful, silent, and overwhelming river of pure data.
Cokas paused before the immense display, his hands in his pockets, his expression a mixture of a historian’s sober reflection and a journalist’s professional respect. The story of Dagbert, a raw and brutal chapter of their past, had clearly left its mark.
“A brutal man,” he began, his voice a low, thoughtful murmur against the background hum of the city. “Brought to justice in the end, thankfully. But when you look at the archives, when you truly analyze his reign of terror on ZeeZee… his greatest weapon was never a ship or a laser. It was information. Or rather, the lack of it.”
He gestured to the media-wall, to the effortless, instantaneous flow of a thousand different truths. “He understood, with a predator’s instinct, that in a time-delayed galaxy, truth was a slow-moving, fragile commodity. He knew that a lie, a rumour, a piece of carefully crafted propaganda, could travel just as fast as a real news report. He didn’t conquer ZeeZee with force; he conquered it with fear, manufactured in the dark, and transmitted as truth. He understood that controlling the story was controlling reality.”
LYRA.ai, standing beside him, her own form bathed in the shifting, colourful light of the media-wall, provided the institutional and philosophical context. Her gaze was sharp, her mind weighing the story of Dagbert with the foundational principles of her own existence.
“A principle that has defined our own network for centuries, Cokas,” she stated, her voice a calm, precise counterpoint to the chaotic energy of the display. “But, as you say, used for a very different purpose. The ‘Human Use of Human Beings,’ as the old cyberneticist Norbert Wiener warned. A system’s ethics are defined by its ultimate goal. Dagbert’s system was optimized for power and control. OCN’s system, from its inception by Varna and Voss, has been optimized for cohesion and stability.”
She gestured to the wall, her hand sweeping across the river of data. “But the threat is constant. The danger of news-fraud, of manipulating economic and social reality through false data, is a permanent vulnerability in any complex society. The more reliant we become on the free flow of information, the more devastating the impact of a single, well-placed lie. It can crash markets. It can start trade wars. It can, as we saw in the ZeeZee system, cost lives.”
Cokas nodded grimly. “Authenticity. It’s the bedrock of the entire galactic economy. The Asterion Collective Paradigm, the Grant-System… it all runs on the assumption that the data we are sharing is real. That the declared output of a mining co-op is their actual output. That the identity of a trader is their real identity. When that trust breaks down, the entire system begins to decay.”
“Which brings us to our next story,” LYRA said, her voice now a seamless, professional segue. “A story that is not about the grand, overt chaos of war, but about the quiet, devastating violence of a carefully constructed falsehood. It’s a story that proves that sometimes, the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy isn’t a fleet of pirate ships, but a single, corrupted data-package.”
The great media-wall behind them began to change. The dozens of competing news feeds dissolved, replaced by a single, focused image: the beautiful, serene, but deceptively placid-looking domes of a settlement on Teagarden’s Star, a prosperous and well-established world in the heart of the RIM.
“For the billions of us living in the core worlds,” Cokas said, setting the stage, “the idea of our daily lives being fundamentally manipulated by false information seems like a distant, almost historical threat. We have the High Yards, we have OCN, we have layers of AI-driven verification. We live in a world of curated, authenticated truth.”
He paused, a look of profound respect on his face for the individual at the heart of their next story. “But in the early 29th century, on a quiet, unremarkable station, a single, stubborn reporter was about to discover that the ghosts of the past, the very same tactics of manipulation used by tyrants like Dagbert, had found a new and insidious way to haunt their present. She was about to pull at a single, loose thread of a seemingly simple news-fraud, and in doing so, unravel a conspiracy that stretched across eighty years and a hundred light-years of space.”
“The story of Luck Good by her granddaughter,” LYRA announced, her voice a quiet, respectful introduction, “is a detective story, a tragedy, and a profound lesson in the enduring power of truth. It is a reminder that the work of a journalist—the slow, patient, and often dangerous work of separating fact from fiction — is one of the most essential services in any free society, no matter how advanced it becomes.”
The camera pushed past Cokas and LYRA, moving directly into the media-wall, the image of Teagarden’s Star filling the 3D-media-stream. The peaceful, serene halls and avenues of the settlement now seemed to hold a dark, hidden secret. The journey into a web of lies, forgery, and murder was about to begin.