Page 129 - SurprisingTruthFinal

Nicholas Boothman
a deep, hidden repository of knowledge. A history of
the previous failures of the sentient experiment.
He suddenly remembered the old corporate legends
he had researched in his cynical past, tales of a pre-
human, highly advanced civilization that had
collapsed not from war, but from "Perfect Clarity." The
old stories were myths, but the underlying data sets
had been real, archived deep within the oldest, most
ignored university repositories.
The Shard was triggered by our collapse. The
mechanism must have been built by the last people
who failed the test.
He had a purpose again. Not the rage of the
revolutionary, nor the guilt of the Scapegoat, but the
clear, cold intent of the investigator. He had been given
the ultimate clue: the location of the Archives of
Balance, the historical blueprints of the Shard's
function.
He had to find those archives before it completed its
stabilizing descent, before it enforced its own absolute,
cosmic version of "Order," which might mean
eliminating the possibility of human choice altogether.
Henry struggled to his feet, the world still spinning.
He was the last consciousness alive who understood
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