Page 132 - SurprisingTruthFinal

The Surprising Truth About Lying
He rode a hot-wired maintenance scooter through
the dead streets. The city was in full Entropic
Equilibrium, a fancy way of saying everyone was so
tired and honest, they just gave up. No thieves, no
police, no desperate hordes. Everyone was either
frozen in silent paralysis or too defeated to even try.
The roads were jammed with abandoned cars. The
drivers had just walked away when The Gaze told
them the truth about their meaningless commutes.
Henry reached the university library, a giant block
of cold concrete. He didn't use the public entrance. He
headed for the sub-levels where they kept the old,
messy data, the stuff too obscure or expensive to ever
bother sorting out. The place that required the most
bureaucratic effort to access was the one place the
revolution hadn't destroyed.
He found the access door and bypassed the ancient
security lock with a simple electrical shunt. The heavy
steel door hissed open, releasing an icy blast of
preserved air. He descended into the Archives of
Balance.
The place was huge, quiet, and spotless. It didn't
hold digital files; it held old, solid data: massive crystal
drives, ceramic tablets, and strange, rough scrolls. He
saw why the last civilization didn't trust the cloud.
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