Page 147 - SurprisingTruthFinal

Nicholas Boothman
"It's ready," Lina said, her eyes dull with exhaustion.
"It is the most elegant lie I have ever created. It will
save the world, Henry. And it will destroy everything
we believed in."
Henry transmitted the final code, locking the cage.
The colossal structure above the city stopped its
rotation and began to dissolve, not in destruction, but
in a vast, silent act of re-engineering. It didn't vanish; it
dispersed its energy across the planet's atmospheric
field, a massive, global recalibration of reality.
The toxic hues in the sky were immediately
cleansed, replaced by a pure, persistent, shimmering
multi-colored light, a vast, silent, permanent aurora
spanning the entire horizon.
The Fire in the Sky.
The Shard was gone, its influence diffused into the
atmosphere, a perpetual, silent sentinel watching over
humanity's fragile new contract. The New Filter was
active. The world was saved, not by finding the truth,
but by legislating the exact amount of hope required
for survival. Henry was the ultimate Hypocrite, the
architect of the necessary lie, and the world was now
ready to begin again.
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