Page 177 - TruthAboutLyingCoverFlipAmazon20

Nicholas Boothman
He turned toward the screen showing the three choices. “Truth can expose a wound.”
“But mercy is what helps people survive it.”
Silence held the room.
Then Jinji stepped forward.
“There’s another way.”
"I've been running simulations," she said. "Trying to model what Graduation would actually look like. What kind of system could satisfy the Curator's requirements while still being implementable by humans."
She pulled up a holographic display, a complex web of interconnected nodes, data flows, accountability structures.
"This is what I keep coming back to. A tiered truth system with distributed oversight. Mandatory transparency for power, protected privacy for individuals. Truth councils with real authority but limited scope. “It’s not pure. It’s not elegant. It’s full of compromises, edge cases, and places where humans will have to make judgment calls.”
She looked around the room, her eyes red-rimmed. "It's everything I swore I'd never build. When we launched Verax, I believed in absolute truth. No compromises. No exceptions. I thought purity would save us."
Her voice broke. "But purity killed people. “The Palliative, the lie we injected to make Verax survivable, that
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