Page 43 - SurprisingTruthFinal

Nicholas Boothman
Chapter 4:
The Pressure Cooker
The world didn’t explode when Lina hit the button.
It just choked.
They watched the initial impact of The Scythe’s
output, the brutal, fact-only paragraph about the train
crash cover-up, from the flickering gloom of their sub-
basement bunker.
For the first thirty minutes, there was silence. The
official news channels, the corporate feeds, and the
political spokespeople didn't respond. They were
paralyzed. They couldn't craft a lie fast enough to
counter the pure, surgical strike of the facts, especially
since the source was untraceable and the document
links were immutable on the decentralized public
ledger.
Then the old machine whirred to life. It didn't try to
deny the facts; it tried to erase the Collective entirely.
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