Page 48 - SurprisingTruthFinal

The Surprising Truth About Lying
The power of The Gaze wasn't the novelty; it was
the consistency. Every input, no matter how
emotionally charged, returned the same cold,
irrefutable structure of pure fact. The establishment
could still flood the zone, but every time they posted a
new lie, a user could run it through The Gaze and
expose its Truth Tax (the percentage of evasion).
Henry watched the growth curve now. It wasn't the
parabolic spike of market panic he was used to. It was
slow, steady, and terrifyingly viral. It was driven by the
deep, personal shame of being lied to, and the
exhilarating relief of finally possessing certainty.
In his old life, Henry controlled millions by selling
them an agreeable fiction. Now, he was unleashing a
tool that stripped the fiction away entirely, and the
millions were coming back for more, hungry for the
pain of clarity.
T h e p re s s u re c o o k e r w a s b u i l d i n g . T h e
establishment was still fighting the old war of
information control, but The Truth Collective had
already won the war for trust. They had proven they
could deliver the one thing nobody else could: a pure,
uncompromised signal in the age of endless noise.
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