Page 84 - SurprisingTruthFinal

The Surprising Truth About Lying
the power to see. If they can’t handle the sight, that’s
evolution.”
Vincent’s refusal was philosophical, surgical. “We
are pilgrims, Henry. We cannot abandon the
mountaintop just because the air is thin. To
manufacture a lie now is to prove that comfort is the
highest good. If truth kills us, then so be it. It is a noble
end.”
Henry felt less noble. He felt like a janitor standing
in a basement filling up with sewage. Ideals meant
nothing when the water level was rising.
He looked at the city’s corpse. The most urgent
symptom of the world’s paralysis was the power grid.
It was the heart of civilization, and without it, the
winter would kill those who hadn't already succumbed
to despair.
The grid wasn't technically destroyed. The core
generators were mostly operational. The problem was
systemic, derived entirely from the Truth Mandate.
Fixing the grid required complex, real-time risk
assessments, trade-offs, and promises.
He launched an old, ghost protocol on Lina's
network, a monitoring tool that scraped the last known
official status reports from the central grid authority.
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