The High Chancellor delivered the real parameters of the trial with the kind of clinical precision that suggested she was reading from a document rather than speaking from genuine conviction."Eight thousand patients globally is not a viable market for a treatment that cost two billion dollars to develop," she said. "Meridian's board wants to shelve the project and redirect resources to more profitable drugs."She paused, and something shifted in her expression that suggested she was about to deliver information she found particularly relevant."The Court wants the treatment released because three hundred of those eight thousand patients are children of Court members or Court-adjacent families," she continued. "These children have significant value within The Court's structure. Their health and wellbeing directly affect the loyalty and cooperation of their parents."Declan understood immediately what The Court was really asking him to do.This wasn't about saving eight thousand lives.

Declan presented all three options to the High Chancellor on day forty-three of the Command trial.He laid out the financial models, the patient impact projections, the timeline requirements.Option one: Premium pricing in private insurance markets. Three thousand two hundred patients treated. Four thousand eight hundred abandoned. Meridian profitable within eighteen months. One thousand two hundred preventable deaths over the next decade.Option two: Expand the indication through additional research. Twenty-three thousand patients eventually treated. Universal access achieved. But three to five years of delay while current patients continued suffering and dying. Approximately four hundred additional deaths among the current patient population during the research phase.Option three: Government lobbying and subsidy programs. All eight thousand current patients treated. Treatment costs absorbed by taxpayers and insurance premium holders. Economic inefficiency created. Precedent establi

Declan sat in his office with the data spread before him and thought about his mother's warning.The Court rewrites people into something that uses words like principle and ethics but no longer means them.He thought about what it would mean to order the deliberate sickening of hundreds of thousands of people.What it would mean to look at two million susceptible individuals and calculate them as potential patients to be poisoned.What it would mean to profit from suffering he had deliberately created.He thought about whether there was a version of himself that could make those calculations and still recognize himself afterward.And he understood that the answer was no.That somewhere during the eighteen years in the storage room, during the cultivation awakening, during the discovery of his true family, during the trials designed to break him into shape, he had developed something that resisted this particular transformation.His mother had felt the same resistance.She had lasted s

Declan did not sleep during the seventy-two hours before his binding ceremony.He used Meridian's system access to map The Court's data infrastructure in ways the interrogators never thought to prevent because they assumed a failed candidate would accept their outcome passively.They had not anticipated that he would use the time before binding to prepare for resistance rather than resignation.Declan identified where information flowed through The Court's networks.Which systems connected to external networks and which remained air-gapped for security.Where monitoring was strongest and where gaps existed in the surveillance infrastructure.The Court's security was sophisticated but it had been designed with specific assumptions.It was designed to prevent external intrusion from actors without legitimate access.It was designed to control information flowing outward from secure networks.It was not designed to prevent someone with legitimate internal access from mapping the infrastr

The work was sophisticated and morally neutral on its surface.Analyzing market trends. Identifying investment opportunities. Standard corporate finance that any analyst might perform for any legitimate company.The difference was scale and purpose.The Court moved billions based on these analyses.Markets shifted from their decisions.The downstream effects touched millions of lives.When Declan recommended that The Court acquire shareholding in a particular pharmaceutical company, that recommendation eventually resulted in the company being guided toward research directions that served Court interests rather than patient interests.When he identified a vulnerable government bond market, The Court's subsequent investments influenced that nation's ability to fund social programs.When he analyzed a technology company's structure and found acquisition opportunities, The Court eventually controlled infrastructure that affected billions of people's access to information.Each analysis wa