The marble was real.Ethan knew because he pressed his foot down slowly, the way you test ice before committing your weight, and it held. Cold. Solid. Not rendered. Not code pretending to be stone.That bothered him more than anything else in the room.The hall stretched in every direction without ending — not the way a large room feels endless, but the way a number does when you keep dividing it and it never reaches zero. The screens covered the walls, floor to ceiling, each one showing a different person. Names. Vitals. Status tags. Hundreds of millions of them, scrolling in real time.Ethan didn't look at the screens. He looked at the man behind the desk.The desk was wrong for the room. Everything else was marble and light and the kind of architecture that says power without trying. The desk was plain wood. The kind you'd find in a government office that hadn't been renovated since the nineties. It had a coffee ring stain on the left corner.The man sitting behind it looked exactl