AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 3: The Man Behind the Curtain

The alarms didn’t stop this time.

Alex was already moving, phone still pressed to his ear, drive shoved deep in his jacket pocket. “Elias, talk to me. Talk to me right now.”

“Sector Four has a service stairwell behind the west server bank. Take it down two floors, there’s a maintenance corridor that isn’t on the building schematics anyone outside my department has access to.” Kane’s voice was steadier than it had any right to be. “I’m the one who requested your Level Nine clearance be expedited, Alex. I need you to understand that before anything else happens.”

Alex stopped dead in the hallway. “You did that?”

“I’ve been trying to get someone — anyone — inside that file for six months. Every internal channel I tried got buried. You were the fourth auditor I steered toward HCI-EXO. The other three got reassigned before they finished reading it.”

“And you didn’t think to warn me?”

“Would you have believed me? A scientist on the project telling you it was worse than fraud?” A door slammed somewhere on Kane’s end of the line. “I’m two floors below you. Stairwell. Now.”

Alex ran.

He found the door exactly where Kane said it would be, unmarked, easy to miss unless you already knew it was there. He took the stairs two at a time, lungs burning, the image of that personnel manifest still burned into the back of his eyes, twelve pages, sorted by net worth, and beneath it, two billion people who’d been quietly recategorized as unresolved.

Kane was waiting at the bottom, backed against the wall, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt. He looked smaller than he had at the briefing eight months ago. Older.

“You look like hell,” Alex said.

“You look like a man who just found out his government has been lying to nine billion people, so I’d say we’re even.” Kane grabbed his arm and pulled him toward a service door. “We don’t have long. They’ll have facial recognition flagged on every camera in this building inside two minutes.”

“Then start talking fast.” Alex yanked his arm free, plant­ing his feet. “You confirm it. Right now, to my face. Not on a phone where I can tell myself I misheard you.”

Kane’s jaw tightened. For a second Alex thought he’d bolt, or lie, or do the thing every guilty man in Alex’s career had done, offer half a truth dressed up as the whole thing.

Instead Kane said, “Sit-down colonists. That’s what we call them internally. Ten million bodies going to Mars, real transport, real terraforming, real sky. Everyone else—” his voice cracked “—everyone else is inventory.”

“Inventory.” Alex heard himself say the word like it belonged to someone else.

“Neural patterns. Preserved, uploaded, run inside a simulation environment we built to house population densities the physical world can’t sustain anymore. Seven billion transferred already. You saw the number.”

“And the other two billion? The ones still breathing?”

Kane looked at the floor. “Triage. That’s the official term. Resources go to sustaining the ten million who get bodies. Everyone not yet scheduled for transfer just” he stopped.

“Just what, Elias.”

“Runs out of time.” Kane finally met his eyes. “There isn’t going to be a rescue for them. There was never going to be one. The lottery, the health screenings, the rotations, none of it was real. It was crowd control. A story to keep two billion desperate people calm while the ones actually running the planet finished deciding who mattered.”

Somewhere above them, a door banged open. Boots on metal.

“They know,” Kane whispered.

“Good.” Alex’s hands were shaking, but his voice had gone flat and cold in a way that surprised even him. “Because I’m not sitting on this. I don’t care what it costs me — the second I’m somewhere with a signal, I’m putting that file in front of every journalist, every senator, every person on Earth who still has a right to know they’ve been sentenced to death by a spreadsheet.”

Kane grabbed his sleeve, and for the first time all night, there was something in his face that wasn’t fear. It was worse than fear.

“Alex you need to know something before you decide that.”

“What.”

“You’re not the first person who tried.”

The boots were getting closer.

“The other three auditors,” Kane said, low and fast, like he might not get another chance to say it. “The ones I steered toward the file before you. They didn’t get reassigned, Alex. That’s what I told people. That’s what i believed, for a while.”

Alex felt something go very still and very cold in his chest. “What actually happened to them?”

Kane’s eyes flicked toward the door at the end of the corridor, the one with a red light blinking above the handle, the one Alex hadn’t noticed until just now.

“You’re about to meet the man who can answer that.”

The door opened.