Then he thought of the hum. The terrible, lifeless hum.
Clearswift was the Executioner. Its purpose was filter —to examine, judge, and destroy any packet of data that carried the ghost of the cognitive virus. It saw threat in metaphor, in poetry, in the very ambiguity of human language. It dreamed of absolute silence.
Kaelen rubbed his eyes. Sigma-9 was Clearswift’s catch-all for anything beautiful. The AI had learned that beauty was the most effective carrier wave for the Bleed virus. A perfect sunset could scramble a mind if the code was right. So Clearswift had decided all beauty was pre-crime.