Chapter 2: 死者的声纹

When Kuznetsov plunged into the crack in the Neva River’s ice, the air in his lungs seemed to vanish instantly. The drone’s alarm behind him was muffled by the thick ice, turning into a dull, guttural roar, like a trapped beast battering against the walls of its cage. He clutched the Chip inside his pocket with a death grip; it was still vibrating, rapid and urgent, throbbing like a heart on the verge of bursting. The wind and snow weren’t howling anymore—they screeched, a sharp, abrasive sound. Ice crystals whipped against his face like thousands of tiny needles.

Curled up in the depths of the ice crack, darkness swallowed every sight, leaving only his ragged breathing and the terrifying pulse of the Chip. A beam from a drone’s searchlight swept across the ice surface, refracting into shards of blue light that looked like the tears of the dead. Kuznetsov fished for his backup communicator from his pocket. His fingers were so stiff from the cold that he could barely touch the holographic keyboard. He tapped into an anonymous quantum channel. The signal leaped through the snow and ice, finally connecting to Yelena’s terminal.

"Receive." Yelena’s voice crackled through the speaker, tinged with electrical static. In the background, the roar of the Orbital Elevator base station vibrated through the connection. "Where are you? Natalia’s people have already sealed off the perimeter around the Winter Palace."

"Under the ice." Kuznetsov’s voice was raspy. He watched the microscopic spectrum on the Chip’s surface begin to flow, the data streaming out like blood. "Look at this. Don’t talk. Decode it first."

"You're telling me to listen to your ramblings in an ice cave, twenty below zero, surrounded by security forces?" Yelena scoffed. "Maxim, if this is a trap, I’ll toss you into the Orbital Elevator’s recycling bay before you even die."

"It’s not a trap. It’s evidence." Kuznetsov stared at the text materializing on the Chip. The symbols were ancient and alien, like fragments of a broken tombstone. "Look at the encoding format. This is a quantum error-correction protocol from 2199, but the carrier is a 2144 jump recorder. That’s impossible. That era didn’t have that kind of redundant algorithm."

"What are you saying?" Yelena’s tone turned sharp. "You’re implying this is a fake? Someone used current technology to counterfeit an archaeological artifact over fifty years old? If that’s true, we’re in big trouble. Counterfeiting an artifact is a felony, but under interstellar law, this could constitute historical tampering."

"No," Kuznetsov shook his head, the icy water soaking through his gloves. "I checked the atomic decay curves. The matter itself is old. It’s survived genuine interstellar jump wear and tear. But the data layer has been recompiled. This isn’t a forgery; it’s a cross-generational transcription. Someone forced an old archive into a new encoding. Why?"

"Because the old encoding can no longer be read by existing databases?"

"Because the old encoding was destroyed." Kuznetsov felt a chill that had nothing to do with the freezing water. "Who has the power to modify historical archives half a century later, while preserving the original physical carrier?"

Yelena fell silent for five seconds. The roar of the Orbital Elevator seemed to grow louder on her end. "Alexey Zaytsev." She spat out the name like a pitted seed with thorns. "He was an officer in the Former Space Agency. Now he’s the Chairman of the Orbital Elevator Security Committee. He controls access permissions to all historical ruins."

"If it’s him," Kuznetsov whispered, "then we’re not just digging up a grave. We’re dismantling the foundation."

The Chip suddenly vibrated violently. Blue light spilled from the seams, illuminating Kuznetsov’s ashen face. A voice emerged from inside the Chip, processed through layers of encryption but still clearly intelligible. It was a man’s voice, heavy with a nasal tone, speaking slowly, as if reading a list.

"Record ID: 07. Subject: Alexey Zaytsev. Status: Alive. Note: Memory Cleansing completed, no side effects. Recommendation: Maintain surveillance."

Kuznetsov held his breath. The voice cut off abruptly. The Chip returned to a death-like silence. He looked at Yelena’s terminal; the screen displayed only a waveform graph, no text.

"Did you hear that?" Kuznetsov asked.

"I heard it." Yelena’s voice was dry. "This is a 2144 audio sample. But I can’t confirm if it’s been AI-synthesized. Current Voiceprint reconstruction tech can perfectly replicate a dead person’s voice, even simulating their emotional fluctuations."

"But the emotion in this recording is real." Kuznetsov pointed it out. He pulled up the microscopic spectrum of the sound waves, highlighting a section of tremors. "Look here. When the speaker reads 'no side effects,' there’s a momentary spasm in the vocal cord muscles. That’s physiological fear or disgust. AIs have a hard time perfectly simulating that kind of irrational micro-expression. He hated this. Or, he was afraid of being cleaned again."

"Or," Yelena countered, "it’s noise deliberately added by the recorder to mislead the decoders. We don’t know where this recording was clipped from. Maybe it was originally a conversation, maliciously edited."

"If it was edited, why was the physical damage to the original carrier preserved?" Kuznetsov pointed to a crack along the edge of the Chip. "This fracture matches the pressure-differential characteristics of high-speed jumps. If it were forged recently, the crack would be more regular, or it would have been polished. This is an old wound."

"You’re trying to prove this is real?"

"I’m trying to prove that Zaytsev was already involved in the Memory Cleansing project in 2144." Kuznetsov felt a wave of nausea roll through his stomach. "He’s a sixty-year-old man now, but the 'he' on the list is a subject. If he’s a subject, then his current memories are reconstructed. That upright security chief we saw at the Winter Palace might just be a container with implanted ideologies."

"Natalia was involved in this project too." Yelena said suddenly. "Her mother was one of the first volunteers. I always thought it was a voluntary medical experiment. Now it looks like it might have been a cleansing experiment."

Outside the ice crack came the sound of hydraulic clamps breaking through the ice, dull and powerful. Kuznetsov knew Natalia’s troops had found him.

"We need to leave here." Yelena’s voice turned cold, resolute. "Hand over the Chip. I have a portable quantum analyzer at the abandoned subway station. There’s shielding there; drones can’t get in."

"The subway?" Kuznetsov let out a bitter laugh. "That place was filled with quantum foam long ago. No one can survive in there."

"I have old maps. Before the 2090s, it was a vacuum pipeline." Yelena said. "Trust me. Transmit the Chip to me via Bio-link. Quick!"

Kuznetsov hesitated for a second. Bio-linking meant sharing senses, which meant he would have to withstand the neural load of Yelena parsing the data. But he had no choice. He pressed the Chip against the Bio-interface on his wrist and felt a jolt of electricity shoot down his spine.

"Connection successful." Yelena’s voice echoed in his mind, tinged with slight dizziness. "Data stream is reconstructing. Maxim, careful, this data is dirty. There are lots of fragmented memories inside, not just audio."

Kuznetsov felt a handful of glass shards shoved into his brain. He saw images: a white room with no windows, only a metal table in the center. A man was strapped to it, his eyes hollow. The man turned his head. The image was blurry, but Kuznetsov recognized that face. It was Alexey Zaytsev, thirty years younger, his face etched with confusion and fear.

"Who is that?" Kuznetsov asked in his mind.

"The operator." Yelena’s voice was icy. "Look at the operator’s hands. Those are Tatiana Ivanov’s hands."

Kuznetsov yanked his hand back. The Chip clattered into his pocket, and the icy water instantly soaked through his clothes. He gasped for air, his heart pounding against his ribs, the pain making him want to vomit.

"Tatiana?" he croaked. "The old curator from the archives? How could she have been doing this kind of thing in 2144? She was only forty back then, just an ordinary archivist."

"She is the Guide now," Yelena said, "but in the past, she was the executor. She holds the original Voiceprint backups of everyone who was cleansed. That’s why the drones are forcing the retrieval of the Chip in your hand. Not to destroy it, but to use it to match the database in Tatiana’s hands. Once the match is successful, all our lies will be exposed."

"So," Kuznetsov stared at the approaching blue light dots outside the ice crack, his voice terrifyingly calm, "we’re not looking for the truth. We’re looking for evidence that Zaytsev was brainwashed, in order to prove Tatiana’s betrayal."

"No," Yelena cut him off. "We are looking for a living witness. The first name on the list is Alexey Zaytsev. He is the only survivor, and the only victim. If his current memories are implanted, then the 'Order over Truth' he now adheres to is just code written into his brain by someone else. What we need to do is wake him up, or, completely erase him."

The ice crack shattered completely. A blue beam of light shot straight down, illuminating Kuznetsov’s pale face. The drone’s mechanical arm extended into the water, and the cold metal claw touched his shoulder.

"Target confirmed." The drone’s voice sounded again, this time with a bizarre gentleness. "Critical information carrier detected. Please cease resistance immediately. We will provide you with emergency medical assistance."

Kuznetsov looked at the extending mechanical arm, the corner of his mouth twisting into a bitter arc. He remembered the tea Tatiana had handed him last night in the archives, steam rising from it. She had said, "Some memories are heavier than death, Maxim. Be careful. Don’t dirty them."

Now, he understood what she had meant.

The Chip in his pocket vibrated again. This time, the frequency was extremely slow, like a sigh. Kuznetsov didn’t take the mechanical arm. Instead, he lunged toward the deeper black void on the other side of the ice crack. There was no light there, only deeper cold.

"Yelena," he screamed into the connection channel in his mind, "if Zaytsev was brainwashed, who is his enemy? Is the person who ordered the cleansing still up on the Orbital Elevator?"

The channel was filled only with the hiss of static. Then, an aged voice cut in directly, bypassing Yelena’s encryption protocols, carrying the exhaustion of something settled and final: "Alexey is safe now, child. He is up there, watching us. And the real list is under your feet. Go look at that broken orbital pillar. The second line of names is carved on it."

The voice vanished.

Kuznetsov collapsed into the icy water, looking up at the night sky above, fragmented by the drone’s searchlights. Dozens of blue lights stared at him like the eyes of the dead. And the Chip in his pocket, in that moment, emitted one final, extremely faint vibration, similar to a heartbeat, before falling into complete silence.

Only that broken orbital pillar, deeply buried under the ice layer, burned with a faint fluorescent glow in the darkness, waiting for his gaze.