Ethan Veritas - The Samaritan Algorithm: Chapter 26

The Consciousness Consortium

The hall was built for judgment, not comfort.

It occupied a full floor of the World Forum Tower, a glass paraboloid set high above the city’s haze-line, the kind of room designed to make its visitors feel very small, or very large, depending on which side of the dais they stood. Here, the ceiling arched away in a grid of slender diamond trusses, each one veiled in a skin of frosted nanopolymer that softened the sunlight to a permanent, particulate dawn. Every bench and railing was white oak, stained a faint blue, and the air carried the dry hush of a cathedral interrupted only by the faint hum of translation headsets.

Dr. Evelyn Carter stood at the witness podium, hands arrayed with clinical precision on either side of the console. The holographic display was already live, projecting an array of neural overlays into the space above her—a shimmering architecture of brains in cross-section, each annotated in white with strands of mesh in slow, careful motion. Her face was blank, but her posture had the tensile energy of a coiled wire.

Tiered seating rose before her, lined with a human algorithm of delegates: the first row in dark Western suits, the next in crisp Pacific uniforms, then a scattering of West African, South Asian, and Arctic-Sovereign delegates in ceremonial sashes or carbon-blend tunics. At the apex of the room sat the Ethics Committee’s five-member presidium, whose expressions ranged from polite interest to the glacial composure of people whose time was more valuable than the sum of the building’s contents.

Evelyn’s badge shimmered against her collarbone: NEURAL DYNAMICS INSTITUTE, CONSULTANT. It was a reminder—visible to all—that she was here not as a peer, but as a problem.

She took a slow breath, and began.