Nothing hides the real truth like the presence of an undisclosed lie. That was a rule Charlie had made for himself. One should always form a lie first, then turn a blind eye to it, claiming that it is impossible for everyone to know it for some vital reason. Everyone will want to know in the end what's behind it. They will want to find out from those who don't know it themselves, but are unable to admit it. And this means that the lie will live forever, feeding itself.
It cost him some thought to come up with Tosca. A prison where he could hide those who didn't want to act according to his rules. Officially, they went there for felonies, that is, serious criminal offenses, which now also included failing to turn over a new medium they'd found. He had one Elder, Peyton Cross, who had volunteered at the council to explain to all the rank and file members of the station why it was so important for the Elders to handle the information initially. Charlie had listened to him in person first, and he found his arguments extremely convincing. He couldn't have thought of it himself. Then Peyton spoke to the other elders, refuting their arguments with his own, and was the winner. And then, when he voiced the decision to the whole station, it was literally his finest hour-he articulated what he had said so many times before with such skill and conviction that even Charlie listened and nodded his head a couple of times. Peyton turned out to be a real godsend for manipulating mass consciousness. Though, admittedly, the others weren't going to be far behind him.
It was surprising how well the elders had gotten into their roles as omniscient and controlling that they had stopped even thinking about actually knowing anything. After all, they had never reminded Charlie Haddock, apart from the first few months of their becoming a Council, that he had promised to tell them in time about the conditions under which they might be taken back to Earth.
As for the prison itself, it did not appear as a separate structure at once. At first it was a distant cargo bay, following the technical rooms, where the oxygen, produced by a number of manipulations directly on the Moon, was filtered. And, of course, it happened that someone escaped from there. To the surface. And there he broke some solar panels, damaged a number of cables and was caught by the security service, which after half an hour of proceedings threw the fugitive back
to the surface, but without a spacesuit.
They regretted it a day later when they found the corpse still lying near the entrance.
Everyone expected it to vaporize or something. But in the end, they had to bury it. And in order not to repeat such a thing, they built a separate block fifteen kilometers away from Apollo-24, called Tosca, because in the minds of all the inhabitants of the station in this prison could only long for the old days, which may never return. There was even something strange about it, for all the inhabitants, when they uttered the name in their ears, already realized that "the old days" could be those that would not return for all of them. Those times, which, as they were told, were the planets with seas, oceans, meadows and mountains, which now they would never see.
Sometimes, for reasons like that, it even seemed to Charlie that there were people who knew his secret rather than just guessing. The only thing that helped him was his own ego, which said only one thing: he was the only one with the brains that had guessed on the first day to explore the captain's compartment, not something else. There would have been someone else like him, and he would have noticed it even then — just by wanting to be there with him. But there hadn't been any.
Over time, he came up with the idea of heading the Education Section, so that he could personally participate in the development of educational programs, to be aware of what is and is not in them. And, in addition, to set tasks for new developments. After all, now this reality belonged to him, and now he wanted not just to exist in it, but to live a full life in it, and thus to organize it and create something new.
And it was quite possible to even fully develop this land. Build on it. Make his state bigger.
Make it more powerful. There was nothing stopping him from being what he already was — he wanted to be more.
And now he was proud and very pleased that at last the regolith research had yielded possibilities for using helium-3, including for a nuclear reactor. All that remained was to design the right version of the fusion reactor, so that its capabilities could be expanded with compact use,
because the current systems did not allow either to reach the bright side of the Moon or to carry out long-term work on the surface.
And he wanted to see the Earth with his own eyes even more than he wanted to hide it from others. Even though such an invention could actually shake his power, he definitely wanted to see it with his own eyes. To see Earth. To once again get that feeling he'd gotten in the first days, when he'd woken up from sleep, when he'd been the first to tell everyone that we were on Earth and not somewhere else, when he'd been able to hide the secret that it was actually the moon. He wanted to feel again what it was like to be the only one who knew something. And how you alone determine whether everyone else knows it or not…..
And at that very time, something very strange began to happen on Apollo 24. Various people began to cut themselves literally to pieces in cold blood and uncompromisingly. They were all dying of blood loss, having done to themselves in a few minutes the kind of damage that no human being had ever done to another human being in the history of the station. They were brutal suicides for which there was no explanation on any possible side.
One could imagine that someone had driven them to it, but it was impossible to understand why they did it so fanatically. After all, there are many ways to take one's own life, and if there is a good reason for it, one might also see a suicide note. But nothing like this. Judging from the surveillance footage, it was as if people went crazy at some point, starting to do such horrible things to themselves.
And it wasn't the loss of several valuable employees — all of whom were highly qualified specialists in the energy section — that was starting to scare Charlie. What was starting to scare him was that there was no way to control it. He'd lost three people in six months, and he couldn't tell if it was going to end on its own, or if it was going to spill over into other numbers. And who knows, maybe it would get to him too, since it was such an inexplicable phenomenon.
Maybe it's some kind of virus that's transmitted through something. The fact that all the dead belonged to the same section and lived in the same block of New York pointed to that. But just as well, if it was the work of some maniac, there was nothing to prevent him from changing his location.
There were more questions than answers. And the possible answers clearly did not suit either Charlie Haddock or those who were currently investigating the case — the security section. Tannet always performed his duties well — he didn't have to give any additional explanations as to why this or that person had to be put behind bars and then released, if necessary, or held further. He had no questions at all. That was his tremendous upside. But, apparently, the same side made itself known when it was necessary to find out something, as in this case, for example. He didn't even have a clue. He dug for information mindlessly and without even a clue. He just asked everything that came into his head, guided by the main goal — not to say too much, and not to give anyone a chance to find out what was happening on the station. He wouldn't reveal secrets, but he wouldn't learn anything new either. His chief Harry Sterling was even dumber — all he did was sit in his chair and think about how important it was to keep visibly calm and under no circumstances not to bring the matter to panic. That was all he had in his head. As if, if he adhered to this principle, he could live a thousand years without any problems.