VoidHive Codex — Arc 4, Chapter 29: The Fracture

[JOINT COMMAND EMERGENCY SESSION — TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT — DAY 22]

ADMIRAL COSS: Lieutenant Vance's transmission arrived at 0611. I want everyone in this room to understand what she is describing before we respond.

GENERAL HARROW: I've read it.

COSS: Then you understand that the Harvest Protocol is not preservation in the way we assumed. It is not a library. It is not a museum. The absorbed minds are active. They are being used to answer a question the Architects have been asking for eleven millennia.

HARROW: They are being used. Yes. That is precisely my point, Admiral. That is what I have been saying since day one.

COSS: The question is whether used is the right word for what Vance describes. She says it feels like—

HARROW: I don't care what it feels like to Lieutenant Vance. She has been inside that structure for twenty-one days breathing recycled air and touching alien nerve tissue and I am telling you her judgement is compromised.

COSS: Her judgement is the only one we have with direct evidence.

HARROW: Then get her out. Extract her, debrief her properly, and send someone else in. Someone who hasn't had three weeks to—

COSS: To what, General?

[Pause — 7.1 seconds]

HARROW: To fall in love with them.

[Pause — 11.4 seconds]

COSS: That is an extraordinary accusation.

HARROW: It is an extraordinary situation. She is asking us to answer a question on behalf of eleven thousand years of dead civilisations. She is asking us to tell the beings that consumed those civilisations whether it was worth it. Do you understand what we are being asked to validate? If we say yes — if we say the harvest was worth it — we are telling them to continue. We are signing the warrant ourselves.

COSS: And if we say no?

[Pause — 3.8 seconds]

HARROW: Then we find out what they do with species that say no.

[End of excerpt — full transcript classified Tier 1]