Chapter 10
Elliot tried one final move.
He released one recording.
Not the scream.
Something older.
My father’s voice.
Or what sounded like him.
That almost worked.
The message claimed my father had intended Marcus to share leadership with me.
It circulated through six older captains.
For two hours, doubt returned.
Then I listened.
My father’s voice was rougher than mine.
Slower.
The imitation was excellent.
Still wrong.
One phrase exposed it.
“Collective leadership.”
My father hated that phrase.
Called it committee cowardice.
Anyone who knew him well laughed.
That saved us.
Not technology.
Memory.
Elliot had samples of sound.
Not life.
That became the flaw in every imitation.
Voice is more than acoustics.
It is habit.
Vocabulary.
History.
Relationship.
He could reproduce my tone.
Not always my choices.
Still, I refused complacency.
I asked every captain who believed the fake message why.
One said:
“Because I wanted it to be true.”
There.
Same pattern.
Fake information works best when it confirms a wish.
Marcus had supporters who wanted shared power.
The recording gave permission to believe.
Important lesson.
We removed the audio from circulation.
Then I confronted Elliot.
“You had my father too?”
He smiled.
“Years of old recordings.”
My skin crawled.
He had built a library of dead and living voices.
Not just mine.
He could manufacture approval from men buried a decade.
That gave him something more dangerous than counterfeit command.
Counterfeit ancestry.
A dead founder endorsing a plan still moves old families.
I ordered every archive access he touched reviewed.
Then destroyed his private voice library after preserving evidence of what he had done.
No archive of counterfeit dead men.
No future resurrection.
Elliot watched the drives being physically ruined.
That was the first time he looked truly afraid.
His power had never been the laptop.
May you like
It was the possibility that any voice could still speak after truth lost track of the source.
We ended that possibility.
