He saw, in painful flashes, how easy each step would have sounded in committee rooms back in his own time. Climate failures. Mass panic. Supply shocks. Cities buckling under heat and flood. Every argument for triage, simplification, automated care, reduced choice, protective forgetting. Temporary measures, always temporary. Humane measures. Necessary measures. He had sat in rooms where people he knew had spoken in that tone—clean, regretful, convinced. Tarek would have loved language like this. Not because he was cruel in any simple way. Because he believed systems could be kinder than people if they were allowed to decide enough for them.

Elias lowered the binder and stared at the far wall. The depot seemed to tilt around a point much deeper than his dizziness. He thought of the upper gardens, of Lina touching fruit as if it simply arrived from the world by grace, of the way people there turned from dark openings and forgot their own questions halfway through asking them. He thought of the hidden workers below, the grouped black marks under dead monitors, the child-sized repaired shoe. Managed comfort above. Delegated labor below. Memory shaved down until suffering could continue out of sight and remain, for those spared, almost nameless.

He should have felt the thrill of proof. He had been right. Instead the knowledge settled in his gut like bad food.