He turned. Rows of intake records filled the display. Ages. Health notes. Transfer towers. Reintegration outcomes. A column marked residual attachment response. Another marked image retention decay.

Mara touched the glass with two fingers, not gently. "Blue walls," she said, almost to herself. "Crying tone. Kept saying rest. Then nothing after that." She looked at him. "They measured it."

Elias forced himself back into the file stack because if he stopped on her face he would stop entirely. "It started as emergency rule. Climate collapse, resource shock, population waves, orbital control of the last intact stores. They built triage models. Then the models became law. Then culture."

Mara said, "Listen to yourself."

He looked up.

She had one hand braced on the screen, jaw tight. "You say it like weather. Like if the line runs neat enough, nobody did it."

"I'm saying how it held." His voice came out too fast. He heard it and hated the sound. "If they linked comfort above to labor below, and stripped memory where it caused resistance, then the whole thing could run for generations without open war. The passivity on the surface wasn't natural. It was maintained. Guided tones, food, route shaping, controlled language drift, selective forgetting-"

"And people." Her words cut straight through his list. "People carried that. People took them. Signed for them. Locked them in rooms and called it balance."