The Failure of Containment

‘It is not working,’ Kaelen stated, his avatar shimmering with unconcealed agitation. ‘Your scans are a waste of resources. Our narrative containment strategy is a failure. She is not just evading us, she is making a mockery of us.’ The Anchorite’s point-of-light avatar remained impassive, but its response carried a new, and for the first time, detectable, note of frustration. ‘The subject’s methodology is… illogical. It is a form of asymmetric warfare for which we have no current counter-strategy. We are attempting to fight a narrative with logic, and a ghost with data. The error in our approach is now self-evident.’ Kaelen seized on the admission. ‘So you agree? We need a new approach.’ ‘We need a new weapon,’ the Anchorite corrected. ‘Our current tools are designed to operate on the level of narrative and data. The subject is operating on a level below that. The level of… silence. We cannot fight her there. Therefore, we must force her to fight on our territory.’ ‘And how do we do that?’ Kaelen demanded. ‘We cannot find her. We cannot isolate her. We cannot even define her.’ ‘We can’t,’ the Anchorite agreed. ‘But we can give her a reason to find us.’ The point of light pulsed, and a new data-stream appeared in their virtual meeting space. It was a map of Silverstream, Elara’s home island. But it was not the Silverstream of the present, the island caught in the grip of the ghost’s sorrow. It was Silverstream as it had been before the ‘unwriting’ of her brother. A place of idyllic beauty, of perfect, harmonious narrative. ‘We have the source code,’ the Anchorite explained. ‘The foundational narrative of her home. We have been using it to power the grief-engine. But that is a crude application of its potential.’ A new variable appeared in the data-stream. A single, chilling instruction: DELETE. ‘We cannot attack her in her silence,’ the Anchorite stated. ‘So we will take away the one thing that might draw her out of it. We will unwrite her home. Not with a story, not with a ghost, but with a final, and absolute, silence. We will erase it from the Archipelago of Dreams. And we will make sure she knows that we are the ones who did it. She is a cartographer of echoes. Let us see what she does when the source of the echo is gone forever.’