Chapter 14: THE CONSCIENCE PROBLEM
The facility's official designation was "Agricultural Research Station 17."
The guard towers, barbed wire, and systematic brutality told a different story.
We'd landed two miles out, in a forest that smelled of pine and frost. March 1944. Germany. The war grinding toward its conclusion, but not fast enough for the people inside those fences.
"The artifact is in the central laboratory," Rip explained, his holographic map painting the trees blue. "Nazi occultists believe they've recovered a weapon from the 'gods'—actually a temporal device that slipped through during a recent aberration. We need to retrieve it before they discover what it actually does."
"And the camp?" Sara's voice was flat. Controlled. "The people inside?"
"Our mission is the artifact. Interference with the broader timeline—"
"Could save lives."
Rip met her gaze. "Could also create cascading effects that result in far more deaths. The camps are liberated in thirteen months. Any action we take now risks that outcome."
The argument was familiar. I'd heard versions of it in every time-travel show I'd ever watched. Fixed points. Acceptable losses. The mathematics of suffering.
And I'm calculating alongside them, I realized. Running the numbers instead of feeling the horror.
The cognitive enhancement made the calculations easy. Too easy.
"Bennett." Sara's voice snapped me back to attention. "You're on tactical support. Entry points, guard rotations, extraction timelines. Ray and Stein will handle the artifact. I'll cover."
"Understood."
I pulled up the system interface, overlaying the facility layout with the information we'd gathered. The Processing Boost made the analysis trivial—three entry options, optimal timing windows, probability calculations for each approach.
"Eastern gate shows a rotation gap in forty-three minutes," I said. "Guards change at seventeen hundred, but the relief shift is consistently four minutes late. That gives us a window to approach the laboratory wing without direct observation."
Sara nodded. "Good. What about extraction?"
"Northern fence has a blind spot where the watchtower angles overlap. If we time it to coincide with evening roll call, the attention will be focused inward rather than outward."
The words came out smooth. Clinical. Like I was planning a heist instead of infiltrating a place where people were being systematically murdered.
Ray was staring at me.
"What?"
"Nothing." But his expression said otherwise.
The infiltration went perfectly.
We entered through the eastern gate during the rotation gap. Moved through the facility in the shadows, following paths I'd calculated to minimize detection. The laboratory was exactly where the intel said it would be—a converted storage building filled with equipment that looked medieval next to the temporal device sitting on the central table.
Ray secured the artifact. Stein analyzed its temporal signature. Sara kept watch while I monitored guard movements through the window.
Outside, prisoners shuffled between buildings in striped uniforms. Thin faces. Hollow eyes. The systematic dehumanization of an entire population, reduced to logistics and labor allocation.
I didn't look at them. Not directly. Looking would have meant engaging with the reality instead of the abstraction.
[TEMPORAL RESIDUE DETECTED]
[SOURCE: ARTIFACT INTERACTION WITH LOCAL TIMELINE]
[ESTIMATED YIELD: 35-45 ✧]
[RECOMMENDATION: ABSORB BEFORE EXTRACTION]
I moved toward the artifact, reaching out to touch the energy traces—
"Don't."
Ray's hand caught my arm.
"I was just—"
"I know what you were doing." His voice was quiet. Intense. "The same thing you've been doing all mission. Treating this like a math problem."
"It is a math problem. Entry, extraction, probability—"
"Those are people out there." Ray's grip tightened. "Not variables. People. Being worked to death, starved, murdered. And you haven't looked at them once."
He's right, the improved part of my brain acknowledged. He's absolutely right.
But the acknowledgment felt distant. Intellectual rather than emotional.
"Looking doesn't save them," I said. "The mission saves them. Focus on the artifact, complete the objective, get out without changing the timeline. That's how we help."
"That's how we stay clean," Ray corrected. "That's how we pretend we're not complicit in everything we don't stop."
"We can't stop it. Rip explained—"
"Rip explained the rules. He didn't explain why you look at concentration camp victims like they're spreadsheet entries."
The accusation hit harder than it should have. Because he was right. Because I knew he was right. Because the cognitive enhancement made me aware of my own emotional detachment with clinical precision.
The system did this, I thought. The gamification. The stats. The numbers that make everything feel manageable.
But that wasn't entirely true either. The system had given me tools. I'd chosen how to use them.
"We should move," Sara said from the doorway. "Guards are adjusting patterns."
Ray released my arm, but his eyes stayed on me. "This isn't over."
The extraction went as smoothly as the infiltration. We were back at the Waverider within the hour, artifact secured, mission complete.
I sat alone in the cargo bay, staring at the crate that held our prize. The temporal residue still called to me—energy I could absorb, resources I could gain. But Ray's words echoed louder.
"There's a difference between being focused and being cold."
He was wrong about one thing. I wasn't cold because I didn't care. I was cold because caring felt like a luxury I couldn't afford. Every death was a lesson—mine, in Norway, had taught me that. The universe didn't reward emotional investment. It rewarded efficiency.
But efficiency without humanity wasn't survival. It was something else. Something I wasn't sure I wanted to become.
The cargo bay door opened. Ray walked in, two cups in hand.
"Gideon's coffee," he said, holding one out. "Still tastes wrong, but it's warm."
I took it. "I didn't know you were assigned to beverage delivery."
"I'm assigning myself to something else." He sat down across from me. "You're not okay, Shane. I don't know what happened to you—the dying, the coming back, whatever you're hiding from Rip—but you're losing something. Something important."
"My humanity?" The word came out more bitter than I intended.
"Your perspective." Ray's earnestness was almost painful to witness. "You're so focused on surviving that you're forgetting why survival matters. What's the point of building something if you become a monster in the process?"
Monster. The word settled into my enhanced consciousness, finding connections I didn't want to examine.
"I'm not a monster."
"Not yet." He took a sip of his coffee. "That's why I'm here. Someone needs to remind you when you're crossing lines. Someone needs to be your conscience until you remember where yours went."
I laughed—a short, harsh sound. "You're volunteering to be my moral compass?"
"I'm volunteering to be your friend." Ray's smile was genuine, which somehow made it worse. "Friends don't let friends become war criminals through emotional dissociation."
He's ridiculous, I thought. He's naive and optimistic and he doesn't understand anything about what I'm dealing with.
But he was also the first person on this ship who'd looked at me and seen something worth saving rather than something worth investigating.
"Fine," I said. "Be my conscience. But I reserve the right to ignore you when you're being unrealistic."
"That's fair." He raised his cup. "To mutual accountability."
I clinked my cup against his. The coffee still tasted wrong.
But for the first time since the resurrection, something felt almost right.
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