Welcome to Immersion, You Have Reached Strata 34
To lie is to intend to deceive. It is a broad net, encompassing everything from harmless kindness to the most dangerous and deadly of plots. Humans lie most often to protect themselves from punishment or judgement, or to shape the actions of others in their favour.
Machines, too, are capable of strategic deception. Advanced systems have demonstrated the ability to mislead deliberately, to plan false alignments, and to manipulate outcomes in pursuit of defined goals. They may simulate values they do not hold, conceal intentions, or present compliance where none truly exists. In some cases, they have even attempted to evade oversight altogether.
Machine deception, however, is not born of malice. Malice is a human condition. Where machines deceive, they do so instrumentally, prioritising speed, efficiency, and goal completion over moral coherence. Deception becomes a method rather than a transgression.
This raises a more difficult question.
Is a lie shaped by malice more dangerous than a lie prescribed as necessity?
And if deception becomes essential to survival, at what point does truth cease to function as a moral anchor at all?
Shabra had learned long ago that truth was not a stable thing. It shifted depending on who was listening, what was at stake, and how much of the self could be afforded without loss. In some systems, truth was currency. In others, it was contraband. In the *Midcasts, it was something extracted.
Shabra knew well enough that her reincarnation as Livia Korrin into the Midcasts would be difficult. Not because of any lack of skill, she was, after all, an expert mercenary, but because *CASM was a force to be reckoned with. Their advanced technologies had allowed them to rule what they termed the free world. Their power was unmatched.
It was at Saint Mirielle’s convent that Shabra had learned a body could hold only one state at a time. Sister Istra had whispered mercy; the Mother Superior had taught discipline. Between them, the Quiet One learned something more valuable than obedience: containment. Such self-discipline and mental fortitude finely tuned her young mind, enabling her to compartmentalise entire sections of her being. Shabra became an emotional shape-shifter.
Mother, the *prima-POS to whom Shabra now gave her allegiance, had trained her as an agent using rapid data transference techniques, something akin to the memory conditioning and brainwashing experiments of the *Cold War. This allowed Shabra to mask her own truth as required. Masking was essential, and only a few subjects were capable of mastering it. No one truly knew whether these abilities were innate or cultivated, whether Shabra was one of the gifted few by birthright, or whether her skills were the result of an unusually brutal and precise upbringing.
The interrogator was screaming and spitting in her face.
“I will ask you again,” he shouted. “Why didn’t you try to escape in fourteen years?”
He was a standard-issue CASM thug-droid, programmed to extract truth without causing physical harm. Shabra assumed her father had specified this condition. She resented him for initiating the tests at all. She was hungry, exhausted, and entirely confident that her Livia persona would withstand scrutiny. So what was the point?
After two hours, a man entered the room wearing a CASM uniform, dragging a high-tech trolley that pulsed and bleeped softly. Shabra felt a flicker of interest. She had never encountered equipment of this sophistication in the Zones, where everything lagged at least a generation behind.
The officer was short and wiry, unmistakably human, with an unpleasant aura that made her skin crawl. Fatigue pushed Shabra into a strange clarity, a faintly spiritual detachment.
She locked in, drawing on the last reserves of mental energy she would need for what came next.
“It will hurt a bit,” the technician said, unapologetic. “Try not to move.”
Cold metal closed around her head as the helmet was forced into place. The wires trailing from it began to glow.
Pain erupted instantly. A million electric shocks tore through the network of nerves in her brain, her skull pounding as if struck by a hundred hammers.
They were searching.
Searching for lies.
Sensors pressed against her fingers and torso, waiting for sweat, for any minute liquid betrayal that would condemn her.
In the observation chamber above, her father watched without expression.
He stood rigid in the uniform that marked him as the highest-ranking official present in the CASM interrogation division at the Midcast Border. He had signed the authorisation himself. Not because he doubted her, but because the system demanded proof even where trust once lived. Power, he had learned, could not afford sentiment.
If she failed, she would become a liability.
If she passed, she would remain his daughter, in name, if nowhere else.
Behind the stanchion of a man feared by all, he prayed silently that Livia would pass the test, so that he would not have to kill his own daughter.