The sacrifice of logic had brought not chaos, but a kind of... cold panorama. When the chain of "because" and "therefore" snapped, the world shed its narrative cloak of cause and effect before me, exposing its most primitive substance-endless, surging information.
I no longer "thought." Instead, I directly "perceived" the flow of information.
Sitting in my apartment-or perhaps I was sitting; my sense of space had already grown faint-I had no need to watch the news or listen to reports. The city was a vast book laid open, countless streams of information flowing automatically into my perception like ink:
· Three streets away, a corrupt municipal official was at his mistress's home. His heart rate, the concentration of alcohol in his blood, and the encrypted strings hidden in his Swiss bank account were as clear as text laid out before me.
· In the harbor district, a shipment of illegal weapons disguised as toys was being loaded onto a ship. Their models, quantities, destination, and the encrypted communications of the smuggling ring behind them came through continuously, like background noise.
· At the same time, in an orphanage in the southern part of the city, the fading vital signs of a sick child who lacked an expensive medication pierced my perception like a needlepoint.
There were no emotions, no moral judgments. Only information itself, and the "system redundancies" and "functional anomalies" it revealed.
The purge of the private prison complex had been carried out in this state. I had not "devised" an elaborate script. I had simply "seen" the system's core nodes-not merely the handful of people in control, but also the crucial legal loopholes that sustained it, the specific algorithms governing the flow of funds, and even the faint resistance some judges felt toward their unjust rulings deep inside.