Page 169 of BounBound By Scars

He grinned. “Through everything.”

He stepped closer to his desk, pulling a small remote from a drawer and clicking the screen behind him to life. A digital schematic bloomed to life—nodes, mirrors, lines looping back on themselves.

“Everyone’s so busy defending their truth,” he said with a laugh. “But what if we stopped trying to destroy it—and just replace it?”

I tilted my head slightly. “Replace it?”

“No… not replace. Mirror. That’s the right word.” He tapped the screen. “The Rubicon Network.”

I said nothing. Just stared at the schematic as if I’d seen it before. That was the trick. Pretend you’re not surprised. Make them fill in the blanks you never asked for.

“You call it a Doom Switch,” he continued, “but that’s such a crude, juvenile label. Makes it sound like we’re going to blow up the internet.”

He smirked.

“We’re not destroying it, Cipher. We’re duplicating it.”

I leaned forward, keeping my tone reverent. “A mirror internet.”

“Identical,” he said. “In structure, layout, user interface. It’ll look like Google. Feel like Twitter. Function like Reddit. But every result, every data point, every fucking search—altered.”

“Curated,” I said quietly.

“Exactly.” He pointed at me, pleased. “Search a senator’s scandal? Gone. Search a journalist’s exposé? Gone. Search me?”

He grinned. “You’ll find a philanthropy fund, an honorary doctorate, and a TED talk.”

“And when people notice the shift?”

“They won’t,” he said, walking back to his chair. “Because we’ll do it gradually. A few million results here. A few million facts adjusted there. Then one morning you wake up and the internet still looks like the internet—but it’s not. Not anymore. Influencing perception at its best!”

I think you mean mass manipulation.

“What about the originals?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“Archived. Locked. Shadowed. Or flagged as misinformation. The old truth will be buried under the weight of the new one.”

The floor beneath me may as well have vanished. But my face didn’t betray it.

Not even a twitch.

“Brilliant,” I said, my voice quiet. “Dangerous… but brilliant.”

Inside, my mind was spiraling—spinning through possibilities faster than I could ground them.

If they could rewrite truth… they could erase criminal records. Alter medical histories. Bankrupt companies overnight. They could fabricate credentials, fake scandals, collapse economies, and make entire governments kneel without ever firing a shot.

And if every fact could be rewritten… then every lie could be sold as gospel.

Fuck.

I kept my tone casual, like I was still just impressed.

“And the companies Romlinson owns?” I asked, lightly swirling the drink in my hand. “They’ll be the new backbone, I assume?”

“Consolidated,” he said with a casual wave. “We own the infrastructure. Payment processors. Cloud platforms. News outlets. Social media subsidiaries. The narrative. Once it goes live, we don’t just control perception. We control reality. Including the weapons countries are trying to build to fight us.”

He leaned in now, eyes gleaming.

---