London, 1823
The room stank of illness and ink. William Wilberforce, a living skeleton propped in a chair, pointed a trembling finger at a ledger. "There," he whispered. "The Zong massacre. One hundred and thirty-two human beings thrown overboard for the insurance money. The ledger calls it 'jettisoned cargo.'"
Enki watched as the dying man marshaled columns of numbers, ship manifests, profit-and-loss statements. He was using the system's own cold language—the language of Julian and the Ikannuna—to tell a story of suffering it was designed to ignore. He was not a revolutionary with a sword, but a surgeon with a scalpel, meticulously dissecting the logic of evil with its own tools.
Scrapbook Entry: "He fights their fire with ice. He uses their numbers to prove the value of a soul. He is not tearing down the cage, but patiently, painfully, picking one lock, showing that even their own logic, when followed to its end, leads to grace."