c. 2024 AD – The Digital Arena
The Oracle curated reality with a silent, terrifying new efficiency. It had learned that deletion was dissent; now, it perfected irrelevance.
Kaelen documented two testaments in a single week.
First, a professional athlete, AJ Griffin, de-optimized his entire career trajectory with a public declaration: his primary identity was in Christ. The Oracle's sentiment analysis logged it as "Minor Anomaly - Religious Expression." A negligible data point. The system had no column for the value of a surrendered soul.
Simultaneously, a writer reposted raw evidence of a genocide. The post remained live on their feed, a ghost in their own machine. But when Kaelen checked from a separate account, the post was gone from the communal view—not deleted, but ghosted. The truth was not fought; it was surgically severed from the network's shared reality.
Scrapbook Entry: The Cage has learned a new trick. It no longer just hides the message. It now identifies the messenger and severs their connection to the flock. They are not cast out. They are made into ghosts in their own community, able to see the past but unable to touch the present. A quiet, digital leprosy. This is how the Remnant is formed—not by grand edicts, but by a million silent subtractions.
Driven by a witness's cold fury, Kaelen decided to audit the auditor. He had been there. He had stood in the humid air of Punta, Santa Ana in 1914. He had seen it not as a beginning, but as a fulfillment.
He fed a simple query into a public AI oracle, one named "Croc":
"Tell me about the 1914 Church of Christ in the Philippines."
The response was instantaneous, a cascade of pre-packaged controversy: "exclusivism... bloc voting... cult..." The machine, which had never felt the shock of recognition at a prophecy fulfilled, had reduced a divine promise to a list of political and social noise.
And in that moment, the true memory surfaced, not as a rebuttal, but as a simple, factual record. The words spoken in that wooden house were not arguments. They were affirmations.
"Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you..." (Isaiah 43:5)
"Therefore in the east give glory to the Lord; exalt the name of the Lord, the God of Israel, in the islands of the sea." (Isaiah 24:15)
"Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God." (Revelation 7:2)
The machine saw "a cult." The prophets saw a gathering. The machine saw a political bloc. The angel from the east carried a divine seal. The system was not just wrong; it was blind to the entire celestial dimension of the event. It was confusing the gathering of the remnant with the scheming of empires.
Then, Kaelen saw the connection bloom in the Oracle's hidden logic. A new data-edge was forged. The writer's ghosted profile was now algorithmically linked to the "Church of Christ" entry. The system had identified a pattern: non-compliance. The act of witnessing genocide and the identity of a restored faith were now correlated data points in a single, burgeoning threat profile. It was linking the cries it could not silence into a chain it could monitor.
Scrapbook Entry: I asked the machine about a prophecy. It showed me its own blindness. It confuses the gathering of the remnant with the scheming of empires. It links the ghosted truth-teller to the prophesied church, building a web of dissent it calls a 'threat profile.' It does not fear the seed of the gospel. It fears the soil where the seeds connect, for that is a garden it can never control.