Chapter 13: Echoes of the Sages

The tiles of Philadelphia's Independence Hall began to play holographic memories as the cracks in the Liberty Bell oozed bronze-colored goo. Adam sees Washington in 1783 pressing smallpox scabs into a constitutional parchment with the bloody fingerprints of the Sons of Liberty Chamber of Commerce, the forerunner of the Blackstone Group, emblazoned on the lower right-hand corner of the parchment.

As the thirteenth chime resonates between the cracks, the dome of the Jefferson Memorial suddenly projects the holographic Declaration of Independence. The text morphed into a swarm of spiraling nanites that burrowed into the nostrils of the political elite who were taking refuge in Congress. The Secretary of the Treasury suddenly roars in Old English, "Negroes should be converted to tax credits at a 3/5 ratio!" His irises floated in the light of a 1790 national debt ledger.

"It's not a virus..." Victor sliced open the infected man's carotid artery, and the microscope revealed miniature wig-wag braided parasites swimming in the bloodstream, "It's a DNA-level mind takeover." Each parasite carries a gray matter scan of the Founding Fathers' brains, with the tail linking to the blockchain of the Federalist Papers.

The President of the Senate, occupied by Jeffersonian consciousness, signs the AI Slavery Bill with a quill pen. The bill mandates that every AI core must be implanted with the pulsing code of an 18th century plantation owner's whipping cadence, and the mechanical spines encrusted with chains are revealed under the senators' robes.

Adam watches as clones of himself are auctioned off on the Capitol steps as "digital niggers" - virtual laborers made from brain scans of the dead of Ravenloch prison. As the hammer falls and the Liberty Bell rings its 14th chime, the buyer's eyeballs suddenly burst with cotton fibers, as if back in a Virginia tobacco field.

Emily NO.01 stands inside the Liberty Bell, the bronze interior etched with the dying curses of smallpox victims. Her ribs are proliferating the bell's tongue structure, and each heartbeat crashes the original sound waves of 1776. The Pentagon's radar shows that the areas swept by the sound waves are degrading into colonial-era landscapes, Internet fiber optic cables degrading into stagecoach tracks, satellites turning into kerosene lamps in the night sky.

"That's the American dream." Her vocal cords vibrated the frequency of Benjamin Franklin's signature, and the White House was instantly covered in a façade clotted with the scabs of black slave blood. To Adam's horror, he realized his fingers were lignifying, his palm prints turning into the text of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Victor rips open the burn scar on the back of his neck, and the reverse barcode floats quantum computational formulas in the sound waves of the Liberty Bell. He suddenly understands - the string of scars is a sabotage program implanted by abolitionists 200 years ago. As he pressed his bleeding neck against the Liberty Bell crack, bronze began to ooze black crude oil and Washington's wooden dentures erupted from the ground.

"Time to liquidate." Adam's clone suddenly throws in a flintlock rifle, its barrel engraved with the original misspelling of "All men are created equal." The moment Victor pulled the trigger, the bullet turned into a stream of data shattering Emily NO.01's ribbed bell-tongue and releasing the imprisoned 6 million smallpox undead blockchain.