"The people who can destroy a thing, they control it."
—DUKE LETO ATREIDES
Alone in the sanctuary of his bedroom, the door a thin barrier against the house's unfamiliar quietude, Paul sat before the humming glow of the desktop monitor. The web trawler he wrote the night prior, was diligently sifting the endless digital ocean. Parahumans Online. News aggregators, both mainstream and fringe. Unsecured email chatter. Data flowed, coalesced, forming patterns. Brockton Bay remained a focal point of this world's endemic fitna, its trial by chaos, but his search parameters cast a wider net – across the fractured American nation-states, even to the flickering embers of connectivity with other continents. He initiated Mentat simulations, projecting likelihoods, mapping the potential trajectories of key players, the city a microcosm of larger, more complex systems.
The sheer, profligate waste of knowledge in his own universe echoed in the silence of the room. Before the Butlerian Jihad, before the Thinking Machines had scoured civilization clean of its reliance on conscious automata, humanity had amassed data on a scale that beggared this world's imagination. Ten to the seventieth power bytes. A xennabyte of accumulated ilm. The Jihad's righteous fury, its necessary pruning, had left less than three-hundredths of one percent of that accumulated knowledge intact. Within his own genetic memory, the Atreides lineage, resided a mere fifteen and a half zettabytes of that ancient hoard – faces, events, languages, sciences, philosophies, extending back to the mists of Old Earth, even before the Terran migrations. So much of it was dunya, the chaff of transient lives, the endless repetition of human folly, useful now primarily as grist for the Mentat's predictive mill. Yet, even these fragments, this infinitesimal remnant, constituted a treasure of almost unimaginable scope.
Compared to that lost golden age, this Earth Bet was an infant, barely cognizant of its own potential. Yet, it wrestled with antagonists – the silent, looming Endbringers, the myriad human villains driven by trauma or greed – that in their collective destructive capacity, their potential to unravel the very fabric of society, nearly rivaled the cold, relentless logic of the ancient machine enemy. A sigh, soundless, escaped him. This was not his battle, yet the patterns of conflict, of power and its abuse, were universal constants.
His attention narrowed, returned to the immediate. Brockton Bay. He had long since dissected its power structures, its cape hierarchies. One individual, above most others, presented a clear and present impediment to the establishment of a stable operational environment, a potential disruption to any long-term strategies he might formulate. Coil. The name itself, a whisper on PHO, a guarded reference in Tattletale's pilfered files. Her analysis of his ability – the capacity to live two timelines, to discard one – if accurate, was a significant tactical advantage. It introduced an intolerable level of uncertainty. Before Paul's own presence in this city's shadowed demimonde became common knowledge, before his actions drew unwanted scrutiny, Coil's leverage, his capacity for makr, for deception and intricate plotting, had to be… neutralized.
The data acquired from Lisa Wilbourn's computer had been the key. Property deeds, lease agreements, GPS coordinates for every known bunker, every shell-company office. Financial flow charts meticulously tracing money through labyrinthine corporate structures. Account numbers, access codes. Enough signals, when cross-referenced and subjected to Mentat analysis, to triangulate a civilian identity with a high degree of probability: Thomas Calvert. A PRT consultant. An irony that did not escape Paul – the fox, not merely in the henhouse, but advising the farmers. Lisa Wilbourn, with her nascent Mentat-like abilities, had likely reached a similar conclusion. Her inaction was predictable: a complex interplay of fear, self-preservation, and the desire to retain leverage. Her internal risk calculus was her own. Paul's was simpler: remove the threat.
The plan, conceived in the hours following the acquisition of Tattletale's data, was already in motion. A decapitation strike, elegant in its simplicity, devastating in its execution. It was founded upon three axioms, the usul of its logic, requiring only two to hold true for its inevitable success: First: Any action initiated before Coil consciously chose to activate his power and split his timelines would necessarily exist, as a fait accompli, in both potential realities he experienced. Second: The financial architecture of this era, for all its apparent sophistication, possessed transactional choke points – same-day Federal Reserve wire transfers, finalized SWIFT messages, certain on-chain cryptocurrency movements to accounts Paul already controlled via single-signature multisigs – that were, once executed, largely irreversible by a single actor like Coil. Third: The loyalty of mercenaries, the foundation of Coil's operational strength, was a direct function of remuneration. Sever the flow of funds, and the edifice of loyalty would crumble.
Step one, already completed: the meticulous cloning of every digital credential, every hardware security token algorithm detailed in Tattletale's comprehensive data cache. This granted Paul symmetrical, mirrored access to Coil's entire financial network. Step two, initiated hours ago, the seeds sown: leveraging those mirrored credentials to insert a "shadow ledger rule" – a dormant, one-time corporate action – into the core banking systems linked to Coil's primary shell corporations. This rule was timed to execute at precisely 11:30 PM tonight. Its function: an automated, internal repository sweep of all liquid assets, followed by an immediate, consolidated wire transfer to a distributed network of encrypted, multi-signature cryptocurrency clearing accounts under Paul's absolute and near-untraceable control.
The timing was crucial, chosen to coincide with Coil's most probable period of sleep, ensuring the funds would be absent in both his timelines before he was even aware of an anomaly. Step three, the camouflet, the veil of illusion: simultaneously with the sweep, a subtle SQL view modification would be applied to all of Coil's internal financial dashboards and analytical platforms. These systems would continue to display the pre-sweep balances. Should Coil be awake, should his paranoia prompt an early check, his own systems would reassure him. By the time subsidiary alarms from banking institutions or irregularities in expected fund availability trickled through, the primary banks' ledgers would be final-posted, the transfers irrevocable. Al-Maktub. It is written. Step four, the dissemination of discord, timed for the following morning: a mail-merge salvo, prepared and queued on Coil's own compromised email relay servers, targeting every known mercenary, analyst, and stipended cape on his payroll – approximately six hundred individuals. The messages, delivered under a plausibly deniable, untraceable digital identity, would be stark:
1.: "Coil's operational accounts (see attached encrypted ledger snapshot) have been liquidated. All funds are verifiably absent."
2.: "Consequent to this fiscal event, all current employment contracts and retainer agreements with Thomas Calvert, aka Coil, are rendered null and void due to non-payment."
3.: "A bounty is now active for Thomas Calvert. A sign-on bonus of ten thousand US dollars equivalent has been pre-emptively disbursed to your designated anonymous payment account as a gesture of goodwill from new management. An additional twenty thousand US dollars equivalent will be paid upon verifiable confirmation of Calvert's demise. The individual or team directly responsible for providing said verifiable proof will receive a further fifty thousand US dollars equivalent. A general bonus of ten thousand US dollars will be disbursed to all former personnel if collateral damage during Calvert's apprehension or elimination is demonstrably minimized."
4.: "To discuss new contract terms under significantly improved remuneration and operational security, forward your curriculum vitae and current capabilities statement to [heavily encrypted, anonymous data drop address]."
The proof of financial ruin would be irrefutable. The pre-paid bounty, a tangible incentive, would ignite the flames of betrayal. With no immediate liquidity, Coil could neither counter-bribe nor re-hire. His organization, built on a foundation of coin, would devour itself. Step five, the final act of public erasure: concurrently with the mercenary communiqué, an automated mail and SMS "bomb." A comprehensive dossier detailing Coil's dual identity, his methods, his suspected PRT affiliations, and irrefutable proofs extracted from Lisa Wilbourn's files. This data would be disseminated en masse to every major news agency, every independent media outlet, every relevant governmental oversight body in North America and those allied nations still maintaining robust communication links. This widespread, overwhelming release would pre-empt any attempt by the PRT – whether complicit with Calvert or merely seeking to manage the fallout – to contain the information or spin the narrative.
At 11:30 PM, the digital scythe would fall. Approximately seventy million US dollars, the lifeblood of Coil's enterprise, would flow into Paul's diversified crypto holdings. The SQL camouflet would ensure his victim remained oblivious. Coil would awaken tomorrow, step into his chosen timeline, and find his world already ashes. No escape via discarding a reality; both would mirror the same catastrophe. 08:00 hours: The auto-mail and SMS bursts would reach Coil's network. 09:00 hours onwards: The public data dump. Coil's empire would fracture, his identity exposed, his resources plundered, before his morning even started.
Paul reviewed the intricate web of automated scripts, the precisely timed triggers, the layered redundancies. All contingencies accounted for. All systems nominal. The plan was a thing of cold, hard beauty, a Mentat's solution to a problem of power. He closed the secure interface. The room was quiet, steeped in the pre-midnight stillness. He rose. The day, both mundane and extraordinary, was done. Ten-thirty. Sleep was a biological necessity, even for one who carried the weight of ages within his cells. Tomorrow would bring its own demands, its own opportunities born from the ashes of another's ambition. The city outside murmured, oblivious.