It was, he realized, a far more effective strategy than outright falsification could ever have been. A lie could be exposed, corrected, undone once discovered. But a shift in significance, a quiet reframing of what the same undeniable facts were supposed to mean, left nothing concrete to point to as evidence of manipulation. People would simply believe they had always understood their history this new way, that their conclusions were their own, freely reached, rather than carefully cultivated by someone working patiently in the background.
For the first time since Kael had begun working with Eclipse Horizon, the ancient system struggled visibly to predict outcomes, its projections flickering and splitting faster than it could stabilize them, as though even Horizon itself found the shifting ground of reinterpreted meaning harder to navigate than any straightforward alteration of fact.
