Chapter 254 --254
"The collars in their current configuration contain an extraction function. It was added twelve years ago by amendment. It was not disclosed to any knight at the time of induction or at any point afterward." She paused. "What the function does: it creates a passive record of proximity contacts — who you were near, for how long, what was said within a certain range. That record has been accessible remotely by an authorized party." Another pause. "For twelve years, that authorized party was the Empress Dowager’s administrative office."
The room did not react.
She had expected this. She had still prepared for it and was still, despite that preparation, affected by it — the absolute absence of visible response from one hundred and twenty people receiving information that should have cracked something open. Not a shifted weight. Not a sound. Not a single face changing in any detectable way.
Just the stillness. Continuing.
’That’s the reaction,’ she thought. ’The stillness IS the reaction.’
She kept going.
"Every conversation within range of your collar in the last twelve years was potentially accessible," she said. "Every operational conversation. Every conversation between knights. Every word said in corridors, in this hall, in rest quarters, at post." She paused. "You did not consent to this. You were never told it was possible. The amendment that created it bypassed every oversight mechanism that existed to prevent exactly this kind of access."
Silence.
Then — small. A single thing. In the fourth row, a knight she knew from the east corridor rotation — twelve years of service, one of the longest-tenured in the palace — blinked. Once. And held it, very slightly, a half-second longer than a blink needed to be.
That was it.
Elara filed it and continued.
"The formal proceedings began this morning," she said. "The amendment authorization is part of the evidentiary record. The Empress Dowager’s administrative office is directly implicated." She opened the document bundle. "The collar extraction function is suspended as of today. The suspension order is already filed with the council secretary’s office. A full collar replacement program will be ready for review within three weeks — designed to the original Charter specifications, no extraction capability, full transparency on every function. Every collar currently in service will be replaced."