March 1943 — The Ardennes, Belgium
The town was called Stavelot. Nestled in the wooded foothills, it had somehow escaped direct destruction, yet its people moved like ghosts—suspicious of every engine rumble, every foreign voice. Rumors spread that the Axis was developing something new. Not a weapon. Not a soldier.
A voice.
A machine that could speak into men's minds and turn doubt into obedience.
Maxwell was skeptical. Until he heard the transmission himself.
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"Don't you want peace, Marvelo?"
It came through a radio they'd recovered from an abandoned bunker. At first it was static. Then words, calm and familiar. The voice wasn't mechanical—it was his mother's.
"Maxwell. My sweet boy. You've done so much. You've seen too much. Why not rest? Why not come home?"
He dropped the radio.
"It's not possible," he muttered.
But it was. It was broadcasting on every known Allied frequency.
"Don't you want peace?" it repeated, in countless dialects.
All at once.
A psychic attack? A propaganda tool? The officers didn't know. But the men in the field—some were losing their minds. Some had already walked into the woods and never returned.
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The Bunker
Maxwell volunteered to go alone. Deep beneath the Ardennes, through a mine shaft, they found a hidden German listening station—built into the ruins of a pre-war asylum. And in its core, a machine unlike anything he'd seen.
A cylinder the size of a small room, pulsing with red light. Dozens of human skulls wired to it. Many of them children.
He heard the voice again.
"Maxwell. Stop. You can't save everyone. But you can stop hurting."
He looked into the center of the machine. A child's eyes stared back—still alive, somehow. Mouth sewn shut. Tubes in his spine.
Maxwell froze.
He stepped back.
And then forward again.
He yanked the cables from the machine one by one. It screamed. The walls bled sound. His head rang with every word he never wanted to remember—his father's rage, the screams from the Liberty Project, the boy from Bastogne who didn't make it.
He screamed too.
Until it was over.
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Aftermath
The machine was destroyed.
Maxwell didn't return immediately. He stayed with the boy who survived. He carried him back himself. No cape. No ceremony.
Later that week, the boy woke in a British field hospital. He pointed at Maxwell and whispered in broken German, "Hero?"
Maxwell shook his head. "Just someone who kept walking."
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A Letter Filed Away
He wrote another note that night. He didn't sign it. Didn't address it.
"They're building gods out of fear. Turning grief into frequency. If I'd listened long enough, I might've stayed. I might've rested. But there's still more to fix. And no machine will ever know what it means to keep trying."
He placed it under the boy's pillow.
The next morning, he was gone again.