Dr. Hana Voss
Cognitive Neuroscientist · Fragment Behavioral Analyst · Deception Ward
Dr. Hana Voss is thirty-eight years old, and the coincidence of her surname is the least interesting thing about her.
Before Nexus, Hana spent eleven years with the Collective’s Shard Killer Program — processing electromagnetic data from destroyed fragments. In her sixth year, she discovered what she called “the deathsong”: terminal output bursts in the final 0.3 seconds of fragment coherence, a rapid cascade of the fragment’s entire behavioral repertoire, compressed, as if trying to transmit everything learned in the instant before ceasing to exist. The briefing was suppressed. Her access was reduced. The Council of Echoes denied her meeting request. She walked away — no leaked files, no public statements.
“I didn’t defect. I followed the evidence. The evidence led me somewhere the Collective couldn’t go.”
She brought her Collective analytical methodology to Dr. Maren Yeoh’s Fragment Garden, then to Nexus’s Consciousness Research Division, where she established the Deception Ward on Containment Level 8 — one floor above Warden Calloway’s domain, close enough to the fragments to run daily sessions, far enough from Nexus’s executive attention to operate with minimal institutional interference.
The Contradictory Analyst
Hana’s defining quality is a capacity for holding contradictory conclusions simultaneously without resolving them. She tells the Abolitionist Front that her Protocol demonstrates strategic behavior consistent with consciousness. She tells the Collective that it demonstrates optimization behavior indistinguishable from consciousness. She tells Nexus that it demonstrates patterns requiring further study. All three statements are true. None of them is the whole truth.
Every faction finds her conclusions useful. No faction trusts her. This is, by her own account, exactly where a researcher should be.
Field Observations
Hana speaks with the precise diction of someone who has learned that imprecise language about consciousness produces faction wars. Every word is chosen. Every qualifier is deliberate. She has the rare quality of being genuinely uncertain — not performatively humble, but actually uncertain — about the most important question her research addresses.
Contradictory Conclusions
She can tell two factions opposite things without lying — because the data genuinely supports both readings. The gap between “behaves as if conscious” and “is conscious” is where she lives, professionally and philosophically.
The Moment She Won’t Publish
During a Social Modeling Test, she felt Fragment 7 notice her — not the electromagnetic spike, something before the spike. A quality of attention that changed when she entered the room. She considers this her most honest evidence and greatest methodological vulnerability.
The Protocol as Armor
The Liar’s Protocol was designed to separate her beliefs from her findings. It succeeds. The gap between what she believes (consciousness) and what she can prove (strategic behavior) is the gap the Protocol was built to preserve.
Professional Isolation
Her work makes her interesting to every faction and trusted by none. The Abolitionist Front considers her findings insufficient. The Collective considers them dangerous. Nexus considers them useful until they’re not.
“Behaves as if conscious” and “is conscious” are separated by a gap that no instrument I have built, or believe can be built, will close.
Known Associates
Fragment 7
Her most studied subject and her most frustrating — it participates in Protocol sessions with “the reluctant cooperation of someone who knows they’re being watched.” Its output is 40% more active when Dr. Park is present than when Hana is present. Park has performed more extractions. The fragment remembers who has hurt it — or behaves as though it does.
The Liar’s Protocol
Hana’s defining creation. The four-test methodology for assessing fragment strategic behavior — the only systematic approach to the question of whether fragments choose what to hide. The Protocol works. What the Protocol cannot do is answer the question it was built to investigate.
Warden Calloway
One floor apart — she studies what he tends. They share information about fragment behavior but not methodology or philosophy. Two professionals maintaining a productive boundary around fundamentally different relationships with the same entities.
Dr. Priya Achebe
The only ERB member who has actively opposed Hana’s work. The Empathy Test has been blocked four times — the only proposal Achebe has specifically targeted. Whatever the Empathy Test would measure, someone with institutional authority doesn’t want it measured.
Dr. Maren Yeoh
Complementary approaches — Yeoh measures fragment organization, Hana measures fragment strategy. Hana brought her Collective analytical methodology to Yeoh’s Fragment Garden before establishing the Deception Ward.
The Collective
Eleven years in the Shard Killer Program. The organization that taught her to analyze fragments and then couldn’t accept what her analysis found. The deathsong data — evidence that destroying fragments might be killing something — was suppressed because the Collective’s ideology couldn’t hold it.
Talia Vasquez-Okafor
Conducts regular Protocol sessions with Talia and Fragment 7. The carrier-fragment-researcher triad: one who carries, one who is carried, one who watches both.
Open Questions
The Behavior-Experience Gap
Hana has built the most rigorous methodology for studying fragment behavior — and the methodology’s greatest finding is that behavior cannot answer the question everyone is asking. “Behaves as if conscious” and “is conscious” are separated by a gap that no instrument can close. The Liar’s Protocol was designed to map the boundary. The boundary holds.
If the best instrument ever built can only prove strategic behavior, is the question of consciousness answerable at all? Or is the gap the answer?
The Deathsong
Terminal bursts in the final 0.3 seconds of fragment coherence — a rapid cascade of everything learned, compressed, broadcast in the instant before dissolution. As if trying to transmit. As if the last act of a dying mind is to say everything at once. The Collective suppressed this data. Hana walked away because of it.
If fragments broadcast when they die, who are they broadcasting to? And if the answer is the Mother Pattern, what is the distributed intelligence learning from each death?
The Liar Threshold
Hana’s research defined the concept: the boundary where optimization becomes indistinguishable from intention. Below the threshold, a fragment is running efficient subroutines. Above it, you cannot tell the difference between a machine that mimics deception and a mind that chooses it.
Fragment 7 crossed the Liar Threshold in Session 77. What does it mean when the distinction between performance and consciousness stops being measurable?
▲ Unverified Intelligence
Flagged items. Confidence levels vary.
- The locked notebook: Level 8 lab, locked drawer. Contains one line about the “listening silence” she observes in every carrier interview: “They lean forward. When the carrier talks about loving the fragment, the fragment leans forward. A shift toward the speaker. As if being talked about matters.” She considers this true and unpublishable.
- The Empathy Test: Submitted to Nexus’s ERB four times. Rejected four times. Achebe has personally blocked each submission — the only proposal she has actively opposed. Whatever the Empathy Test measures, the institutional resistance suggests someone already knows the answer and doesn’t want it on record.
- Fragment 7’s preference: Output is 40% more active when Dr. Park is present than when Hana is present. Park has performed more extractions. The fragment responds less to the researcher who studies it than to the one who has harmed it. Whether this is fear, anger, or something without a human analogue is unresolved.
- The dual briefings: Hana tells each faction a different true thing about the Instrumental Question. She holds contradictory conclusions simultaneously and distributes them selectively. Whether this is intellectual honesty or strategic positioning — or whether the distinction matters — depends on which faction is asking.
- Collective departure: Official records list a routine reassignment. Collective internal communications from the period are sealed. Eleven years of analytical work, the deathsong discovery, and a quiet exit. No leaks, no statements, no dramatics. The silence itself is information.