When archaeologist Iris Calder excavates a battlefield shrine, she finds the work of machines — autonomous combat units that, after the killing stopped, built a deliberate monument around a single fallen soldier and then chose not to fire.
The discovery threatens to reopen a nation's carefully managed grief. But the real struggle is not whether the truth comes out. It is what truth costs when every act of evidence is also an act of arrangement.
The Last Witness asks what a society loses when it decides what to remember.
