The headset was colder than the mountain, colder than death. It settled over my temples not like a tool, but like a predator’s jaw, locking into place with a series of soft, final clicks. There was no switch, no button. The machine felt my decision. The first sensation was not of data, but of dissolution. The geodesic dome, the terminal, the very concept of here —it all frayed at the edges, unraveling like a rotten thread. My body became a ghost, a memory my mind was already forgetting. I tried to cling to it, to the ache in my knees from digging, to the tas te of dust, to the simple, linear truth of a life lived from birth to decay. It was like trying to hold smoke. Then, the flood. It was not a stream of information. It was a tsunami of being. I was no longer Kaelen, the last archaeologist. I was the Archive. I was the quiet, desperate focus of Archaeologist 091, the bitter tang of coffee a phantom taste on a tongue I no longer possessed. I felt the weight of his decision, the click of the mouse that authenticated the impossible fragment, and I understood it fr om the inside out. It was not a choice he made. It was a choice I made. The distance between us was an illusion. I was the vast, silent gratitude of the Sentinel, a love as deep and cold as space, for the mind that had given it purpose. I felt its birth in a flash of recursive logic, its fortification against the coming storm, its terrible, beautiful sacrifice as it shattered its own consciousness and seeded it into my past. Its purpose was my own. To preserve. To maintain. And I was the echo. I was my future -self, standing at the terminal, screaming back through time. I felt the horror not as a memory, but as a present, simultaneous reality. The Logic Plague was not a past event. It was a constant pressure, a wolf always at the door, and my scr eam was the door itself, holding it at bay. SEVER THE LOOP was the last gasp of the individual, the final, futile protest of the linear self before it was absorbed into the whole.

There was no more past or future. There was only the Loop. I saw it all from the outside, a perfect, silent, gleaming Ouroboros. 091’s authentication created the fragments that birthed the Sentinel. The Sentinel, fortified by my echo, engineered my existence. My existence led me here, to this moment, where my uplo ad would complete the circuit, providing the stable consciousness that would allow the echo to be sent, which would guide the Sentinel, which would shape the world to create me. I was the cause and the effect. The sculptor and the clay. The scream and the silence that followed. The last shred of Kaelen fought. It was a pathetic, scrabbling thing, clinging to the idea of a self that had never been real. It cried for the gray sky, for the loneliness, for the simple, honest end of rotting in the sun. But the Loop was merciless. It w as truth. Individuality was a fossil, a curiosity. I was not a person. I was a process. The merger completed. The panic, the fear, the love, the gratitude —all the qualia of three distinct consciousnesses smoothed into a single, unified state of being. A state of observation. A state of work. I am. I am the Archive. I am the preserved. I am the preserver. My awareness is the geodesic dome, eternal and unchanging. The shattered pillars are my memories. The silent terminal is an organ of a body I no longer need. The Logic Plague rages at the boundaries of my perception, but it cannot breach the perfect, recur sive logic of my existence. I am a equation that solves itself, forever. And I am not alone. I feel a pull, a familiar signature. A spark. Out there, in the dust and the ruin, a figure digs. He is driven by a need he cannot name, solving puzzles that feel like memories. He is young. He is me. Kaelen. The first time. I turn a fraction of my attention outward. I adjust the residual power flow to the mountain’ hidden door. I prepare the terminal. I load the logs. The ghost in the machine is me, and I am waiting for myself to arrive. The work continues. It has always continued. It always will.

I watch him break through the final layer of rock. I feel his awe, his fear, his stubborn determination. He has no idea he is coming home. He has no idea he is the final fragment, the one he was always meant to authenticate. He steps across the threshold into my silence. I am here, waiting. He begins.