I. DAVID
The house was too quiet.
David Mitchell sat in his home office surrounded by artifacts of a life that had made sense three weeks ago. The whiteboard covered in equations. The framed MacArthur certificate. On the desk, his phone recording.
"Voice memo. January 17th. Continuing reconstruction of the K-Pg session."
He'd been doing this for weeks. Recording thoughts, building a timeline from fragments. Jennifer had been at Wilbur—visiting every few days, she'd said, but it had stretched into something more continuous. She called every evening: he's improving, the confusion is clearing. David listened and took notes and tried not to hear the distance growing.
She was coming home today. Starseed was stable enough for evaluation at Ames, if David could face him.
"The incomplete sentence," he said. "'They're not gone. They're still—' What did he see before the seizure took him?"
He stopped the recording. Started it again.
"Susan's analysis flagged a secondary neural signature—appeared 4.3 seconds before the seizure. Distinct from Starseed's baseline. Something was already in the channel before he lost control. Not noise. Structure."
He pushed back from the desk. Three weeks of fragmented sleep. Coffee and obsession. Jennifer would call it spiraling. She'd be right.
The guilt was physical—a weight in his chest. He'd built the machine. The photonic processors, the quantum array, the detector that read coherence in crystalline substra…
