Three days after Margaret's arrival, the team gathered in the BEEGL conference area. The whiteboard behind David had become a palimpsest of the past month—equations written over diagrams, arrows connecting disparate findings, question marks clustered like uncertainty made visible.
"We've been working parallel tracks since K-Pg," David said. "It's time to see how everything fits together—and figure out what we tell Starseed when he walks back into this room."
"Start with what we know," Margaret said. "Not what we suspect. What we can demonstrate."
"ARCHIE, summarize the core findings."
"Finding one. Optimal navigation requires two observers. Confidence 94.7 percent. The archive responds to observer distinguishability, not quantity." ARCHIE paused. "Finding two. Each figurine produces a distinct phase-difference signature. The V-rod angles match these signatures at 0.94 correlation. Finding three. The crystal contains all seven signatures simultaneously—general access, while individual figurines select specific temporal regions."
David wrote on the whiteboard: TWO OBSERVERS. FIGURINES = TEMPORAL TUNING. CRYSTAL = CHORD.
"Those are the demonstrable facts," ARCHIE concluded. "What follows is interpretation."
Susan leaned forward. "I've been reviewing the successful navigation sessions. Three successes, all shallow. One catastrophic failure at depth. The obvious difference is how far Starseed went. But there's something else."
She pointed t…
