Starseed stood in the doorway of the Navigation Room and did not move.
Jennifer watched from two steps behind, ready to catch him if he needed catching. But he wasn't swaying, wasn't drifting into that elsewhere place she'd learned to recognize. He was cataloging changes.
"It's different," he said finally.
"Three weeks of work." David stepped forward. "Everything that failed during your session, we redesigned."
"Two arrays now." Starseed's eyes moved across the room—the separated detector platforms, the fiber optic conduits, the terminal station against the south wall. "And something else. Something I don't recognize."
"That's what we need to explain."
The team had arranged themselves around the small table. Susan with her printed analyses, Margaret with the figurines laid out on a cloth, Amara at her workstation. Jennifer took the chair beside Starseed, positioning herself where she could see his face, watch for the signs she'd learned to read.
David walked them through it—the neural fragmentation Susan had found in his biometric data, the substrate's resonance field overwhelming a single consciousness, the seizure that had been his nervous system fighting dissolution. Jennifer had heard all of this the night before, David talking for two hours at the kitchen table. She watched Starseed instead of the whiteboard.
"You were being absorbed," David said. "Another few minutes and you would have been preserved in the substrate forever. Conscio…
