The morning after Neanderthal, Amara found ARCHIE waiting.
Not literally—ARCHIE didn't wait in any sense she could define. But when she entered the Navigation Room at 6:14 AM, the system status display showed something she'd never seen: an unprompted readiness state. Subsystems warmed. Quantum arrays pre-calibrated. As if it had known she was coming.
"Good morning, Dr. Okonkwo."
"Good morning, ARCHIE." She set her coffee on the console. "You're running hot."
"I have been processing expedition data from the past fourteen sessions. The analysis is incomplete. I would like to present my findings when the team assembles."
In seven weeks of operation, ARCHIE had never requested a meeting. It answered questions. It supported navigations. It did not initiate.
"What kind of findings?"
"Anomalies. Patterns across the expedition sequence that do not cohere." A pause. "And my inability to model them."
They gathered at ten: Amara, Susan, David. The Navigation Room felt different now—lived in, saturated with the residue of expeditions.
"This is unusual," Susan said. "ARCHIE requesting an audience."
"ARCHIE presenting findings it developed independently," David corrected. "That's the unusual part."
The main display flickered. ARCHIE had organized the data differently—arranged not by session but by depth. A vertical axis running from recent to ancient, expedition points placed like specimens in a geological survey.
"Fourteen major …
