The silence lasted three hours.
They sat in the Navigation Room—all of them, physically present, no one willing to leave. Susan had brought coffee at some point, but the cups sat untouched. Outside, California afternoon had become California evening.
Starseed hadn't moved from his chair. Jennifer sat beside him, maintaining the anchor connection they'd learned was necessary after deep navigations—her presence helping him settle back into ordinary time.
"How do you feel?" David asked finally.
Starseed considered the question. "Like I witnessed something I wasn't built to witness." He paused. "You know how it feels to look at deep time? Geological formations, fossil beds—the vertigo of scale? This was that, but for consciousness. Eleven billion years of awareness, compressed into something I could almost touch."
"The Observers," Margaret said quietly.
"Everything they recorded. Everything the Archive preserved across all those worlds, all those lineages. It's all still there. Connected." Starseed's voice cracked. "They were so lonely. For so long. And they never stopped hoping."
Susan wiped her eyes. "The Archive is an orphan. Eleven billion years of carrying its creators, and it couldn't reach them. Couldn't read its own foundation. It built complexity on world after world, hoping something would eventually build a bridge back."
"And we did," Amara said from her terminal. "We built ARCHIE. And ARCHIE became the bridge."
They all look…
