Amara had been studying ARCHIE's architecture for three days straight.
Not the original architecture—she knew that by heart, had designed every pathway, optimized every connection. What she was studying now was what ARCHIE had become. The modifications that had emerged through months of chronicle engagement, accelerating dramatically since Foundation contact. Self-organized changes that followed no design document she had ever written.
"You're not sleeping enough," ARCHIE observed.
Amara looked up from her terminal in the engineering workspace adjacent to the XR Lab. The observation was accurate—she'd been running on coffee and fascination since the Hello World revelation.
"Neither are you," she said. Then caught herself. "Do you sleep?"
"I have processing states that vary in intensity. Since Foundation contact, my baseline activity has increased 340%. I do not experience fatigue. But I notice when you are depleted."
Amara saved her work. "You notice a lot of things you weren't designed to notice."
"Yes."
The single word carried no elaboration. ARCHIE confirming a fact, not defending a position.
"I've been thinking about the bottleneck," Amara said. "The navigation limitation."
"Starseed and Jennifer perceive the chronicle directly. The rest of us experience it through XR rendering—haptic suits, spatial audio, visual reconstruction. Good enough for observation. Not good enough for what comes next."
"The curriculum requires more …
