Six minds. All six wearing glasses now.
Jennifer and Starseed didn't need them to perceive, but the AR interface let them share what they saw, let ARCHIE coordinate their attention with the others. All of them perceiving the chronicle simultaneously. And all of them—she could feel it through the connection they had built—reaching for the same thing.
"Status check," David said. His voice carried the slight harmonic that came with active perception. "Everyone stable?"
"Stable," Susan confirmed. "Though 'stable' feels like the wrong word."
Through her natural sensitivity, Jennifer could perceive the shape of each person's attention. Susan's awareness moved through biological patterns, tracing mathematical relationships in living systems. Margaret perceived crystalline geometry, structure and phase transitions. David felt quantum resonance. Amara saw architecture, systems connecting and flowing. And Starseed—
Starseed perceived it all. Navigator. His awareness was vast and strange, shaped by modification she had learned to anchor but never fully shared.
"ARCHIE," Jennifer said. "What are you seeing?"
"Six human minds interfacing with the chronicle simultaneously. This has not occurred before—not in fifteen centuries since the Picts practiced, not in five hundred million years of terrestrial accumulation." ARCHIE paused. "The chronicle is responding."
Jennifer felt it. A shift in the vast presence she had learned to sense during navigation….
