Margaret couldn't sleep.
She had tried—lay in the narrow bed, stared at the ceiling, counted her breaths. Nothing worked. Her mind kept returning to the bioreactor humming at standby, to the artifact pulsing at the center of everything they had built.
At 2 AM she gave up and walked the quiet corridors to the central chamber.
The expanded BEEGL facility felt different at night. The engineering teams were gone, the workstations dark, the clean rooms sealed. Only emergency lighting remained—soft blue illumination that made the equipment look like something from a dream. Margaret moved past fabrication bays and bioprocess suites until she reached the observation gallery.
The bioreactor waited below. The geodesic sphere of acoustic emitters. The articulated arms of the laser assembly. The nutrient bath vessel, now filled, its contents stabilizing. And at the geometric center, the Rhynie artifact—her artifact, though she had never thought of it that way until now—its deep internal forms shifting in colors that had no names.
She descended to the chamber floor and stood before the mounting platform.
"I found you," she said softly. "Or Alasdair did, in that ritual well. But I'm the one who understood what you were."
The forms shifted. Not response—the artifact couldn't respond, not in any way she could verify. But something.
"Thirty years at the Natural History Museum. Twenty-seven years of suppressed findings. Twenty years mapping correlat…
