Starseed had navigated to the K-Pg boundary. He had touched the Foundation layer and survived. He had perceived through organisms dead for hundreds of millions of years.
None of it had prepared him for this.
Through his neural link, he perceived what the instruments couldn't show. The field wasn't just organizing matter—it was remembering it into existence. The Cethren observer-pattern was expressing itself in carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen. Chemistry becoming biology. Information becoming flesh.
"Starseed?" Jennifer's voice, steady as always. "What are you seeing?"
"Not seeing. Feeling." He struggled for words that fit his framework. "It's like watching someone wake from a dream they've been having since before the sun existed. They're remembering what it was like to have a body."
"Is it working?"
"They're coming back."
The form in the vessel was unmistakably biological now.
Susan watched through the observation window, her decades of training trying to categorize what she was seeing. Bilateral symmetry, but not quite—subtle asymmetries suggesting a different evolutionary logic. Limbs that could have been arms, could have been something else. A head, still forming at the upper terminus.
"Tissue differentiation complete," she reported. "Distinct organ systems visible. The biology is functional."
The acoustic array powered down. The laser assembly retracted. The nutrient bath continued to glow, but differently—…
