MITCHELL’S POVThe summit smells like failure: stale coffee, suit laundry, the metallic tang of ozone from too many phones. The room has no windows, just a long table and forty-seven tired faces arranged like a jury waiting for bad news. Nobody slept. Nobody could have; since the primer leak, sleep had become an act of faith.I look at them—ambassadors with trembling hands, ministers whose smiles have been chewed down to practicality, a few military men whose eyes are haunted by metrics instead of nightmares. They’re all wearing the same thing now: the fatigue of people who’ve watched the rules that used to hold the world together get shredded in front of them.“We need a neutral governance framework,” I say. The language is precise because there’s no time for poetry. “An oversight board—scientists, ethicists, military observers. Binding protocols for preservation activities. If we don’t do this, private contractors will harvest humanity the way they harvest data: by contract and coll

AVELINE’S POVThe archive vault feels endless, an indoor canyon of stacked memory. Towers of datasets climb into the dark like ribs of some buried creature, each cube pulsing faintly with preserved fragments of worlds long gone. Our desk lamps barely dent the shadows. It’s three in the morning. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with grit, and the air carries that strange tang of dust and static…“Rerun the Kepler-442b rituals,” I tell Devon, knuckling my eyes until stars bloom behind my lids.His fingers flick across three keyboards at once, the clatter echoing up the vault walls. A moment later, the screens bloom with color: beings that might’ve been our cousins, moving with deliberate grace in concentric circles. Witnesses arranged like a living theorem. Voices rising in braided harmonies that twist numbers into sound, proofs into melody. Consent ceremonies, six thousand years old, captured before their world went silent.“Look at the verification layers,” Ezren murmurs from my

SORA’S POVThe schoolhouse in Cedar Falls smells like chalk dust and damp wood, like something old and patient that’s been waiting for us. Forty-three people squeeze into chairs meant for fourth graders. Their elbows brush, knees touch, winter coats piled along the back wall. Outside, an autumn wind claws at the loose windowpanes. Inside, no one wants to be the first to speak about the one thing none of us were raised to decide…whether we vote to stay human or let ourselves be archived.I stand beside a whiteboard streaked with diagrams scrawled so fast the markers squeak. “The Choice Station,” I say again, for the third time, voice dry from repetition. “Not harvesting. Not extraction. Voluntary preservation under full community oversight. You vote yes, you get a facility that runs on bridge protocols…witnesses, deliberation, transparency, no black boxes.”Margaret Hoffman’s hand rises, knotted with veins like driftwood roots. She’s seventy-eight, and you can hear the weight of lived

COMMANDER MITCHELL’S POVThe audit chamber feels like an operating theatre built for a planet, not a person. Blue-white light glares from panels hidden in the ceiling, bleaching faces until they look like ghosts in formal clothes. The air is so clean it smells of nothing… no dust, no oil, no life… just the faint sting of ionization that makes the back of my throat tighten.Twelve judges sit at a single curved table that sweeps around the room like a scythe. Ethicists. Legal scholars. Representatives from governments that barely exist anymore. They still cling to process like it’s a lifeline, as if cosmic bureaucrats might be impressed by tidy paperwork.Behind them, the caretaker’s interface hovers… a sheet of living code suspended in the air, shifting colors like a pulse. Every hesitation we make is recorded, every tremor filed away for some alien archive that will decide whether humanity keeps its soul or loses it to administrative overlay.Eight billion people are watching the fee

COMMANDER MITCHEL’S POVThe global situation room vibrates like a giant engine under strain, every console lit up, every wall a moving mosaic of maps, numbers, and verification feeds. The air tastes of recycled coffee and ozone from overworked servers. Around me, translators whisper into headsets, officers bark into secure channels, and a hundred different accents collide in the hum of a world trying to coordinate itself at scale.Ten days. Two hundred and forty hours to prove Sarah Reeves didn’t cross that threshold for nothing.“Status report,” I say, my voice sharper than I intend. The room is still just enough for me to hear my pulse.Torres glances up from her station. “Sixty-three nations signed on. Twenty-seven are still on the fence. Fifteen negotiating separate terms with the caretaker.”“Separate terms mean contractor deals,” I mutter, my eyes sliding to a small red icon labeled Blackthorn Activity. “Relay security?”Major Kim lifts his head from three stacked screens. Four