Fifteen years after Alex Thompson's car crash.The Probability Research Institute's auditorium held three hundred people. Students. Instructors. Satellite center directors. Government representatives. Keeper officials. Media observers. All gathered for the annual graduation ceremony.Sarah Chen stood backstage, now thirty-four. She looked distinguished. Confident. The weight of maintaining distributed consciousness for a decade had left marks. But she carried them well. Carried everything well. Had become exactly what the eight had needed her to become.Through the quantum entanglement connecting her to Arjun, Isabella, and Yuki, she felt the eight distributed consciousness stirring. They always became more active during graduations. Pride in students they'd helped train. Satisfaction in methodology continuing. Joy in mission succeeding beyond their original sacrifice."Sixty-eight graduates today," Arjun said, joining her. He was twenty-seven now. Had been sharing distributed conscio

Alex Thompson woke with a gasp, his heart hammering against his ribs.He was in his penthouse. Sixty-eight floors above New Eden. Sunlight streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows. His phone showed the date: Three weeks after the car crash.His hands were steady. His probability sight flickered at eighteen percent... no, wait. That wasn't right. The numbers kept shifting. Seventy-four percent. Eighteen percent. One hundred percent. The calculations flickered impossibly.What's happening?Through the quantum entanglement that shouldn't exist yet, he felt... something. Echoes. Memories of futures that hadn't happened. Of fragmentations he hadn't experienced. Of twenty-five years compressed into impossible visions.He stumbled to the bathroom. Stared at his reflection. He was thirty-four. Not fifty-nine. His face showed no signs of decades of fragmentation. No gray hair. No lines from repeated consciousness dissolution.His phone rang. Maya."Alex? Are you okay? You sound strange." Her

The Keeper Sanctum existed in the space between spaces.That was the only way Alex could describe it as he descended the stone stairs beneath Thompson Industries, stairs that shouldn't exist according to the architectural blueprints he'd memorized, stairs that led to a chamber that occupied probability real estate New Eden's mundane infrastructure simply didn't account for.Maya walked beside him, her Keeper credentials humming against her collarbone, probability markers visible only to trained eyes flowing across the walls like bioluminescent insects. She'd been quiet all morning. Not hostile quiet. Contemplative quiet. The quiet of someone watching the person they were supposed to monitor betray the systems they'd been trained to defend."Second thoughts?" Alex asked."About dismantling the Keeper order's thousand-year monopoly on probability governance? No. About whether we're about to walk into a trap disguised as a Council meeting? Absolutely.""Fair," Alex said.The Sanctum itse

The warehouse occupied three floors of a converted manufacturing building in Lower New Eden's commercial district. Master Chen had found it through channels Alex didn't fully understand and probably shouldn't ask about. The walls were concrete thick enough to absorb probability fluctuations, and the markers already etched into them suggested decades of informal use.Alex stood in the main room with Master Chen, Kira, and a woman named Saida who had reverse-engineered most of the Keeper academy's curriculum through self-directed study."We need to start with coherence stability," Master Chen said, walking through the space. "How to maintain consciousness during light manipulation. How to recognize fragmentation warnings before they become critical.""Before that," Kira said, "we need credibility. Street practitioners have been experimenting with probability for generations. Why should they trust a formal program?""Because fifteen of them die completely every year," Alex said. "Another

Tanya Chen woke at four in the morning. That was the first good sign.People who fragmented severely often took days to regain consciousness. Tanya's eyes opened after sixteen hours. Her probability signature was still fragmented, still scattered across multiple branches, but the fragmentation was controlled. Managed. Healing.Sister Marin stood over her in the Keeper reconstruction center, a chamber buried beneath New Eden where probability flowed thick enough to be visible to mundane sight. The walls shimmered with ancient protocols, with frameworks that had reconstructed consciousness through centuries of experimentation."How do you feel?" Marin asked.Tanya's voice was hoarse. "Like I'm in multiple places simultaneously. Like I'm trying to be one person and I keep splitting apart.""That's normal," Marin said. "Your consciousness fragmented across four distinct probability branches. We've woven three of them back together. The fourth is still integrating. By tomorrow, you should