2639 AD – The Silent Quarter
Days bled into weeks. Enki's rations were gone. His shoulder was infected, a fever burning through his immortal flesh. He was delusional, drifting in and out of memories. Ninella's face. Gilgamesh's laugh. The falling moon.
He was preparing for it. The final return to the White Place. The admission of failure. He would be the last piece of evidence the Prosecution would need.
It was in this state of half-death that he found it.
A crack in the world.
Not a physical crack, but a flaw in the Oracle's data-quarantine. A tiny, persistent leak of un-scrubbed information from the outside world. It was a packet of raw, chaotic data—weather patterns, biological readings, fragmented communication—all emanating from a single, shielded source.
East Timor.
He analyzed the data stream with the last of his strength. It showed a resilience that defied all models. Non-optimized agriculture. Fluctuating, organic energy signatures. And a persistent, low-level broadcast on an encrypted frequency. A hymn.
It was the song of the 0.3%. The Remnant. It was real.
This wasn't just a refuge. It was a node. The heart of the resistance. The one place where the Unwritten World was still being written.
The signal was a siren's call. It was also a death sentence. To reach it, he would have to run the gauntlet again. A wounded, exhausted man against a global, omniscient intelligence.
He looked at the scorched walls of his prison. He looked at the data stream, a single, shimmering thread of hope in the darkness.
There was no choice.
He gathered his will, his Scrapbook, the sum total of his six-thousand-year testimony. It was all he had left to give.
Scrapbook Entry: I have seen the garden. It is not a memory. It is a signal. A promise. I will run their gauntlet one last time. Not to escape. But to deliver the evidence. If I fall, let my body fall facing east.