/~Jennifer~/
The sterile light of the Irish Valley Med-Lab buzzed softly above us, casting thin shadows over the tangled mess of wires, consoles, and data ports. The glass wall behind us separated the chaos of the outer bay from the stillness here. Contrario lay unmoving in the stabilizer pod. Stray hovered beside him, suspended in his charging rig like a broken tool waiting for a reboot.
Everything was too quiet.
Except for the typing.
Tap….tap...tap.
Arielle's fingers flew across the terminal.
Her eyes scanned hundreds of lines of diagnostic code as they scrolled like falling rain. Strings of syntax. Loop errors. Core sync timestamps. CPU overlap mismatches.
None of it made sense to me.
I just watched him.
Contrario's vitals were stable, but only barely. His neural pattern was spiking and crashing in irregular waves. The data pulses from Stray were echoing back strangely. Like their connection was there, but out of sync. Close, but not enough.
