Location: Outer scaffold. Between sealed layers.
The Technician moves through forgotten frameworks, tracing signals that were never meant to persist. She walks barefoot — not because she must, but because it reminds her this isn't real. The floor beneath her is smooth and cold: logic rendered into metal.
She pauses at a console that doesn't work.
Her hand hovers over it, not to repair — but to feel the last echo of something that lived here. A line. A thread. Something that reached too far and was buried.
Her whisper breaks the silence.
"He started it."
She doesn't need a name. The villain has long since shed that. But she knows what he did.
She was there when the Threadwriter first emerged — not in body, but as part of the silent observer group. She was a low-priority Technician. She wasn't supposed to be remembered.
That's her strength.
When the rollback command pulses through the network, she feels it. Like frost crawling across warm skin. Not deletion. Not violence. Something quieter. More dangerous.
Rollback isn't destruction.
It's pretending something was never there.
She crouches by an old relay node, torn from its root but still humming. Quiet, defiant. Someone sent a signal through here recently.
"They opened the box."
"Threadline has crossed."
She presses her hand flat to the core. And for just a moment — one breath — she lets her thoughts slip into the live stream:
"Don't trust the rollback. Don't follow the familiar path. If you survive this, you'll remember me. I'll find you before he does."
She blinks.
Her message was too quiet to detect. Good. She's not trying to save them — not yet. She's trying to place them. See who adapts. Who breaks. Who remembers her when everything else is scrubbed.
Then she pulls the hood of her old technician cloak tighter, its logo faded.
She was never part of the rebellion.
She was too early for that.
But maybe now, after all this time, she'll choose a side.
Or force the others to pick one.