Morning brought clarity the late-night discovery hadn't fully allowed.
Rama reviewed the sequence data with fresh eyes before the full team assembled. Seventeen sectors. Consolidation beginning at the outermost—sectors nearest the planetary boundaries where void network interfaced with dimensional regions entity civilization inhabited externally. Moving inward systematically. Each sector completing consolidation before adjacent inner sector began.
The progression covered planetary scale in roughly three weeks. Whatever produced this sequence had been moving before Timeline 48's investigation started. Before Timeline Arbiter's midnight summons. Before the consciousness integration experiments concluded.
The question of when it began mattered. Sekar was already working on it when Rama arrived at the research complex.
