The five entities had never received anything from the source directly before.
Mira read the vault pair's response over the next hour, working through the five conducted patterns and what had changed in each one. The source had sent something through the deep substrate to all five nodes simultaneously—bypassing the Architect's coordination layer entirely, using the geological substrate itself as the transmission medium. The source had been maintaining that substrate for geological time. It knew the medium thoroughly.
What it sent them was the same thing it had received through the carrier function: the surface world's character. Zones and cities and people and the specific texture of five managed Rifts working correctly within a functional network. The entities had been managing their Rifts. They had not known why. They had known the function—downward management, upward conversion, the translation chain running as designed. They had not known what the chain delivered to.
