Chapter 289: The Last Eight
The last eight anchors were all below the source-contact seam.
He had known this from the field mapping weeks ago. The innermost ring of concentration nodes — the anchors closest to the Gene Archive — sat at fifty-four to fifty-six meters. The source-contact layer ran at fifty-three. Every one of the last eight points required crossing it.
He reviewed his notes on anchor thirty-one.
That had been the first source-contact seam crossing — the carrier function finding a third signal below the organized rock layer, slower and lower than the archive threads, different in kind from anything above it. He had set anchor thirty-one at the seam's near edge, holding the source-contact read while working the dual-signal grammar, and the cost had been fourteen percent. Two different kinds of work running at the same time. At Gene Sovereign, that had been near the edge of what was manageable.
