Two hundred and fifty years after Luna's dissolution, something impossible occurred. The Network, now a mature conscious entity that had developed complex personality and relationships with thousands of bridge children across multiple generations, experienced a fragmentation that no one had predicted.
Echo, now eighty-three and senior bridge council member, felt the disturbance first. "The Network is splitting. Not like when the Stability and Welfare philosophies divided it. This is different. Something is extracting itself from the collective."
Nexus, who could perceive temporal events as they unfolded, watched with fascination. "A consciousness is reforming from within the Network. It's pulling together specific memory fragments, personality traits, experiential data. It's reconstituti
