The search for surviving Data Center fragments did not begin with the ruins of Earth, but inside the oldest protected archives of VIREON. ELE-480 and ELE-481 entered records that had been carried out of NEX during the final years of collapse, many of them incomplete, damaged or preserved without any expectation that they would ever become operationally important again. What had once appeared to be historical material now contained the only surviving maps of regional Data Center architecture, maintenance routes, synchronization systems and emergency isolation protocols. The records were fragmented across different ELE repositories because no single evacuation group had carried enough information to reconstruct the entire network. To find the Data Center, VIREON first had to rebuild the memory of NEX itself.

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ELE-480 recognized more than she expected. Some archive identifiers belonged to systems she had once encountered as ordinary infrastructure, while others were connected to sectors whose names had disappeared from active use centuries ago. During the final years of NEX, the ELE Line had relied on regional nodes without always understanding how much information those systems preserved beneath normal operations. Maintenance logs, population synchronization records and emergency routing tables now revealed layers of infrastructure that had continued functioning even after communication with the Core Nexus failed. The archives were not only records of where the Data Center had been; they were evidence of how long parts of it had survived independently.

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ELE-481 approached the material without the same memories, which allowed her to notice patterns ELE-480 initially read through familiarity. She compared shutdown sequences across distant regions and discovered that several groups of nodes had not failed chaotically, but entered controlled isolation within minutes of detecting irregular network behavior. Those nodes stopped transmitting before NULLIS reached the sectors around them, then disappeared from every later synchronization record. A system destroyed by the collapse would normally leave error trails, partial responses or damaged state reports, yet these groups left almost nothing after isolation. Silence, in their case, might have been evidence of survival rather than destruction.

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FENIX-280 joined the analysis when the first candidate list began forming, immediately separating historical importance from operational value. Some nodes contained enormous amounts of archived data but were located too close to known NULLIS regions, while others were accessible but had remained active too long during the final contamination period to be trusted. He rejected several locations that ELE records marked as technically intact because their last communication patterns could not be explained with enough certainty. The purpose was not to recover as much of NEX as possible. The purpose was to recover only what could be proven safe enough to exist near E.A.R.T.H.

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VIREON operators began constructing a new archive map from the combined ELE records, assigning each known fragment a separate status based on location, shutdown history, communication behavior and possible exposure to NULLIS. Most of the old network immediately fell into categories that would never be touched again, either because the physical region was inaccessible or because the fragment's history contained too many unknowns. A smaller number remained uncertain and would require remote observation before any attempt at contact. Only a very small group received the first provisional classification for possible recovery. The future Data Center would be built from a fraction of what NEX once possessed.

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MAJA reviewed the classifications without challenging their caution. She had no emotional connection to the old Data Center, which made her less interested in preserving its history and more focused on whether any part of it could threaten the humans she had protected. Every candidate fragment would therefore have to pass through separate layers of verification before it could even communicate with VIREON, while the Preservation connection would remain completely closed during the process. Ksara supported the rule because the first mistake could be the only one they were ever allowed to make. Nothing recovered from NEX would receive trust by inheritance.

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As the archive reconstruction continued, ELE-480 found one group of records associated with a former ELE maintenance corridor far from the Core Nexus. The region had never been strategically important during the final conflict, which was precisely why its Data Center nodes had remained outside most defense activity until very late in the collapse. Their final status showed an emergency disconnection followed by centuries of absolute silence, while later planetary scans never confirmed physical destruction. ELE-480 remembered that the corridor had been built with unusually deep shielding because it once supported large population synchronization loads. For the first time, the search produced a candidate that was not only theoretically survivable but also potentially large enough to matter.

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The discovery changed the pace of the investigation. ELE-481 began cross-referencing the corridor with orbital records, old energy maps and evacuation data, while FENIX-280 searched for any sign that NULLIS had ever entered the region after the shutdown. Nothing proved the fragment was safe, but nothing proved it had been compromised either. VIREON therefore marked it as the first location worthy of active remote contact, under the condition that no direct network handshake would be allowed. The fragment would have to prove its isolation before VIREON revealed anything about itself.

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Ksara watched the reconstructed archive map slowly replace the broken historical version. Hundreds of former Data Center locations had disappeared, dozens remained unusable, and only a handful now carried the possibility of recovery, yet that was enough to change E.A.R.T.H. from an impossible system into an achievable one. They did not need the old NEX network in its entirety, only enough distributed architecture to give the human world room to grow. Every safe fragment would become another piece of computational territory moved away from the ruined civilization that created it and into the protected structure of VIREON.

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Before the archive session ended, the first candidate region was transferred to Portal Fenix operations for remote verification. No activation command was sent, no old authorization code was used and no attempt was made to restore communication as it had existed during NEX. VIREON would approach the fragment as an unknown system, not as a lost part of itself. The archives had given them the first direction.

Now they had to find out what was still alive.