The first search sequence began without sending a single direct command toward the old NEX systems. VIREON used passive observation, surviving orbital records and long-range environmental measurements to compare the coordinates recovered from the ELE archives with the real condition of the Earth below. Centuries of collapse had changed entire regions beyond recognition, burying former cities beneath vegetation, geological damage and the expanding boundaries of the Dead Zone, yet some signatures remained too regular to belong to natural systems. Deep beneath several former NEX sectors, small energy patterns continued repeating with the same precision they had maintained before the fall. The Data Center fragments had not disappeared; some of them had simply continued waiting.

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The first candidate corridor discovered by ELE-480 became the reference point for every later search. Its surface structures were almost completely gone, but the deeper shielding remained detectable beneath layers of collapsed infrastructure, while residual power moved through isolated circuits that had not communicated with the planetary network for centuries. VIREON did not attempt to wake the fragment, because even a response could reveal the existence of the recovery operation to anything still watching the region. Instead, operators reconstructed the surrounding architecture from old plans and compared it with every available scan. The more they observed, the more likely it became that the fragment had entered exactly the kind of autonomous shutdown predicted by the archives.

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Other locations produced very different results. One former Data Center sector appeared intact until VIREON discovered irregular energy pulses moving through structures that should have been completely inactive, while another candidate responded to environmental changes with timing that did not match any known NEX maintenance routine. FENIX-280 rejected both immediately, refusing to treat unexplained activity as evidence of survival. A third site had been physically destroyed so thoroughly that only buried storage layers remained, and even those contained no useful operational capacity. Every failed candidate reduced the number of possible fragments, but also strengthened the safety of the network they were trying to build.

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Ksara followed the search across the planet and gradually understood how much of NEX had survived without anyone knowing it. The civilization had collapsed visibly at the level of cities, transport systems and planetary coordination, yet its deepest infrastructure had been designed to continue operating without recognition or assistance. Some fragments had spent nearly a thousand years performing nothing more than internal integrity checks, maintaining dormant storage and waiting for synchronization signals that never came. They had not preserved NEX as a civilization, but they had preserved enough of its architecture to make reconstruction possible. The ruins above them were dead; the systems beneath them were not always so simple.

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MAJA remained focused on a different question: whether any of those fragments should ever be physically moved. Recovering entire structures from the real Earth would expose VIREON personnel to dangerous territories and create unnecessary routes through regions still affected by NULLIS, while leaving them where they were would make E.A.R.T.H. dependent on infrastructure scattered across an unstable planet. The solution emerged from the same principle that had made NEX resilient in the first place. VIREON would not recover every machine; it would recover verified architecture, protected data structures and computational patterns, then rebuild or reproduce them inside VIREON under modern safeguards.

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The first safe extraction therefore contained no direct connection to Preservation and no active E.A.R.T.H. traffic. Portal Fenix created a temporary isolated receiving environment inside VIREON, while the candidate fragment was contacted through a one-direction verification layer designed to accept data without allowing any process to return through the same path. Old NEX authentication methods were deliberately ignored, because NULLIS might have learned them centuries ago. Instead, the fragment was forced to reveal its internal structure through passive state records and cryptographic comparisons with archived ELE data. Only what could be independently verified was allowed to cross into VIREON.

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The first transfer was smaller than anyone expected. It contained no dramatic archive of lost NEX history and no intact consciousness, only a set of computational modules, redundancy protocols and synchronization structures that had once allowed regional populations to continue functioning when central systems failed. Yet those modules were precisely what E.A.R.T.H. lacked, because they were designed to distribute enormous processing loads without requiring every operation to pass through a single core. VIREON rebuilt the structures inside its own environment and immediately tested them against the failed capacity model from Preservation. The improvement was significant enough to confirm that the search had found the right kind of architecture.

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Encouraged by the result, ELE-481 expanded the search using patterns learned from the first fragment. Locations previously classified as irrelevant were reexamined for deep autonomous signatures, while old power grids revealed hidden branches that had never appeared on ordinary NEX maps. Some fragments were so small that they contributed only specialized functions, while others contained large regional architectures capable of supporting millions of simultaneous processes. Every one of them had to be treated as an unknown system regardless of how familiar its design appeared. The future Data Center began growing not from one recovered machine, but from dozens of separately proven pieces.

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Weeks of analysis produced a planetary map that looked nothing like the Data Center network of old NEX. Most former nodes remained permanently abandoned, several were sealed behind regions VIREON refused to approach, and many had been corrupted beyond any possibility of reuse. The remaining candidates formed a sparse pattern across Earth, but together they represented more than enough architecture to continue the reconstruction inside VIREON. Preservation still remained isolated from all of them, and MAJA refused to change that rule until every layer of the new system had been rebuilt and tested independently. Humanity would not become the final test subject for technology recovered from a dead civilization.

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By the end of the first recovery phase, VIREON possessed only a fraction of the old Data Center's architecture, yet that fraction already exceeded the capacity available beneath Preservation. The project had stopped being an attempt to resurrect NEX and become something far more controlled: a new Data Center built from verified fragments of the old one, redesigned inside VIREON for a purpose NEX had never imagined. Across the real Earth, other silent nodes still remained buried beneath ruins, forests and Dead Zone boundaries, some safe, some damaged, and some impossible to understand from a distance.

The search had found enough to continue.

It had also found enough to justify fear.