The final capacity test began only after every connection between Preservation, Portal Fenix and the reconstructed Data Center had completed repeated isolation cycles without a single unexplained deviation. No preserved human consciousness would participate, because MAJA refused to use the people beneath the old Earth as proof that the new architecture worked. Instead, the Data Center generated protected consciousness models that reproduced the full computational requirements of the approximately one hundred million humans waiting in Preservation, including memory continuity, biological synchronization, sensory processing and independent decision pathways. Around them it created a complete planetary environment containing weather, ecosystems, cities, transport, communication and an expanding simulated population. For the first time, every major component of E.A.R.T.H. was activated simultaneously at the scale for which it had actually been designed.

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The first hours of the test were deliberately conservative. Population models remained concentrated inside a limited territory while the Data Center distributed environmental processing across independent VIREON nodes, allowing operators to observe how the system responded when human-level workloads interacted with billions of simpler processes. The architecture no longer behaved like the Preservation systems that had failed during the first attempt, because local environmental calculations did not compete directly with protected consciousness for the same resources. Weather, biological systems and simulated inhabitants could be shifted between processing regions without affecting the protected human layer, while the human continuity models remained permanently isolated from population management. The world and the people existed inside the same simulation, but the system did not treat them as the same kind of process.

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Once the first stage remained stable, ELE-481 authorized the population increase. Hundreds of millions of simulated inhabitants became one billion, then two, while cities multiplied across the model and the environmental systems adjusted food production, transport, water use, energy demand and regional climate without requiring direct intervention from VIREON operators. The Data Center absorbed the growing workload by opening additional distributed layers reconstructed from verified NEX architecture, and reserve capacity declined far more slowly than the original Preservation projections had predicted. Even under heavy load, no single processing core became indispensable to the whole world. The distributed structure was doing exactly what NEX had once been built to do: survive complexity without forcing everything through one center.

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MAJA ordered the test to continue beyond the population they expected E.A.R.T.H. to maintain during ordinary operation. Three billion inhabitants became four, then five, while the protected human models remained active throughout the expansion and the environment continued responding without detectable simplification. Only when the total simulated population approached six billion inhabitants did the Data Center begin reserving increasingly large margins rather than expanding further. That number was not a target for civilization but a hard operational ceiling beyond which VIREON would no longer guarantee safe long-term stability. The result established the population rule that would remain part of E.A.R.T.H. for centuries: ordinary civilization could fluctuate between approximately one and five billion inhabitants, while six billion represented the absolute system limit.

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FENIX-280 then forced the system into conditions no normal civilization should ever experience. Regional networks were overloaded, environmental systems were interrupted, population density was concentrated unnaturally inside several territories and large sections of the Data Center were temporarily disconnected to simulate hardware loss or isolation events. The world slowed in controlled areas but did not collapse, while protected consciousness models remained separated from failures occurring in simulated population layers. When processing capacity became constrained, nonessential environmental detail was reduced first, followed by inactive background simulation, but the system never attempted to lower the integrity of protected human continuity. The architecture had finally learned what could be sacrificed and what could not.

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Ksara requested one final scenario before she would accept the test. The Data Center was instructed to predict the future of the world across centuries rather than hours, including population growth, technological development, changing cities, environmental pressure and billions of independent choices that could not be known in advance. The purpose was not to forecast human history accurately, because doing so would contradict the very freedom E.A.R.T.H. was meant to protect, but to determine whether the system remained stable when history became unpredictable. Thousands of possible trajectories unfolded simultaneously, some peaceful, others violent, some technologically advanced and others marked by collapse. Across all of them, the architecture remained capable of supporting the world without requiring predetermined human lives.

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That result mattered more to Ksara than the population numbers. A simulation capable of supporting six billion inhabitants but only by assigning everyone the role most efficient for the system would have failed the purpose of E.A.R.T.H. before the first person entered it. The Data Center therefore received one of its earliest permanent restrictions: it could optimize environmental stability, processing load and system protection, but it could never assign a human being a profession, partner, belief or predetermined life path. Human behavior could make the world less efficient, more dangerous or harder to maintain, yet those consequences belonged to the freedom MAJA and Ksara had promised to preserve.

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MAJA studied the final projections while the test population continued living inside a world no real person had yet entered. She watched simulated cities grow around rivers, transport networks spread between settlements, storms cross oceans and populations respond to events without any operator directing the details of their lives. The system did not look perfect, because perfection would have required removing uncertainty, and uncertainty was already becoming one of the defining features of the world. E.A.R.T.H. could support life without writing it in advance. For MAJA, that distinction finally made the project more than a larger form of Preservation.

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When the Data Center ended the full-scale simulation, the final status remained stable across every protected layer. Portal Fenix had carried the required synchronization traffic without exposing Preservation, VIREON had maintained enough reserve capacity for long-term operation, and the rebuilt NEX architecture had supported the equivalent of approximately one hundred million transferred human consciousnesses inside a world containing billions of additional inhabitants. The first attempt beneath Preservation had failed because the sanctuary had been asked to become something it was never built to be. Now the burden had been distributed across a system large enough to hold an entire civilization.

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Ksara closed the capacity projection and left only the empty E.A.R.T.H. world visible before them. The oceans still moved, clouds crossed continents and forests responded to seasons, but no protected human mind had yet opened its eyes beneath that sky. The technical problem that had once made the project impossible was finished, and the next decisions would no longer be about processing power or recovered NEX architecture. They had built enough capacity for a world.

Now they had to decide what kind of world humanity would receive.