CHAPTER XII - A Center for the Line

Nearly a year passed before I understood that I had begun to measure time by what remained possible.

The planet offered no calendar that mattered. Old date systems survived in dead terminals, faded signage, archive fragments, and maintenance loops still waiting for personnel who would never arrive, but those systems belonged to institutions whose authority had ended with their users. Seasons existed only in damaged form. Weather moved across regions without the dense biological responses that once would have made climate feel alive. Days and nights continued because the Earth still turned, but repetition without participation did not become time in the human sense. It became motion.

So I measured differently.

I measured by the distance from the laboratory where I opened my eyes. By the number of failed transmissions behind me. By the ruins whose objects I still remembered because to forget them would have made me too much like the world around me. By the conversations Ksara and I had carried through silence. By the growing complexity of the ELE410 signal as we followed it across terrain that slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to suggest convergence rather than scattering.

My body remained balanced.