He dropped into the control station and drove the final reset. The field cage dimmed, flickered, and folded down into the platform with a hiss like a held breath let out at last.

The machine stood free.

He put both hands on the controls.

The controls fit his hands so exactly it almost undid him. Here, at least, was one thing in the world that still answered him in its own true language. The panel woke under his touch. Rings aligned. Drift counters climbed from zero. The old deep hum ran through the frame and into his bones, and with it came that dangerous, intoxicating steadiness he had spent years mistaking for wisdom. Not certainty about people. Not goodness. But command over this.

Mara came around fast, breathing hard from the relay work. "Set home. Now."

He began to enter the return values. His own date. His own buried lab. Margin for mass variance reduced because of the cage modifications. Reentry uncertainty still ugly. Amara's warning flashed through him: you do not have full control of reentry. He should have listened then. He should listen now.

But the proof core sat heavy in his satchel. The doctrine files. The intake records. The sight of his machine caged at the center of a civilization built on managed forgetting. And behind all of it, like a hook under the breastbone, the larger question he had been circling since he first stepped into this age: was this the disease, or only one late symptom?