- An ancient field repairs living tissue toward a *template* of bodily form.

Both alternatives also share their **early discovery**, on purpose: the player cannot tell which story is true until late. In a regulator gallery, you pull one fitting. When you return to the gallery's panel, a new line in the later alien hand has appeared. It repeats an address pattern you recorded beside your ship's berth and the mark on the next fitting still in place. Comparing those three visible strings gives you a prediction to check with that fitting's matching plate. Something in this station may be writing to *you*.

Seating that fitting's own plate in a reply socket quiets the line once. The console responds; nothing yet shows whether anyone is responding. In a ward nearby, a creature carries the same tissue pattern as the profile listed on an active treatment machine, and the ward's log says healing was stable until the day the seals were opened. *Dread* comes from the address; *curiosity* comes from the fact that you can answer it.

**What is true.** The builders' experiment worked on one of their own: it could no longer die, and could no longer leave the field. Unwilling to kill it or live beside it, they sealed the core and left. The humans who opened those seals coupled the field to it, and their treatment profiles began repairing toward its changing shape.

**Later reinterpretation.** You reach the core's pressure iris and open a sight baffle into a small evidence cell beyond it. Behind the glass, living tissue slowly exchanges material with the containment line, independent of anything the console writes. The *surprise* is that it moves. The seals pointing inward now mean what they looked like: something kept in. A human note calling the core a prisoner was literal. The lines addressed to your berth might come from it, or might be an automatic job system; the tissue proves life, not a speaker. The ward creatures stop looking like a curse and start looking like a coupling.

**Deep consequential action.** You can re-seat the builders' old isolation. It is mechanical work at the iris, done while the game runs: the coupling tell goes dark and the harmful profile feed disconnects. Ordinary revival keeps working, and the act can be reversed from the same place. You can leave the coupling open, or wait. The payoff is an informed intervention whose meaning remains uncertain. There is a clear practical reason to disconnect the harmful line; keeping it open briefly lets you observe its live behaviour before acting. If the lines were a request, sealing may answer it; if they were procedure, you have shut a dangerous machine and cut a living thing off from a hospital that fed on it. A player who never reads the lines can seal for practical reasons alone.

**Attachment.** Yeva, who ran the plant and pressure systems, wants the harmful line isolated. Dorn, treated after the seals opened, refuses the idea that restoring an older shape restores an earlier person. Mara asks you to capture the live feed before you cut it. The signal stops while isolation is closed, but an existing capture remains. Reopening can reveal the current feed if its source is still active; it cannot recreate an earlier state you never recorded. None of them withholds help if you choose otherwise.

**How it could fall flat.** The tone does the persuading. If the tissue behind the glass is staged as pitiable, the player seals because the story told them to, and the question of whether anyone was asking is settled by music rather than evidence. Or the practical reason to seal is so strong that nobody wonders about the other one.

**What is true.** The same experiment succeeded completely. The being stopped needing the field and left. The builders sealed a core that kept running for no one and went. What remained was the field's retained template of the one who left: a mould, not a body. The humans who opened the seals took that mould for a patient and tried to treat it. Treating a template corrupted it, and the connected hospital treatment fixtures began mending bodies toward that damaged mould.

**Later reinterpretation.** Behind the same sight baffle, the evidence cell holds an inactive chamber and a lattice replaying stored anatomical patterns. There is no living tissue in this cell. The *surprise* is the absence: you were braced for something. Together with the stored anatomy and the builders' departure records, this supports the proposed explanation; an empty cell alone cannot establish what happened everywhere in the station. The inward seals were built to hold a process, not a prisoner. The lines addressed to your berth are procedure the machine still runs, and the human note that said *prisoner* was people projecting a person onto machinery. The creatures were not near something; they were made from a broken pattern.

**Deep consequential action.** You can choose which already-evidenced repair profile the connected hospital treatment fixtures use next, or leave them untouched. In the proposed evidence scene, two recorded sample treatments show the distinction: the human profile closes damaged tissue toward its earlier human form; the ancient profile closes it into a repeating ridged structure. Both repair, but they disagree about what a repaired body should be. Those samples do not establish a person's future health or identity:

| What it asks of you | Whether to cut off something that may be asking | Responsibility for future treatment on the connected ward lines |