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A hundred centuries of maintenance logs. Nine hundred plates. Every system on the planet, every cycle, every swap, every tolerance check. I have been treating it as a records problem — a vast one, but a records problem, the kind you beat with patience and a good glossary.

It isn't a records problem. It's a signature problem.

Every entry carries an authorizing mark, and the mark never changes. Not once. Not over the plate boundaries, not over what must be forty generations of whoever built this, not over the war that shut the surface archive, killed the crews, and sealed Nineteen mid-shift.

One signature. Continuous.

"That's a role," Darius says, when I show him. "Not a person. Bureaucracies do this — the office signs, not the officer."

"That was my first thought too. So I went looking for the office."

Because the concordance can read a job title now. The mark nests two glyphs I already have: the keeper structure from custody transfers, and the closed circle meaning a thing held in trust. Put them together, run them against the surface ledger equivalents, and you get something that is neither a name nor a rank.

Custodian.

"There's a custodian," I tell him. "Singular. It signed every work order in this facility across a hundred centuries and never handed the job to anybody."

Then the worse part.

A week of mapping the control architecture, expecting what every infrastructure system on every world has: a control layer. Somewhere a person sits. Overrides, manual authority, a place where a qualified operator takes the wheel.

There isn't one. Anywhere. I have been through the whole spine and every branch we've opened and nine hundred plates of documentation, and Paragon's environmental network has no independent operator layer, because it was never designed to have one. The city was built as a body with something inside it doing the breathing, and for four centuries every engineer here has operated on the muscles while the nervous system sat sixty-one meters down, politely ignored.

"We haven't been failing to fix it," I say. "We've been fighting it. Every patch. Every reroute. Four centuries of two systems working against each other because one of them stopped talking."

Darius has gone still. "Why would it stop?"

"That's tomorrow's problem."

Tomorrow's problem arrives early, because on day thirty-three I go up to check my work against the surface archive, and the surface archive starts disappearing while I'm reading it.

It starts slow. I'm pulling expedition records — any prior attempt on the under-volume — and I find four. Not rumors. Four funded, staffed engineering expeditions, in 2611, 2688, 2790, and 2941, each working the same problem from a different angle, each getting close.

None of them failed. That's what stops me. Not one of the four reports says the work was impossible. Two of them say the work was going well. All four expeditions were terminated administratively — funding withdrawn, authority rescinded, personnel reassigned — inside eleven weeks of filing a progress report that mentioned anomalous power draw.

Four times across three centuries, somebody with clearance has read a progress report and closed the file.

I'm eleven minutes into the 2941 file when the 2611 file goes dark.

Not corrupted. Withdrawn. The record is there and the payload is gone, the withdrawal timestamp is nine seconds old, and I am the only person logged into that index.

I stop being careful.

I dump everything. Bulk copy, no sorting, no verification, straight onto the reader and onto Darius's slate and onto a third cell I have because Tomas made me carry a third cell. The 2688 payload goes while I'm halfway through it. The 2790 goes as I'm reaching for it. I get maybe sixty percent of 2941 and all of the funding trail on 2611 and then, at 14:22, the entire surface expedition index locks under an administrative hold, and the hold has a reference number, and the reference number belongs to an office and not a person.

Then the terminal offers a very polite message about scheduled maintenance.

I sit there and breathe for a minute.

Corruption doesn't wait for you to arrive. Decay isn't nine seconds behind your cursor. Somebody was watching that index, saw a login, recognized the query, and started burning the file cabinet from the far end while I was standing in it.

Darius finds me still sitting there.

He doesn't ask what happened. He looks at the screen, and at the three cells lined up on the desk, and at me, and whatever comes across the bond arrives before I've said a word, because his hand is on the back of my chair and his markings have gone dark before I get a word out.

"How much did you get?"

"Sixty percent of one. All the money on another. Enough to prove the pattern. Not the person." I push the reader toward him. "Four expeditions, Darius. Somebody has been closing this file for three and a third centuries. That's not a man. Men die. That's an institution with a habit."