Page 91 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I look over my shoulder. “You keep asking me questions that assume time is behaving.”

His mouth tightens. “Estimate.”

“Ten minutes if the system cooperates. Longer if it makes me fight it. Shorter if it fries my brain.”

He does look at me then. “That was not funny.”

“It was a little funny.”

“No.”

The sharpness in his answer steals some of my air.

I turn back to the scanner before my face can betray too much. “Fine. I’ll avoid brain frying as a courtesy.”

“See that you do.”

Brakk lowers himself against a pillar with a grunt. “That was almost affectionate if you ignore the death glare.”

“Brakk,” Ghar warns.

“I’m ignoring it. See? Personal growth.”

Sira kneels opposite me, and together we begin building a translation field across the archive core. The system resists at first, folding symbols inside one another faster than the scanner can parse them. I adjust frequency, pattern tolerance, semantic weight, and resonance alignment until the floating text stops behaving like a storm and starts behaving like a lock.

Then something clicks.

Not audibly.

Conceptually.

The chamber opens a memory.

The projected fragment rises between Sira and me, expanding from a thin thread of silver into a structured display of layered images, language, and emotional impressions. I feel the first brush of it against my mind and brace myself against the floor.

This archive is larger than the first one.

Smarter too.

It does not rip me into vision immediately. It offers an interface, perhaps because the preserved nexus has decided I am a returning infection, a qualified user, or a particularly interesting accident. None of those options is comforting, but all of them are irresistible.

Sira’s voice turns careful. “The heading references First Architects.”

My skin prickles.

Brakk pushes himself upright. “That sounds important in the bad way.”

“It is,” I say.

The translation sharpens.

PLAYFUL CREATION CYCLES.

The phrase appears in the air with absurd elegance.

I stare at it.

“That cannot be the correct rendering.”