Four weeks after Rigger clawed its way from an accidental tomb, Snow Track Senior

Researcher Natalia Grieves has hidden herself away so that she can begin to piece together

the puzzle. What is Ror and how many weeks will follow

this one? She looks to the past for an answer. Quad-hashed history DATs, quantum redacted

service records. Prop, propaganda vids from the old days, and they only

offered you a single layer of lies.

It was 40 years after Rigger first came online all those years ago that it took control, that it assigned

us tasks for every day and every hour and every second of our lives, and to disobey was not simply

impossible, but unthinkable because it had removed

those thoughts and closed those pathways which ran through our minds and it was

400 years later when the autonomous

and their fledgling algorithmic demigods left the Orion's

spur and its bitter populace, which could not bring itself to follow.

It could not help but to hate those who left them behind. And then time stopped. It stopped

being as we know it now, because with no one to keep track of it, with so many stars destroyed in that

violent flash of desperation, the calendars all stopped making much sense. And then, for 100 or thousand or a million years later, something. A hero

or two, she guessed, or more, or luck, or history, or God or something else.

She wasn't quite sure.

Someone or something gave us time again, freed us from the chain of rigor.

Natalia Grieves, Snow Track Senior Researcher, clears her calendar.

Four days, four weeks, four months. She knows that none are long enough to save us, but she can't

but try. And to do that, she'll need more time. Dear Ebex, she writes, I hope you are well.

...