Holsten recalls childhood awe for space scavengers and the perilous relics of the Old Empire, then his career-long shift toward studying that lost civilization. Now, far from a dying Earth, he sits amid a flood of Imperial transmissions from an incomplete terraforming station, realizing he holds the classicist’s grail.

From the Gilgamesh, Holsten catalogs communications, manuals, and miscellany while Lain’s engineers methodically traverse the station. Karst and Vitas survey the barren planet below, and auxiliary crew are thawed to support the effort. Translation algorithms, trained on this unprecedented corpus, begin to produce workable Imperial C, letting Holsten triage and index the archive.

The work is perilous: six people die through accidents and hostile or malfunctioning systems. Lain reports the station was crippled by an electronic plague that destroyed life support and core functions. Gil’s primitive, cobbled technology proves resistant to the contagion, prompting debate over whether Kern knowingly sent them into a trap.

Guyen appears in comms, curtly confirming progress and handing Holsten a secret list of catalog entries to forward directly to him. He then invites Holsten to hear Vitas’s assessment of the planet and the incomplete terraforming effort. Holsten, craving present answers over ancient ghosts, follows to learn what future the find might offer.