Avrana Kern awakens painfully from cold sleep in the Sentry Pod, overwhelmed by data and using the hub’s Eliza mode for clarity. As memory returns, Avrana Kern recalls Brin 2’s destruction, the loss of the monkeys, and that she had ordered the hub to wake her when radio signals changed. Fourteen years and seventy-two days have passed, prompting a brief hope that a rescue ship might have been en route before Sering’s sabotage.

On checking comms, Avrana Kern learns there is no ship to contact. The hub highlights not a new presence but an absence: Earth’s radio signals have ceased, their last trailing edge having passed the pod twenty years earlier. Avrana Kern reviews the final captured window—pleas for help and fragmentary messages—inferring a short, catastrophic war.

The hub reports an all-frequencies electronic virus broadcast from Earth that disabled receiving systems. Avrana Kern concludes the in-solar and extra-solar colonies likely died when their automated support failed. The Sentry Pod survived because the virus was not designed to attack experimental uploaded human personalities, and Avrana Kern’s upload within the hub made it an unsuitable host. The pod’s solar arrays can sustain it indefinitely, a grim kind of endurance.

The hub requests a Command decision on reawakening criteria before returning Avrana Kern to cold sleep. Avrana Kern instructs it to wake her upon a rescue ship’s arrival, a response from the planet, or at her upload’s discretion. She surrenders to hibernation, leaving her simulacrum to watch a silent world in a silent universe.