Pham follows Trud Silipan into Hammerfest’s Attic, where racks of Focused workers labor in teams. Silipan explains their three tiers: retargetable rote responders, programmer teams optimizing Qeng Ho code to startling gains, and security analysts hunting trapdoors in fleet systems. In the clinic, Silipan demonstrates how the mindrot infection and MRI-grade fields modulate glial secretions to retrain neural pathways, using the ziphead Egil Manrhi while tech Bil Phuong assists.

Moving through a ziphead-carved frieze, Silipan reveals that Anne Reynolt is not a Podmaster but a rare Focused manager whose people-skills survived, making her Nau’s most valued asset. Pham meets Reynolt, who rapidly penetrates his feigned incompetence. He provides the encrypted manuals, and Reynolt grasps the localizers’ power and availability, intent on pervasive deployment.

Back in his cabin, Pham senses the Emergents pulsing power through the temp and dusting millions of localizers. He plants motes by his eye and ear. Unlike Emergent devices, Qeng Ho localizers hide a direct, interface-less channel for those who know the protocols; Pham prepares to exploit it.

A long memory returns: on Trygve Ytre he bargained with magnate Gunnar Larson, who demonstrated localizers that stimulate the optic nerve and read bodily rhythms. They traded Larson’s localizers for Qeng Ho medical tech and debated empire, impermanence, and wisdom. From this, Pham seeded the Qeng Ho park tradition; later, Ytre fell, likely hastened by ubiquitous surveillance abuses.

In the present, Pham attains the required breath and pulse patterns, establishes challenge–response with the localizer net, and gains reliable contact via optic-nerve signaling. With hours left in his Watch, he begins infiltrating the fleet net to invent a compromising, believable new backstory for “Trinli,” positioning himself to subvert Emergent control.