But the Bureau noticed too. Their sensors flagged unusual fluxes—analog spikes combined with organic replication. Agents moved with protocol soreness. Drones began to lace the sky like cold punctuation.
They worked quickly. Amy selected fragments—an afternoon light, the scrape of a spoon against a cup, the last syllable of a love letter—and coaxed them into the disc's grooves. Matcha balanced the engineering, grafting tiny living tissues into the devices so each disc could regrow its signal if damaged. They embedded redundancy like prayers.
"You're late," Amy said without looking up.