Chapter 8: Jonathan Returns, Broken

Jonathan Harke's Personal Log — 21 May, 07:43

I am going to write this while it is still sequential. While the sequence still holds.

Central Station. Platform Nine. I stepped off the 06:55 from the Eastern Transit Hub and the DataVeil hit me like a wall of warm water — every implant channel opening simultaneously after eleven days of null-connectivity, notifications cascading across my visual overlay in a torrent I had not prepared for and could not immediately dismiss. I stood in the middle of the platform with commuters parting around me and I could not find the gesture to silence the overlay. My hands did not remember the gesture. I stood there for what my log tells me was forty-three seconds, though it felt like a structural flaw in time, until Mina's hand closed around my left wrist.