Chapter 16 — The Fixes Nobody Logged

STUB — to be drafted. POV: Lena · Location: Cai's world.

Cai swears the machinery is sound — and won't admit how many small, undocumented fixes he and every keeper make in a year, fixes once shared and now drifting. Through him the failure mechanism becomes legible: worlds correcting locally and blind, each undoing the others. A living line like Cai→Lio is proof some local lines survived, not that the system still works. Alongside him works a reviser-culture clerk (the second non-human species), whose palimpsest logs keep every change rather than a clean conclusion — a different, equally partial way of holding knowledge, neither the failure's cause nor its cure.

Carries: failure mechanism made human; the surviving-local-line clarification; first concrete appearance of the reviser species (texture, explicitly not the culprit). Artifact: keeper logs / maintenance symbols (persistent); a reviser palimpsest. Withholds: that the corrections could be made visible to each other.