"Are you sure this thing will hold?" he asked.
Maye didn't turn. "It's not a matter of sure. It's a matter of options. And this is the only one we've got left."
He leaned against the railing, eyes fixed on the sphere. "How do you even test something like that?"
"We run simulations. Thousands of them. Stress points, overload thresholds, conceptual resistance metrics. We even introduced minor conscious interference to see how the matrix holds against psychic feedback loops."
"That's all fancy language for guessing."
"Educated guessing. We're not amateurs, Darren."
"I've seen gods fall for less."
She finally looked at him. "You didn't come back just to criticize us."
"No," he said quietly. "I came back because I felt it moving again."
Maye studied him, her face unreadable. "It's not fully awake."
"Not yet," Darren agreed. "But it knows we're here."
