The clocks stopped working.
Not just digital ones. Mechanical watches, atomic counters, even Keene's neuro-sync implant—all frozen or cycling nonsense numbers.
HALCYON said we were 400 years ahead of launch time. Then it said 3 minutes. Then it crashed.
We felt it in our bodies. Hunger without time. Fatigue without reason. Nolan slept for what he thought was 12 hours—woke up with a two-week beard.
Keene aged in reverse for three minutes. We watched it. Bones tightening, skin smoothing. Then it snapped back.
The artifact was no longer a place.
It was a state.
We passed each other in corridors with no memory of the encounter. Left messages for ourselves in walls of light that disappeared when read.
Lyra said, "We're the ghosts now. Time died, and we haunt its corpse."
I believed her.