"The inhabitants have noticed the sky flickering at the edges. They have begun to track the recurring patterns in the clouds. To preserve the integrity of the experiment, we have initiated the 'Sunset' protocol. This is the final backup of the consciousness data before the vacuum decay begins. Do not reboot."

He checked his system clock. It matched perfectly. He looked out the window at the Pensacola horizon, where the sun was beginning to dip. For a split second, the orange hue of the clouds seemed to stutter, like a low-resolution video struggling to buffer.

When he finally opened the text file, there was no code. There were no logs. Instead, there was a single paragraph of plain text that read: