The technician smiled. Then the red light flashed—not the loop's red light, but the lab's emergency alarm. The 47 seconds had become a minute. The arc was growing, and it was learning to reach out.

The 47-second slice of spacetime had grown. It was now 48 seconds. And Paul was standing at the edge of the lab, just beyond the bottle's original boundary, holding a beaker that hadn't shattered yet.

Aris slammed the emergency stop. The magnetic bottle hummed, then died. The arc should have collapsed.

But six hours ago, Aris had authorized the "G+" upgrade—Generation Plus. A higher-fidelity resonance cascade that should have sharpened the loop's resolution, not scrambled its sequence.