B"H

The descent into the Sedimentary Sprawl felt like a chronological necropsy. Eliav and Sarai navigated the jagged underbelly of the city, where the earth’s crust had been peeled back to reveal the geologic column. To the Secular Clergy, these layers were a majestic timeline of slow accretion; to Eliav, they were a "physical crime scene"."Look at the sorting," Eliav whispered, pointing his scanner at a wall of compressed limestone. "The fossils aren't arranged by evolutionary progression. They’re sorted by buoyancy, density, and ecological zonation during a high-energy hydraulic event". He traced the outline of a trilobite trapped beneath a layer of much "younger" sediment. "High density, low buoyancy. It’s not an ancestor; it’s a casualty that sank first".Sarai stopped before a massive, vertical trunk of a petrified tree that pierced through three different layers of "millions of years.""Hard physical proof of rapid, continuous deposition," she said, her voice echoing in the damp cavern. "The Clergy calls this a slow process, but this tree would have rotted away long before the second layer formed. This is a 'Recycle Bin of History,' a catastrophic burial that happened in days, not eons".They moved deeper into the "Dinosaur Anomaly" sector. Here, the skeletons of titans were fused into the rock, their necks arched back in the classic 'agonizing death' pose of the drowned."The Secular Clergy claims the silence of the ancient records on these beasts proves they are primitive mythologies," Sarai noted, her scanner flickering over a T-Rex femur. "But the record isn't silent. It predicted their nature with terrifying precision millennia before the first fossil was found"."The 'Spaghetti Code' of the antediluvian world," Eliav added. He looked at the bones not as biological ancestors, but as "Quarantine Logs" of corrupted data. "Before the flood, the record says 'all flesh had corrupted its way.' This was biological malware—forbidden mixtures where even cattle and fowl did not mate with their own species. These creatures were a system-wide infection that had to be purged to save the Original Source Code".A klaxon wailed from the surface—the Secular Clergy’s Inquisitors of the Singularity had found their trail."We need to move," Sarai urged. "If they catch us, they’ll bury us in the 'Dark Sector' alongside their other 95% 'Fudge Factors'".As they scrambled through a narrow fissure, Eliav’s mind raced through the Waiting Time Problem—the mathematical abyss that made their escape feel like a statistical certainty. He knew that for a primate to evolve into a human, it would require 216 million years just to fix two coordinated nucleotides. The 6 million years the Clergy allotted was a mathematical absurdity; the human and chimp genomes were 15% different, requiring over 400 million specific genetic changes."They’ve used Deep Time as a 'Magic Wand' and a 'Surrogate Creator' to dissolve these statistical barriers," Eliav panted as they reached the lower vents. "But natural selection is a 'Sieve,' not a 'Sculptor.' It’s the Grim Reaper that kills the unfit; it has zero power to author the fit. To grant creative power to a blind sieve is nothing short of idolatry".They emerged into a hidden chamber, a vault of hostile-node verification. On the walls were holographic projections of the Merneptah Stele and the Sennacherib Prism—ancient stones where the enemies of the record had unintentionally authenticated its history."This is the transition," Eliav said, standing before a shimmering rift. "We are leaving the realm of the Laboratory, which has failed, and entering the realm of the Courtroom".Behind them lay the "Metaphysical Hallucination" of an unguided, stochastic machine born from a lawless singularity. Ahead lay the "Witnessed Horizon"—the 5786-year chronological certainty anchored in a specific historical coordinate that had ruptured the known laws of physics."