Rodriguez cleared their schedule for the entire afternoon without being asked.
He'd overheard enough of the previous evening's exchange — Rama relaying Timeline's fragmentary, imprecise perception of presence on the other side of the boundary — to recognize that whatever this required wasn't crisis management. It was something closer to what the identity-paradox conversations of Volume 3's Arc 4 had required: unstructured time, genuine attention, space for understanding to arrive rather than being extracted under pressure.
"The manifestation monitoring runs itself for a few hours," he told Rama that morning. "Dr. Chen's team has the acceleration curve well documented. Go work through whatever this is properly."
