The Vethari They were here first. That is the part humans struggle with. Six hundred years before a colonial expedition cracked open an Architect installation on Cantos IV and delivered the Integration to every human mind in broadcast range, a species on the far side of the galaxy received the same gift. Or the same sentence. Depending on who you ask. The Vethari activated their own installation — a paired site, moon-based transmitter and planet-based vault — and never developed conventional FTL. They didn't need to. The Integration gave them drift, and drift gave them the stars, and they spent those centuries learning what the galaxy looked like when you read it through an overlay that had been running longer than most human civilizations had existed. They are based in the Sagittarius Arm. The next major spiral arm inward, toward the galactic center. Between their space and ours: five to eight thousand light-years of interarm void. Sparse systems. Thinning coverage. Flux Storms at the margins where two spheres of influence almost touch but don't quite merge. They crossed that gap to find us. Not the other way around. --- *[NOTIFICATION: Sagittarius Arm sphere overlap — 0.3%. Drift stability in...