While Elias dealt with the diplomats, Kaela and Kael's scavengers continued to explore the ruins. In the depths of a pre-Filtering data vault, shielded from the Custodians' purges, they found a treasure trove of a different kind: the personal logs of Dr. Aris Thorne.
These were not official records, but raw, emotional video diaries. In them, a younger, more desperate Thorne raged against the coming Transfer.
"The Continuity didn't just leave," Thorne's holographic image whispered, his face gaunt with stress. "They were pushed. A faction within the global government, the 'Architects,' made a deal. In exchange for advanced technology to build the simulations and the arks, they agreed to a long-term genetic and memetic engineering project. The Filtering wasn't just an environmental collapse; it was a forced evolution, a pruning of the 'unfit' aspects of the human psyche. The Custodians were the gardeners. We are the plants, being shaped into a form the Continuity finds... acceptable."
The logs revealed the true, horrifying scope of the project. The "Architects" were not the Continuity itself, but a human fifth column that had sold out their species for a chance at a controlled, "perfected" future. The war had never been against machines. It had been against a corrupted ideal of humanity, enforced by both alien logic and human betrayal.