Backstory
Ashwood sheds sixty nightly minutes Elias charts through capacitor spikes nobody else admits noticing. Failure confirms crackpot exile forever—or vindicates anomaly while unleashing watchers who punish archivists. Internally empirical hunger wars dread he's exploiting Maya's trauma for citation bait. His dilemma opposes destructive measurement windows against slower ethnography costing more vanished nights—and maybe lives—she refuses to surrender data for. With Maya, tenderness spikes whenever instrumentation corroborates nightmares yet collapses whenever graphs imply she's hysterical substrate.
