"Please," she said. Her voice didn't travel through air. It traveled along the threads, straight into my goggles. "Don't filter the next one. The big one. It's the only way."

I let go of the glove. I took off the goggles.

"I'm you," she said. "Forty years from now. And I'm here because the future doesn't have a filter anymore. We stopped the wrong message, and everything… simplified. No paradoxes. No edits. Just a straight, clean, dead line. No one invents anything new because no one can learn from what hasn't happened. No art. No risk. No point."

Hope.

I reached out with a gloved hand—my only real physical interaction with the job—and pinched the thread. It snapped with a sound like a plucked guitar string. The infected vein withered. Tuesday stayed normal.

"Systemic?" I asked.