It came back on the morning of the third day, at the fifth hour, while I was standing at the wash basin with soap on my hands and my mind on the Harren problem.
Not with a dramatic announcement. Not with the stuttering, flickering quality of the previous day's partial recoveries. It simply returned, fully, cleanly, with the quiet certainty of something that had finished what it needed to finish and was now ready to resume normal operations.
[System Status: Recalibration Complete. All functions restored. Resuming standard operational mode.]
I rinsed my hands and dried them and waited to see what came next.
What came next was not a threat assessment. It was not a quest update or a probability calculation or any of the operational outputs that formed the usual texture of the system's morning presence. It was something I had not seen before.
