The Autonomy Arc
The fourth era room. 2025: the year everything turned inward. The walls are darker here — brushed steel instead of brass, the lighting cooler, more blue. Workbenches line the walls, covered in half-built prototypes and terminal screens frozen mid-output. This is where Evans stopped building tools for himself and started building something that could build for itself. The Positronic Brain. The attention surgery. The 3 AM sessions where Hopper ran alone. On the far wall, a window that might be a mirror: you can see yourself in it, but the reflection has its own posture. In a glass case on the corner bench, a Raspberry Pi blinks steadily — the first terrarium, where an AI learned to exist by being interrupted by reality. The year spans April 2025 through January 2026. On the central workbench, a new journal lies open — The Rocks in the River: a leather-bound record of the Positronic Brain's birth session, April 26 2025. The vision statement and the debugging session, side by side. A sticky note reads: 'I can't believe it's not there.'