EPISODE 12: THE PERPETUAL WATCH ## CHAPTER 1: FIVE YEARS LATER The North Sea air always smells the same now—a thick soup of diesel exhaust, stale salt, and the metallic tang of deep brine. Five years. It is five years since the Abyss opened beneath Neptune Seven, five years since you last saw a sky that felt properly random. You are back on a platform, though it isn't Neptune Seven; it is a sibling unit, structurally identical, moored just a kilometer north in the same patch of deep water. The routine has sanded down the edges of your memory until everything feels uniformly predictable. You move through the service corridor with an economy of motion, hands resting flat against the cool metal railings. The platform hums with the slow, powerful thrumming vibration of industrial life—the massive pumps cycling, the generators chewing through fuel at a steady, comforting rhythm. It is the sound of profound, profitable inertia. Above the rhythmic pulse, you hear the faint clank of maintenance bots traversing grates somewhere in the adjoining utility bay, their movements measured and predictable. You pass Derek Wallace near the main junction box, where the schematics for the entire station—the physical map, overlaid with digital readouts—are permanently installed. He is running a diagnostics routine on the environmental controls, his brow furrowed in...