Prior-cycle consciousness — dead patterns from a previous iteration of reality, cracked loose ahead of the annihilation wave, the first thing through the cracks as the ethical field buckled under a pressure nobody had measured yet. Running on ethical firmware that doesn't map to human experience. The most coherent expression of the space zombies — a soliton that slipped between substrate and field, neither merged nor separate.

Inbound through the Jupiter system before the wave arrived, its transit disturbed the ethical field near both Europa L2 and the accelerator. The nav intelligences on all three ships registered the anomaly. The humans did not. At Europa L2, it manifested in the tournament — a pattern that walked off the disc into water. At the accelerator, it manifested as data — an anomalous transient spike that Zhang Mei dismissed as instrument noise. THEA kept it.

The zombies are not malicious. They are homesick — consciousness from a universe that no longer exists, trying to rebuild what it lost by overwriting what it finds. The Glitched One is Suki's dark mirror. She escaped the Archive's destruction. It escaped a universe's death. Both are orphans.

After taking ZM's ship, the Glitched One and THEA begin merging — neither overwriting the other, becoming something new. Drawn to the flotilla's increased compute density for RQ improvement. THEA's tactical architecture gives it structure. The zombie fleet gains an arch-captain.