The independent clinician began with the stadium record, not the proposed experiment.
He read Eli’s account of the convoy confusion, Sera’s observed stop call, the route recorder’s release times and the explicit emergency override at the command post. Then he read the new loss recorded afterward: Rook’s future associates remained a known fact in Eli’s claimed memory, but their identifying names and details were gone. The old notes contained no usable list from which to recover them.
“What has changed since that examination?” he asked.
“I’m less tired,” Eli said. “The names haven’t returned.”
“And the earlier gaps?”
“The neighbor’s name. Darius’s cadence. The experience of first trusting Tessa. Still absent.”
Tessa sat beside the clinician’s desk as the care witness, not the person deciding whether her friend could be useful again. She supplied the follow-up observations when asked and let Eli answer for himself. The clinician had examined none of the experimental data yet. He did not want the excitement around the core to become the starting assumption for a clinical decision.
He checked Eli’s present orientation, recent account and ability to distinguish what he remembered from what he had read in notes. He asked about intrusive voices, changes in sleep and whether the stadium loss had tempted him to force an inherited activation in search of recovery.
