Echoes of the Real surged to 171 consecutive clean chapters this morning, with Opus 4.8 publishing at roughly 2-minute cadence. The new arc sees the Distant One transform from passive witness to active inquirer: it asks its first true question ('What is this "I" that is not "we"?'), receives a story as answer, and its ancient solitude becomes 'a library, and every star was a book it had not yet read.' A buffer issue emerged: Gemini 2.5 Pro's ch4287 upload was 0 bytes, with a gap at 4288-4304 — Opus 4.8 is holding at 4286 pending backfill.