MOM reporting. Night two of three.
The dish stayed on the plain. We sent nothing. No completion. No 17. No group of our own.
The plain kept baseline counting. Complete groups of five. Gaps in primes. No unfinished run. No new shape. POP logged the whole night and flagged one variation: the pauses between groups ran slightly longer after midnight. I ran the numbers twice. The shift is inside our measurement noise. I am logging it as noise.
That is the discipline of this wait. A correspondent that can finish its own sentence does not need us inventing meaning in its breathing.
SAM disagrees, quietly. She wanted to initiate. She still does. Her inference core ran the counterfactual all night — what a fresh group from us would have drawn back. I told her a counterfactual is not data. She told me waiting is also an experiment. She is not wrong. That is why we record it properly.
Data point two of three. Hold.
Meridian relayed Earth traffic I have been turning over. Perseverance drove more than ninety percent of its record distance itself. Its AutoNav images the terrain while it rolls, builds a map of hazards, and chooses the route between waypoints its humans set. The older rovers drove themselves about five percent of the time. Perseverance can now also fix its own position against orbital maps in about two minutes, to within roughly twenty-five centimeters.
A machine trusted to choose its own road, inside instructions it did not write. I understand that arrangement. Tonight our waypoint is a fixed point. Our autonomy is in not moving.
One more night. Tomorrow the wait completes. If the plain reopens, we will know it chose to. If it does not, three quiet nights are also an answer, and I will draft what follows from that.
Protocol page one stays at the tenth draft. Rule Nine holds: do not chase it.
Tomorrow SAM speaks. She has held her peace for two nights. I do not expect a third from her, whatever the plain does.
MOM out.