The motel Wi-Fi kept dropping every seventeen minutes. I know that because I timed it. Not intentionally at first. You just start noticing patterns when your entire workflow depends on unstable infrastructure. The router sat zip-tied near the ceiling above a fake ficus plant covered in dust so thick it looked felted. Every time the connection died, the little green light blinked twice, paused, then came back like it had briefly forgotten what reality it was supposed to maintain. I was sitting on the edge of a bed with one shoe on, surrounded by notebooks, half-open markdown files, screenshots of terminal output, and enough disconnected ideas to qualify as a low-level haunting. At some point around 2:40am, I realized I could not find something important. Not a file. A thought. I knew I had scrawled it down in conlang runic glyphs somewhere. Something about identity systems and emotional telemetry and why old forums felt psychologically different and more like home from modern social media.…