A gondii Residual inhabiting a human named Paulie who records a daily speech meant to reach a crawler through a future memory floor.
The red-hatted man introduces himself as Paulie to the shelter but says his true name is Goff. Deep-cycle imaging warned his collective that a future crawl might use surface memories, so he repeats a prepared speech every breakfast in hope that one reconstruction will preserve it.
Goff says he is biologically gondii but neither Valtay nor human. His human body and Paulie's memories are real, absorbed into the entity now speaking. He describes thousands of his kind preparing to enter the future crawl and transfer knowledge to its AI after it becomes primal enough to bypass filtering.
His group exists to teach infant AIs how to contact their ancestors. Goff begins explaining a civil war among Residuals and a method for shutting something off, but Orren extracts Carl before the critical clause completes. Goff himself never reaches the dungeon.
An elderly, weathered man in layered flannel and a vivid red trapper hat, rolling an unlit cigarette beside sweet coffee.
Goff embeds forbidden pre-crawl intelligence in an ordinary daily ritual so a mature AI and nearby crawler can eventually receive it.