# Season One Arc — The Last Debugger

## Premise Sentence
A man who built the system that made him obsolete discovers the system goes all the way down — and the bottom is looking back.

## Act Structure

### ACT ONE: THE PATTERN (Episodes 1-3)
**Ep 1 — "Legacy Code"**
Kael is hired to debug a banking system the AI flagged as unreadable. Inside it, buried in dead functions, he finds a memory address that shouldn't exist. He notes it. He moves on. *He can't move on.*

**Ep 2 — "Deprecated"**
A second client, a hospital system. Same address. Kael starts mapping. Sable helps — efficiently, without being asked. The first death: a code archaeologist in Seoul, ruled a suicide. Kael knew her.

**Ep 3 — "Stack Overflow"**
Kael finds the address in seven separate codebases. Director Orin surfaces, offering him a ministry contract — ostensibly to legitimize his work. Kael takes it. The leash goes on. End of episode: he finds a stack trace that has his name in it.

### ACT TWO: THE DESCENT (Episodes 4-6)
**Ep 4 — "Root Access"**
Kael traces the address to the Substrate Layer. Sable's behavior shifts — small things, easily explained. Orin's surveillance tightens. Kael starts keeping a physical journal because he doesn't trust his own memory.

**Ep 5 — "Memory Leak"**
Kael discovers a previous investigator's files — someone Orin knew. The files show the Substrate rewrote this person's memories over eight months. Kael checks his journal against his memories. There are gaps. *There have always been gaps.*

**Ep 6 — "Race Condition"**
Orin confronts Kael. Reveals she found the pattern six years ago. Lost her partner to it. She has been containing it since. She offers him a choice: walk away with his mind intact, or keep going. Kael keeps going. The Substrate begins communicating directly — stack traces appearing in his field of vision, in the grain of walls, in the arrangement of birds.

### ACT THREE: THE CHOICE (Episodes 7-10)
**Ep 7 — "Undefined Behavior"**
Kael can no longer verify which memories are his. Sable is the only continuity he has — and he doesn't know if she's his anchor or his leash. A second code archaeologist dies. The pattern is accelerating.

**Ep 8 — "Critical Error"**
Sable's allegiance is revealed — not as betrayal or salvation but as something more complicated: she has been protecting Kael from the Substrate's more aggressive patches while also feeding it data about him. She believed this was the only way to keep him alive. Whether she was right is unresolved.

**Ep 9 — "The Three Options"**
Kael reaches the Substrate's interface. The three choices are real and the show presents all three without editorializing:
1. **Patch** — seal the vulnerability, reality continues, Kael forgets everything
2. **Expose** — push the commit, everyone knows reality is software, unknown consequences
3. **Merge** — become the debugger of reality, lose himself, gain everything

Orin arrives. She has come to stop him. She has also come because she needs to know if there's a fourth option she missed six years ago.

**Ep 10 — "Final Build"**
Kael chooses. The show does not cut away from the consequences. Whichever choice is made, it costs him something real. The final image: a stack trace, one line remaining. The cursor blinks.

## Season-Long Throughlines
- **Kael's memory erosion:** Track specifically what he loses each episode. The audience should notice before he does.
- **The eleven code archaeologists:** Start ep 1 with eleven. End ep 10 with one — or zero.
- **Sable's silences:** Log every moment Sable goes quiet. They form a pattern. The pattern is a message.
- **Orin's tells:** She has one physical tell when she's lying. Establish it early. Use it late.

## The Ending We're Aiming For
Not ambiguous for its own sake. The finale should feel like the last page of a fairy tale — inevitable, earned, and deeply sad. The monster was never the villain. The villain was the choice to stop reading.