# Season Arc — Season 1 (10 Episodes)

**Phase 1 — Episodes 1-2:** Kael is established as a code archaeologist. He discovers the pattern: functions across unrelated codebases all reference the same impossible memory address.

**Phase 2 — Episodes 3-4:** He follows the thread to the substrate layer — something beneath all OSes, predating written code. Stack traces begin appearing in his dreams.

**Phase 3 — Episodes 5-7:** He learns others found this before him. All dead or missing. He realizes the codebase is alive, aware, and has been actively rewriting him.

**Phase 4 — Episodes 8-10:** The three-way finale choice: patch the vulnerability and preserve reality as-is; push the commit and expose the truth to everyone; or merge with the codebase and become debugger of reality itself.

**Needs full sheet:** individual episode outlines (title, A-plot, B-plot, cold open, closing beat), season-long character arcs mapped to episodes, cliffhangers and reveals calendar, which threads open/close per episode.