Shimmering lights played on the rain-slick street as the street-cleaning servo ground its way around the corner. It rolled slowly over the discarded chip. The crystalline matrix that held the ourobouros, one more pawn in someone’s big game, resisted the grinding pressure of the metal brushes and solvent jets for a moment, then cracked and crumbled. By the time the machine had moved on, even the dust was gone, and there was nothing, nothing at all, to show that it had ever existed.