It's no secret that Russia has a superconducting quantum program. I mostly know their work from papers on Josephson Junction fabrication and 3D fluxonium qubits. But now? They're also rethinking the building blocks of quantum error correction. A new experiment from the Russian Quantum Center demonstrates an elegant trick: Use just three linearly connected transmons to perform stabilizer measurements - with a ???????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????. Instead of assigning the ancilla role to one physical qubit, they ???????????????? that role mid-circuit. The ancilla state walks from one end of the chain to the other, interacting with the data qubits along the way. Despite increased gate depth, the final fidelity holds up, matching what you'd get from a traditional, statically placed ancilla. And while the scale is minimal, the mindset reflects where QEC could be heading → Flexible layouts → Dynamically changing the roles of qubits over time → Codes that adapt to the hardware, not the other way around