DEVON’S POVThe quarantine lab sounds like a living thing.A low, steady hum that seeps into my bones… fans breathing, servers murmuring, cooling units cycling with the patience of machines that never need rest. Every surface glows sterile white under fluorescent light. Mist from the humidifier drifts across the room, turning edges soft, like the air itself is dissolving. My sandwich sits untouched beside me, bread stiff as paper. I stopped tasting things hours ago.Sixteen hours. That’s how long I’ve been watching. Feeding the contractor drives into the analysis array one by one, letting their hidden code unfold like the petals of something carnivorous.And what it shows me… God. It’s beautiful, in the same way a venomous flower is beautiful.On the main display, a video crawls frame by frame. A child at a community event… round cheeks, sticky fingers, a smile built from unfiltered joy. The synthesis pipeline dissects it with surgical calm. Curiosity. Affection. Trust. Each blink lab

ZARA’S POVThe airport lounge was made for people trying not to exist. Bad chairs that bite into thighs, fluorescent lights that make everyone’s faces look tired and guilty, the endless river of travelers who look through one another like glass. Perfect for a meeting nobody could ever admit to.I hold the folder like a talisman against my palms. The cardboard soaks up sweat; my fingers leave dark prints. Inside: names, account numbers, routing notes…little arteries feeding contractors who harvest people and sign it “humanitarian.” Sora brought the ledger. It doesn’t just pin Reyes to the wall; it points at the scaffolding that built him: banks, shell firms, “compliance” departments with smiling logos.They arrive separately. No security, casual clothes—small footprints, or plausible deniability. Santos first: Brazilian, mid-fifties, the sort of woman who reads reports herself and circles the dangerous lines with a pencil. She sits down opposite without a hello. “This better be worth t

DEVON’S POVIt sits in my palm like something alive. Not warm like skin… warmer. Breathing, almost. The kind of heat that feels deliberate, as if it’s thinking its own thoughts while I stare at it under the buzzing fluorescent lights. The hallway is empty except for the hum of cheap wiring and the soft click of my thumb brushing over the crystal surface.The thing shouldn’t exist. That’s the part that keeps snagging in my head. Every reflection off its facets catches patterns… glyphs… that I’ve seen before, buried in contractor code. Access handshakes. Infrastructure sigils. But this isn’t their design language. It’s older. More elegant. Like whoever made this wanted to speak directly to the bones of a system instead of its surface.It’s a key. That much is obvious. But to what, exactly… that’s the question eating me alive.I could destroy it. That would be the smart thing. Smash it against the floor, walk away, pretend it never existed. But my fingers won’t let go. Curiosity is a sic

AVELINE’S POVThe lab is too quiet. The kind of quiet that hums in your teeth. Whiteboards crowd the walls, bleeding equations and network traces that only make sense to the few of us still awake. The kettle on the counter has long gone cold, forgotten halfway through a panic.Devon’s at the terminal beside me, sleeves rolled up, eyes ringed with exhaustion and blue light. The ledger lies open between us, its columns of inked numbers turned into ghosts under the fluorescent glare. I’ve copied every line twice already, looking for patterns that refuse to form.RIVER NODE ASYNC… send to ORBIT.It’s all I can see when I blink. Whoever wrote that last entry knew they were running out of time. You can feel the urgency in the slant of the handwriting, the way the ink digs deeper near the end… as if pressing harder could make the words carry farther.“Server echoes are up,” Devon says. His voice sounds like sandpaper. “I scraped residual timestamps from the relay logs we recovered.”“Anythin

EZREN’S POVThe lullaby begins like a memory trying to breathe.Soft at first… grainy, fragile, wrapped in static that makes it sound older than it should be. I’m sitting on the edge of a narrow cot in a spare room that smells of old paper and solder. The only light comes from a desk lamp, its glow bending across the walls in the kind of yellow that makes everything look like it belongs to another decade.Devon patched the audio through a small portable speaker. The thing trembles on the table, a tiny heartbeat of plastic and wire.Then the voice begins.A woman’s.Low, worn smooth by repetition and care. Each note sits just slightly off-key, the way real love always is… imperfect, human, alive. The melody rolls over me like the tide against a cliff, familiar in a way that hurts.I can’t move. I can barely breathe.For a moment, I don’t know where I am… just that the air feels thick and my hands are shaking. The sound hits some place beneath reason. I know this voice. Not from files,