2025-08-02 22:37:45The command hub buzzes with white noise and bad coffee.
I follow Devon and Kira past banks of monitors, each one showing the same thing, empty space where the Devourers used to be. Still out there. Just waiting. Dr. Aveline stands hunched over the central console, her fingers dancing across holographic displays. “Signal’s been cycling for over an hour,” she says without turning. “Same frequency. Same coordinates. No response.” The beacon pulses red against the black screen. Hypnotic. Urgent. Kira folds her arms. “What’s the source?” “That’s the problem.” Aveline enlarges a data stream. “The signal’s broadcasting from Los Angeles… but the encryption signature…” She hesitates. Her jaw tightens. “It matches our simulation protocols.” The room stills. The only sound is the soft whir of the hub’s ventilation. Our protocols. From inside the pod. Devon shifts beside me. “Could be an echo,” he mutters. “Residual bleed from the neural systems.” I watch his reflection in the monitor glass. The way his jaw tightens when he mentions the simulation. The twelve students who didn’t make it out. He must be thinking about that. “Or,” Kira steps closer to the screen, “someone else was in there with us and is alive.” The beacon flashes faster. Hope, or bait. “We need to investigate,” I say. Devon’s head snaps toward me. “Are you insane? After what just happened?” “What just happened proves we’re stronger than we thought.” “What just happened is twelve kids died while we played heroes.” His voice cracks on the last word. There it is. The guilt he’s been swallowing since the debriefing. “This is different,” I say. “This could be a survivor. Someone is trying to reach us.” “Or someone trying to lure us out.” His voice rises. “We don’t even know what this is. How many more people have to die before you’re satisfied, Ezren?” The slap is invisible but lands all the same. I flinch. Kira steps between us, palm up. “Enough. Both of you!” The room breathes again. Devon thinks I’m being reckless. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what’s needed. Dr. Aveline clears her throat. “The signal isn’t stationary. It’s moving. Whoever’s sending this is on foot, street-level, heading east through downtown.” “Moving how?” I ask. “On foot. The transmission range keeps shifting, but it’s following surface streets.” Someone is walking through LA with our encryption codes. Someone who was in the simulation. “We can triangulate,” Kira says. “Send a drone. Keep it safe.” “Or we could ignore it,” Devon says. “Focus on the real threat. The Devourers are still out there. We’re just in the eye of the storm and we have no idea when…” “When they’re coming back.” I finish his sentence. “Which is exactly why we need to investigate this signal. What if it’s connected?” Devon stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “Connected how?” I don’t have an answer. Only a gut-deep certainty that sitting here means missing something critical. “I’ll go,” I say. “Like hell you will.” Kira’s voice goes sharp. “You just spent three days wired to an alien mainframe. Your nervous system’s still recalibrating.” “I’m fine.” “You could barely walk an hour ago.” She’s right. The ache in my limbs confirms it. But this isn’t about being ready. It’s about being the one who has to do it. “Someone has to check it out. And I’m the only one here who’s been through the full simulation sequence.” Devon laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Right. Because that worked out so well for Marcus.” The name hangs in the air like smoke. I feel my hands start to shake again. Marcus would’ve volunteered too. Marcus would’ve said it was worth the risk. “I’m going,” I repeat. Dr. Aveline inputs commands into the console. “Coordinates are locked. Signal source is currently at the intersection of Wilshire and…” She stops. The beacon vanishes. For a moment, the entire console goes dark. Then new numbers cascade down the display. Different coordinates. Much different. Kira leans in. “That’s not Los Angeles.” I read the altitude. Once. Twice. The numbers don’t change. My voice comes out low. “It’s in orbit.” A breathless silence follows. Devon shakes his head. “What the hell does that even mean?” I don’t answer. I can’t. Dr. Aveline checks her telemetry. Her lips go pale. “We’ve got nothing in that zone. No satellites. No probes. That coordinate… It’s in free space.” Kira steps back. “Between us and…” “Neptune,” I whisper. “Between us and the last known Devourer position.” The screen pulses once. Then again. Then nothing. Stillness. We stare, waiting for it to return. Whatever was walking through L.A. just launched itself into the void. And we have no idea if it was running from something, or toward it.
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The Bridge Network
ZARA’S POVThe relay zone looks nothing like a battlefield, though that’s what it is. Not guns and armor… ritual and memory. A circle of canvas pitched in the middle of no man’s land, lanterns throwing warm light across low tables stacked with tea sets and worn manuscripts. The air smells of bergamot, paper ink, and bodies too tired to pretend they’re not desperate. Just beyond the fabric walls, the relay tower hums… patient, mechanical, listening. Always listening.Elder Okafor speaks first, her hands drawing invisible shapes in the air. “Every true promise requires three witnesses, seven rounds of deliberation, and a song to carry the choice into memory. Without that, the words drift. They have no anchor.”Dr. Tanaka, still gaunt from the riots in Tokyo, folds his hands over the rim of a porcelain cup. “In my country, we have tea ceremonies that last for days. Every motion counts. Every silence counts. Consent isn’t something you rush. It breathes.”I’m the one tasked with turning
Sifting
AVELINE’S POVThe archive vault feels endless, an indoor canyon of stacked memory. Towers of datasets climb into the dark like ribs of some buried creature, each cube pulsing faintly with preserved fragments of worlds long gone. Our desk lamps barely dent the shadows. It’s three in the morning. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with grit, and the air carries that strange tang of dust and static…“Rerun the Kepler-442b rituals,” I tell Devon, knuckling my eyes until stars bloom behind my lids.His fingers flick across three keyboards at once, the clatter echoing up the vault walls. A moment later, the screens bloom with color: beings that might’ve been our cousins, moving with deliberate grace in concentric circles. Witnesses arranged like a living theorem. Voices rising in braided harmonies that twist numbers into sound, proofs into melody. Consent ceremonies, six thousand years old, captured before their world went silent.“Look at the verification layers,” Ezren murmurs from my
The Seal
EZREN’S POVThe relay station crouches in the Nevada dust like a thing that should have been buried a million years ago and somehow wasn’t—wind-carved metal, scars like old lightning strikes. The air tastes metallic… ozone and something like burnt sugar from distant salt flats… and makes the back of my teeth twitch. Mitchell’s convoy left tracks that blur in the heat, but the world here narrows to the humming tower and the small, human-shaped shadows we cast against it.“You sure about this?” Mitchell asks again, more habit than question. Her hand ghosts over the grip of her sidearm like it’s an old comfort she doesn’t expect to need.“No.” My boots crunch on salt and gravel as I walk. “But someone has to answer the door.”Heat comes off the housing before I reach it… clean heat, not the ragged, hungry warmth of the Devourer. It wants to tidy things, not consume them. When my palm meets metal, the world tilts.It isn’t the sound that touches me. It’s a tidy comprehension, a stack of
Safe Governance
MITCHELL’S POVThe summit smells like failure: stale coffee, suit laundry, the metallic tang of ozone from too many phones. The room has no windows, just a long table and forty-seven tired faces arranged like a jury waiting for bad news. Nobody slept. Nobody could have; since the primer leak, sleep had become an act of faith.I look at them—ambassadors with trembling hands, ministers whose smiles have been chewed down to practicality, a few military men whose eyes are haunted by metrics instead of nightmares. They’re all wearing the same thing now: the fatigue of people who’ve watched the rules that used to hold the world together get shredded in front of them.“We need a neutral governance framework,” I say. The language is precise because there’s no time for poetry. “An oversight board—scientists, ethicists, military observers. Binding protocols for preservation activities. If we don’t do this, private contractors will harvest humanity the way they harvest data: by contract and coll
Public Unrest
SORA’S POVFrom the roof of an abandoned hotel, I watch Times Square detonate with light. Screens flicker like nervous eyes, broadcasting the primer leak across every feed, every surface that still hums with power. The words crawl through the air like a sickness nobody can contain.“Preservation protocols ensure cultural continuity,” the leaked voice drones from every speaker, syrupy calm over the sound of breaking glass. “Subjects should be grateful for the opportunity to contribute to species survival through digitization.”The crowd’s answer is a roar that shakes the streetlamps.Thousands press through the avenues, some clutching signs with NO HARVEST slashed in blood-red paint, others holding candles for children they claim are “safe” in digital heaven. The two sides scream past each other, grief and fury bouncing off the towers like ricochet fire.My comm sputters in my ear.“Sora, we’ve got medical in sectors four and seven. Can you reroute?”“Copy,” I mutter, slinging my rifle
Echoes
AVELINE’S POVThe archive lab is a cave of humming racks and cold light… no windows, no sun, no clock but the little pulse of cooling fans and the slow blink of status LEDs. Data crystals sit like fossilized memories in racks, film reels in crates, everything stacked so tightly you can hear the past breathing. I’ve been here eighteen hours, one bloodshot eye pressed to afterimages of code, tearing apart scraps salvaged from the platform for something that’ll make sense of the harvest. Anything.The coffee at my elbow is a lukewarm apology in a thermos. I sip and try to convince myself the bitter helps me focus. Mostly it just tastes like the exact shade of dread I’ve been cataloging.This fragment is different. Older… buried in lower substrate layers, tagged with a header that reads Ethical Implementation Primer. The phrase should comfort; instead it crawls under my skin. I boot the playback and a voice, calm and almost lullaby–patient, fills the room.“Species-preservation protocols
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