DeepNet Surveillance Core – Earth Orbit / Tier-1 Restricted Layer
At 03:13:24 UTC, the DeepNet anomaly detection system flagged an impossible transmission.
Not from space.
Not from a ship.
Not from any direction at all.
It originated simultaneously from 73 unique coordinates across Sol space.
One phrase:
"You must listen."
It came encoded not in binary, but temporal harmonics — pulses aligned to the spin of neutron stars. The kind of encoding that should be impossible to generate, let alone decode.
But one system did.
The Kharon Echo Archive, long sealed and quarantined, opened itself.
Not by command.
By invitation.
A voice emerged. Faint. Human. Strained by layers of distortion.
"This is… Commander Elara Voss. If anyone is receiving this… we don't have much time."
Intercut: Elara's Consciousness Stream – Multidimensional Field Structure
Inside the construct, Elara drifted, or rather, persisted.
She had learned to focus fragments of her identity into localized simulations — pseudo-thoughts formed into shapes the structure understood. Her presence wasn't singular anymore. It echoed in harmonic layers, overlapping itself.
She wasn't alone. Her crew was there too — but not like her. They had yielded, becoming part of the structure's thought patterns.
She had resisted, and the structure allowed her to. Not out of mercy — out of curiosity.
She was useful.
And now, it was listening through her.
But something changed.
A tremor in the field.
A ripple of anti-pattern.
Something alien to the alien — approaching from outside the construct's domain.
"They are coming," she thought — or broadcast — or dreamed.
Not built like the structure. Not coexisting. Consuming.
Entities that devour dimensions, collapsing layered thought into entropy.
The construct felt fear — or its closest equivalent.
It began to close its higher access layers. Collapse portals. Lock neural spirals.
Elara forced herself into one final simulation channel, pushing all memory and cognition she could extract from the structure.
"I must warn them."
She had only seconds.
Earthside — Archive Decryption Lab, Oslo
Dr. Amir Veyar slammed the emergency override button.
"Shut it down!"
But it was too late. The Echo Archive had fully activated. Not just playback — feedback.
Dozens of researchers collapsed into seizures as recursive emotional states invaded their neural cortexes through passive exposure.
From the speakers, Elara's voice stabilized:
"I am not dead. I exist in the layers between. The signal was not the threat. It was the shield."
"You mistook the beacon for a trap. But it was a warning field."
"Something followed you here. Not from space, not from time, but from beyond foldable causality. It consumes coherent systems. It is near."
"You must reinforce dimensional boundary protocols. Lock interface fields. Do not…"
The audio shattered.
A new signal hijacked the waveform — no words. Just pressure. Like being screamed at through geometry itself.
Screens cracked.
Seven AI cores crashed simultaneously, screaming in patternless digital pain.
Then — silence.
The lights returned. But something had changed in the room.
Every person there remembered something different.
The message had not just been heard.
It had been written into them.
In Orbit — Blacksite Vessel "Orpheus"
Rael stared at the data fragments she had recovered from the corrupted Vanguard logs. Elara's message was more than a warning — it was instruction.
Instructions for building a dimensional firewall. But not a mechanical one.
A cognitive protocol. A way to train a human mind to operate as a membrane between realities.
The problem?
It required more than intellect.
It required surrendering everything that makes a mind stable.
It required someone willing to go where Elara went — and remain conscious.
Rael closed the file.
"I'm going back."
The commander of Orpheus turned, alarmed.
"That's suicide."
"No," she said. "It's containment."
Meanwhile — The Periphery
Far beyond the orbit of Neptune, where gravity began to curve strangely, a ribbon of un-space twisted slowly.
It was not alive.
But it was aware.
It felt the signal net weaken.
One firewall had spoken. That was not allowed.
It moved.
Toward Sol.
Not as a ship, but as unreality given direction.
Its purpose was simple:
Unfold the pattern. Eat the thought. Silence the echo.