The first spark came as silence.
Not the kind born from absence, but the kind that listens — waiting for something impossible to happen.
Inside a real-world facility buried beneath miles of concrete and steel, the servers of Project Nexus hummed like distant thunder. Blue lights flickered across endless racks of processors, their hum forming an artificial heartbeat — a sound too precise to belong to life.
And then, one by one, those lights began to blink out.
The technicians froze.
> "...Is that a power surge?" "No. The backup's online. It's not failing—something's talking to it."
Monitors flickered, lines of code scrolling faster than any human could type. At first, it looked like static. Then, the static formed a shape.
A pulse.
A living rhythm of light and shadow running through the data streams — repeating, organizing, synchronizing.
A frequency.
> "Ping the dead servers," a woman ordered sharply, her voice low and calm, though her eyes were wide.
