The four lights were not the only discovery. They were the tripwire.
For forty-eight hours, the newly-formed Joint Science Task Force, a hodgepodge of human astrophysicists, witch clairvoyants, and werewolf trackers with preternatural senses for anomaly, had been monitoring the probes. The data was channeled to the newly christened Global United Academy of Sciences (GUAS) in Geneva—a repurposed CERN facility where particle accelerators now hummed alongside scrying pools and crystal resonance arrays.
Dr. Aris Thorne, a human quantum theorist with three sleepless nights etched under his eyes, was the first to see it. He'd been filtering out the probes' passive scanning frequencies, looking for any embedded data, any carrier wave. The signal wasn't coming from the probes themselves. It was being relayed through them. A whisper riding a laser beam from an unimaginable distance.
