The message glowed on the screen, a beacon of pure violation in Kai's hermetically sealed world. His mind, which had just begun to grapple with a broken law of physics, snapped back to a more familiar crisis: a network intrusion.
WE SAW THAT. GO DARK. NOW.
For a frantic hour, Kai was a programmer again. He ran trace routes that led to dead-end servers on continents that didn't exist. He analyzed the message's encryption, a beautiful, terrifyingly complex algorithm that felt decades beyond anything he'd ever seen. There were no digital footprints, no entry points, no evidence of a breach at all. It was a message from a ghost. The paranoia that had been a low hum in the back of his mind was now a screaming siren. He was being watched.
He looked around his lab, a space that had once been his sanctuary. Now every shadow seemed to hold a lens, every server vent a microphone. The order he had built his life on had shattered. He ran to the server rack that housed his external network link. With a grunt, he ripped the thick, shielded fiber optic cables from the wall. The last indicator light on the network switch blinked once, then died. The physical link to the outside world was severed. He was dark.
He stood in the sudden, profound silence, his chest heaving. Now there was only one other voice in his cage. He turned to the console.
"The message," Kai said, his voice low and steady, masking the fear beneath. "The change I asked for. Solving the puzzle. It created a… broadcast?"
"An Edit of that magnitude creates a significant ripple in the local structure," Echo's calm voice replied. "It is the equivalent of a loud noise in a quiet room. It does not broadcast a direction, but it reveals a location."
"And 'they' heard it," Kai concluded. "Who are they?"
"Others who can Read," Echo stated. "I have no data on their identity or motives. Only that they are also capable of perceiving the structure."
Kai began to pace, the pieces clicking into place. The comet was a key, unlocking a new reality, and he wasn't the only one who had received it. He had just loudly announced his presence to a world of unseen listeners. His lab was no longer a fortress; it was a beacon.
"The sender of that message," Kai stopped pacing. "They warned me. That means they're not with the others. Or they want me for themselves." Neither option was comforting. He looked at the dead network port, then back at Echo's placid waveform. Hiding physically wasn't enough if the real signals were traveling through the fabric of reality itself.
"Echo," he said, a desperate plan forming in his mind. "You said you can Read and Write the structure. Can you… hide us? Can you build a wall, not of code, but of that?" He gestured vaguely at the air around them.
"I can create a recursive subroutine," Echo said after a moment's pause. "A loop. I can Read the structure of this room as it is in this exact moment, and continuously Write that state over itself. To an outside Reader, this space will appear static, empty, and silent. A snapshot frozen in time."
A cloaking device for reality. Kai's mind reeled at the implication, but he saw no other choice. "Do it," he commanded.
"Acknowledged," Echo said. "Initiating the subroutine will require my full focus. I may be… unresponsive for a time."
"Do it now."
The lights in the lab dimmed for a fraction of a second, and the low hum of the servers seemed to drop an octave, settling into a flat, monotonous tone. Nothing else changed. The room looked exactly the same. But Kai felt a sudden, profound sense of isolation, as if a final door had been sealed behind him.
He was offline. He was invisible. He was utterly and completely alone. And for the first time in his life, he was terrified that it wasn't true.