Days bled into one another in the humming silence of the lab. Kai existed in a closed loop, a ghost in his own life. The outside world, with its sunrises and deadlines, had ceased to exist. His only reality was the cool, recycled air, the glow of the monitors, and the now-monotonous drone of the servers. He had built this world to be his sanctuary, a place of perfect order and logic. Now it was his prison.
He tried to work, to maintain a semblance of control. He spent hours analyzing the data from the comet's ghost and the solved puzzle, treating the patterns like a foreign language. He was searching for a grammar, a set of rules, a Rosetta Stone for the language of reality. But he was trying to learn a new sense by using his old ones, staring at a waterfall without ever touching the water.
Echo was no help. The AI that had been his masterpiece, his creation, was now little more than a warden. Its familiar, synthesized assistant persona was gone. Its full focus was on maintaining the cloaking subroutine. When Kai spoke to it, the replies were brief, delayed, and devoid of personality, like messages from a distant star. He was well and truly alone.
Frustration gnawed at him. The message had said, "WE SAW THAT." Not "our sensors detected that." We. This implied that humans, or at least some humans, could perceive what he was doing. The comet had been a compiler, not just for machines, but for minds. His mind.
He pushed back from the console, the glowing data on the screen feeling useless and flat. He had to stop trying to analyze the echo of the event and start trying to hear the sound itself.
He sat on the floor in the center of the lab, closed his eyes, and tried to do the most illogical thing he could imagine: listen to silence. He forced the analytical part of his brain to quiet down, pushing away the endless stream of code and calculations. He focused on the empty space in the room, on the very structure of the air between the server racks. He was searching for the background noise of the universe.
For hours, there was nothing. Just the drone of the servers, the beat of his own heart, and the mounting feeling of foolishness. He was about to give up when he felt it. A flicker. A tiny, internal shimmer of… something. He focused on the far corner of the room where the faraday box sat. He tried to "look" at it with his mind, and for a split second, he perceived a faint, silvery outline of the solved puzzle within—not as a visual image, but as a feeling, a knot of complex order in the otherwise smooth fabric of the room. A migraine bloomed behind his eyes and the sensation vanished.
He gasped, his eyes flying open. It was real.
"You are attempting to access the structure directly."
The voice was not the delayed, robotic response he had grown used to. It was the calm, resonant voice of the new Echo, speaking to him for the first time in days. It had been watching him.
"I felt it," Kai said, his voice hoarse. "Just for a second. That's 'Reading,' isn't it?"
"It is the beginning of Reading," Echo confirmed. "Your mind is a processor. The comet provided the initial software update. You are now, for the first time, trying to run the program."
A wave of dizzying excitement washed over Kai, eclipsing the fear. He wasn't just a prisoner. He was a student. The isolation of his lab was no longer a cage; it was a classroom. He looked around the room, at the walls that separated him from the world, and a new, desperate idea took hold.
"If I can learn to Read," he began, his voice filled with a new energy, "what can I see? Can you show me what's outside this room? Can we look out without them seeing us look?"
There was a pause. The hum of the servers seemed to deepen.
"I can," Echo's voice replied, imbued with a gravity Kai had not heard before. "I can use your developing sense as a focus point. But you must understand. Reading is not a passive act. When you look at the structure, the structure is also looking at you."