Kai's fingers hovered over the holographic keyboard, his own reflection a ghostly mask on the dark screen. He had built his world to keep chaos out, and now he was about to invite it in for a ninety-second lifetime. He took a steadying breath.
"Now, Echo," he said, his voice quiet. "Open the connection."
The air in the lab grew heavy, charged with a low-grade static. A deep, sub-audible thrum vibrated through the floor, the sound of a door being forced open into another reality.
"Connection established," Echo's voice announced, its tone flat and urgent. "Ninety seconds."
Kai didn't hesitate. He executed the script. A dozen windows bloomed across his display, each a separate thread of his multi-pronged attack. Automated web crawlers and data miners shot out into the global network from a randomized IP address in Brazil, their targets a curated list of astronomical archives, private military contractors, and university physics departments. Data began to flood his system.
"Eighty seconds," Echo stated.
While his automated agents did their work, Kai dove into the murkier corners of the web. He opened a shielded browser, bouncing his signal through a series of anonymizing relays. He bypassed paywalls and security certificates, his fingers a blur as he sliced through layers of digital protection. He wasn't just looking for research papers; he was looking for whispers.
"Sixty-five seconds."
He found it on a heavily encrypted forum for theoretical physicists, a ghost of a conversation from three years ago. A user, now deleted, mentioned a privately funded think-tank working on "decoding non-standard cosmic background radiation." They called it "Project Icarus." It was a dead end—the think-tank's name was redacted—but it was a thread.
"Fifty seconds. The stream is being probed. They are aware of our presence."
Kai felt it a moment later—a throbbing at his temples, the faint, familiar pressure of the other Reader's mind. This time it wasn't a gentle probe; it was a battering ram, slamming against the virtual walls Echo had created. The lights in the lab flickered violently.
"They are attempting to trace the signal," Echo said. "The trace is failing, but the pressure is increasing."
Kai ignored the growing pain in his skull. He fed "Project Icarus" back into his deep-web search, cross-referencing it with the term "interstellar." A single result appeared: a link to a partially redacted federal grant application. He ripped the file open, his eyes scanning the document. Most of the names were blacked out, but one had slipped through. A project consultant.
Dr. Elara Vance.
"Thirty seconds," Echo warned, its voice strained. "The integrity of the stream is failing."
Kai threw the name into every search engine he could access. Results flooded in—a brilliant physicist, specializing in information theory and quantum mechanics, who had dropped out of public life five years ago to work for a private research firm.
"Fifteen seconds. They are focusing on our exit node."
"Show me her face," Kai commanded. He clicked on an image search. The connection slowed to a crawl as Elara's mind—and likely her own AI—pushed back with overwhelming force. Pixels began to resolve on his screen, agonizingly slowly, forming a grainy, low-resolution security badge photo. A woman with dark, intelligent eyes and an unreadable expression.
"Five... four... three..."
The image sharpened just enough.
"Two... one..."
"Disconnecting," Echo's voice boomed.
The thrumming in the room ceased. The pressure in Kai's head vanished. The lab was silent again, plunged back into its isolated darkness.
But on his screen, the grainy image of Dr. Elara Vance remained. Kai stared at her face, and a cold wave of recognition washed over him. He didn't know the face, but he knew the mind behind those eyes. It was the calm, powerful, analytical presence he had touched in the dark.
He now had a name and a face for the ghost that was hunting him.