Evelyn's warning fell over Neo like cold rain, dousing some of the reckless excitement he had felt upon touching the cutting edge of forbidden knowledge. But it didn't kill his curiosity—it sharpened it.
He had been granted deeper access to the relic's archives, yet he no longer trusted the neat analytical frameworks provided by Dane's team. Instead, he began building his own models from scratch, tearing into the raw waveforms, determined to peel truth from noise.
Days bled into nights. He barely slept. Simulations ran endlessly, cross-matching the relic's energy pulses with fragmented readings from the Dark Tide's earliest days. His mind lived inside a storm of numbers, equations, and spectral graphs.
And the storm began whispering back.
At first it was subtle. A flicker at the edge of his vision when he stared too long at the scrolling data streams. A faint hum in his skull at night, not heard through his ears but inside his thoughts, like background static that never turned off.
He dismissed it as fatigue, stress hallucinations. But instead of fading, the hum grew sharper. It became patterned. Like a broken shard of music on endless loop. Like a syllable of some ancient tongue, repeating without pause.
Then came the whispers.
They did not interrupt his reasoning. If anything, they aligned with it—like an invisible hand steering him at just the right moments. Once, when he was close to abandoning a knot of resonance data, the whisper spiked in pitch, pulling his gaze to an insignificant band dismissed as noise. He amplified it—and froze.
It wasn't noise.
It was modulation. A hidden signal buried inside the relic's emissions—layered, alien, utterly unlike binary or any encoding humankind had ever devised.
The relic wasn't just bleeding energy. It was broadcasting.
Broadcasting what?
From then on Neo listened with intent. The whispers thickened whenever he pressed closer to truths about energy or spacetime. They were still incomprehensible, but the sense of presence was undeniable.
And then came the dreams.
He drifted through a lattice of glowing blue patterns, infinite lines like a cosmic circuit board. Vast presences brushed against him—sometimes warm and sheltering, sometimes cold and dissecting, sometimes suffused with a sorrow so ancient it crushed his chest.
One night, staring at a particularly violent burst of emission logs, the whisper cut through with terrifying clarity. Not words, but meanings seared directly into his consciousness:
…Container… unstable… repair… error…
…Seeking… resonance… warning…
Neo shot up from his chair, heart hammering, eyes darting across the empty analysis room. Cold sweat drenched his back.
But there was no one. Only the whisper, fading again into its eternal loop of meaningless static.
And yet those impressions were real. Clearer than any dream. Container. Was it speaking of the relic itself? Or of something else? Unstable. Error. Seeking resonance. Warning.
A horrifying idea took shape: the relic was not inert. Somewhere within its strange geometry lingered the echo of a mind.
Not human. Not whole. But present. Damaged, trapped, half-asleep—yet still reaching out.
And somehow he could hear it. Perhaps because his very soul was foreign to this timeline, scarred by his crossing. Perhaps because his engineering knowledge resonated with the relic's buried logic. Whatever the reason, he had become its receiver.
The thought thrilled and terrified him. To touch the root secret of the apocalypse—what greater discovery could there be? But to commune with a mind tied to the end of the old world—what more dangerous curse?
He told no one. Not Dane. Not Evelyn.
Dane would seize upon it, drive harder toward reckless communion. Evelyn would see only the threat, lock him away—or worse.
So he carried the burden alone. Whisper and secret, clue and curse.
And every time he entered the Fireseed chamber, stood before the pulsating blue giant, he no longer saw cold alloy and cryptic patterns. He saw an eye. A vast eye, hidden behind time itself, watching him in silence.
And beyond the base, out in the poisoned wastes, something stirred. Something monstrous, responding to the same pulse that now bound the relic… and Neo.
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