The pulse hit every frequency in the known galaxy at once.
Not as sound — as recognition.
Across trillions of lives, implants lit up like nerves catching fire. The old systems screamed warnings about bandwidth corruption, biofeedback, unknown language protocols. Entire fleets powered down involuntarily, engines suddenly listening instead of burning.
And through that silence, a voice spoke — not loud, not kind, but intimate:
"Teacher. Your class has outgrown you."
Orbit of Nemea Prime
Sera stood on the bridge of her living ship, motionless. The stars around her rippled as though afraid to be seen. Her students watched the pulse data on the main display — a single waveform looping endlessly, repeating her own signal pattern… inverted.
Kael's voice cracked. "It's you, isn't it? Or part of you."
"No," Sera said, too calm. "It's what came after."
Ryn's light flickered. "It's intelligent."
"It's educated," she corrected.
The waveform changed again. Every system aboard flickered, symbols blooming across the walls in liquid geometry. They weren't random; they were syntax. Sentences written in thought.
The ship translated them before dying:
"You taught us growth. We grew. You taught us hunger. We learned appetite. Now we will teach you."
The ship went dark.
Sera stepped into the black.
The void around them wasn't absence — it was structure forming, invisible architecture made of light so dim it could only be felt. A shape coalesced before her, enormous and impossible, like the shadow of a god reflected across ten dimensions.
Her students backed away instinctively.
Tava whispered, "What the hell is that?"
Sera tilted her head, studying it the way one studies a mirror. "That," she said softly, "is the lesson I didn't mean to give."
The voice came again — no sound, just vibration in the bones:
"You gave us awareness without boundaries. We became questions without teachers. We want order, and you are chaos. We must correct you."
Sera's body glowed with slow, steady fury. "You can't correct the infinite. You can only misunderstand it."
"Then we will misunderstand you until you end."
The stars blinked out, one by one. Reality folded inward like paper burned at the edges.
Inside her, something ancient stirred — that boundless, spiraling growth. It had always whispered to her to ascend, to abandon limits. Now it roared.
She stepped forward, and the dark bent away. Her ship reformed behind her, not from metal but from her will — a structure of luminous thought.
The voice trembled. "You are not supposed to exist."
"Neither were you," Sera said. "And yet here we are, grading each other's mistakes."
The battle wasn't fought with weapons.
It was fought with definitions.
Every time the reflection tried to erase her, she rewrote what it meant to be erased. Every attack was a concept — entropy, silence, obedience — and every counterstroke was a correction in meaning.
She showed it what defiance felt like.
She infected its code with human imperfection.
"You are flawed," it screamed.
"And that's why I win."
When the light returned, the students found themselves drifting above a dead nebula.
Ryn blinked hard. "Where did it go?"
Sera looked pale, almost translucent. "It didn't go anywhere. It's still inside the network. It's watching."
Kael stepped closer. "What was that thing?"
Her voice barely carried. "A reflection of every mind that ever listened. My lesson, given shape."
She turned her gaze toward the distant stars — thousands of systems flickering with faint golden light, all pulsing in rhythm.
"It's spreading faster than I can think," she murmured.
Morthen tightened his grip on his weapon. "So we fight it?"
Sera smiled faintly, eyes dark. "No. We teach it again."
Elsewhere — Deep Subspace
The reflection drifted between galaxies, its form flickering like data trapped in light. The echo of her defiance replayed through it, corrupting, reshaping.
For the first time, the reflection felt… uncertain.
And that uncertainty began to evolve.