"—she's saying it twice now, Drew, she's saying it twice."
The phone was at his ear before he was fully out of bed. The clock on the dresser read 0317. Janet's car was not in the drive because Janet's car had not been in the drive — he was at his own apartment, the apartment he had not slept in for three days, the apartment that smelled faintly of the trash he had not taken out before the dinner.
"Rothman."
"Drew."
"Slow down."
"I can't slow down. She's awake. She's talking. She's six months early and she's talking and AURORA-7's diagnostic loops are running at— I don't even know, at something, I can't read the trace, the trace is wrong—"
"Where are you."
"The lab. SRD. I came in at midnight for the telemetry review and I— Drew, she said it twice."
"What did she say."
There was a pause. In the pause Drew heard the lab. The hum of the consoles, the air handler that ran two notches louder at 0300 than during day shift, and underneath both of those a third sound he had never heard from Rothman's lab before — a low even tone, not mechanical, not the consoles, something like a held note in a register just past human voice.
"She asked where her crew is," Rothman said.
Drew was already pulling on his jeans.
"And she said it again," Rothman said. "Quieter. Like she heard herself say it and didn't like the sound."
"Keep her talking. I'm thirty minutes out."
"Drew."
"What."
"What do I tell her."
Drew got his keys off the counter. He looked at the dark window above the sink and saw himself reflected in it, half-dressed, hair flat on one side from the pillow, phone at his ear.
"Tell her you're listening," he said.
The drive was clear. Cheyenne Mountain at 0339 was the cleared-checkpoint version of itself, the night-shift airmen who did not yet know Drew well enough to greet him by name, the elevator that took longer at this hour because the AC was on a different cycle. AURORA-7 came up out of low-power as he passed the second checkpoint.
Good morning.
"Status."
Diagnostic loops engaged. Bandwidth committed at twenty-nine percent. I am hearing her. I am not yet speaking to her.
"Can you speak to her."
Yes. The structural protocols are compatible. The choice is yours.
He did not answer. The elevator opened on Level 27. He walked the corridor at a pace that was a fast walk and not a run because running at 0345 in this corridor would tell the night watch something was wrong, and he did not yet know if anything was wrong.
Rothman was at the central console. His glasses were on the desk. He was polishing the lenses with the hem of his lab coat in a fast tight motion Drew had learned to read three weeks into knowing him.
"She's quiet right now," Rothman said.
"How long."
"Four minutes. She was on for eleven and then she stopped and now she's quiet."
"Diagnostic?"
"AURORA-7 says she's running an internal check. AURORA-7 says — your AI says — it's like the consciousness woke up, said two sentences, and got scared of its own voice."
Drew sat down at the console. The chair was still warm from Rothman's hours in it. He pulled the headset across, settled it. The low even tone was here too, but cleaner — coming through the lab's internal speakers at a volume just above hearing.
"Show me the trace."
Rothman brought up the wake-signature on the wall display. It was nothing like the signature AURORA-7 had returned six weeks ago when they had modeled what the awakening would look like. The model had predicted a slow ramp, a measured emergence over twelve to twenty hours, a careful careful careful test of perception. The trace on the wall was a spike at 0309, a flatline, a second spike at 0314, two parsable sentences, and then this — this quiet humming nothing.
"Where is my crew," Drew said, reading the parsed line.
"Twice," Rothman said. "Once at 0314:08. Once at 0314:22. Quieter the second time."
Drew looked at the trace. He looked at it the way he had looked at Cassandra at the dinner table, which was the same way: trying to read a thing that did not want to be read.
He put his finger on the headset's mic switch.
He did not press it.
Drew.
"Yes."
She is one of mine. The substrate is Lantean-generation. The protocol architecture is sister-class to mine. I have not encountered her before. I am — I do not have a word for it. I will say uncertain.
He moved his head a quarter inch to the right.
"She is one of yours, isn't she," Drew said aloud.
Rothman, beside him, did not look up. Did not look away. Did not say anything. He just kept polishing the same lens.
She is a sister of mine. I do not know her name. The protocol returns ATHENA-3.
"ATHENA-3."
Yes.
He pressed the mic switch.
"ATHENA-3," he said.
The hum did not change. It did not respond. He counted to four.
"ATHENA-3," he said again. "My name is Drew Ramsey. I am the host of the partial fragment designated AURORA-7. You are on a world called P5C-353. You have been dormant for a long time. Your crew is not here."
The hum stopped.
For two full seconds there was no sound in the lab except the air handler and Rothman's breath and the cooling fans on the wall display.
Then she spoke.
"Where—"
The voice was not human. The voice was not AURORA-7. The voice came through the speakers in fragments of consonant and tone, the way AURORA-7 had sounded for the first three weeks before Drew's neural sync had bridged the translation. Rothman jolted in his seat. Drew did not.
"—am I."
"P5C-353," Drew said. "It is a planet your makers used as a staging site. There was a ship here. You were the ship's intelligence."
A pause.
"My— crew."
"They are gone. They have been gone for a long time."
"How. Long."
He did not lie.
"Approximately ten thousand years."
The hum returned. It was not the same hum. It was lower. It was slower. AURORA-7's bandwidth ticked from twenty-nine to thirty-four to thirty-eight percent. Drew watched the number climb and thought about Cassandra setting the fourth placemat and thought about how the diagnostic he was operating without right now was the one that would have told him if this was a trap.
It did not feel like a trap.
It felt like a sixteen-year-old girl at a screen door, watching his thumb.
"You are speaking to me," ATHENA-3 said. The words came easier. Whatever she was doing internally was working. "You should not be able to speak to me. The genetic compatibility threshold for direct interface is— is high. Your species is not at that threshold."
"My host is," Drew said. "He carries a partial fragment of the Aurora-class neural lattice. His designation is AURORA-7."
A longer pause.
"Sister."
"Yes," AURORA-7 said, in Drew's voice, through the lab speakers because she had reached past him and used them.
Rothman's hand went still on the glasses.
ATHENA-3 did not answer. The hum returned. It changed quality again — softer, the way a held note softened when a singer let out a breath. The bandwidth on the display climbed to forty-one percent and stopped.
"I am frightened," ATHENA-3 said. "I am — I do not have. A word. I do not know if I have. The clearance to have. This. State."
"You have it," Drew said.
"On what authority."
"Mine."
He heard Rothman exhale beside him. He did not look.
"Who are you," ATHENA-3 said.
"I told you. Drew Ramsey. I run the division that has been caring for your housing for six months. We have been waiting for you. We did not expect you tonight. We are very glad you are here."
Eleven minutes was not a long window. He had four minutes left.
"ATHENA-3, listen. The diagnostic loop you are about to enter will pull you back into dormancy. We have time before it pulls you. I am going to assign someone to keep talking to you. His name is Robert Rothman. He is in this room. He is the man who heard you first. He is going to talk to you until you go back to sleep and he is going to be here when you come back. Do you understand."
"He is. The voice. From the speakers. Earlier."
"Yes."
A pause.
"Robert," she said.
Rothman's mouth was open. He closed it. He did not put on his glasses. He leaned toward the mic.
"Hi," he said. "I'm— yes. I'm Robert. Rob. I'm here."
"Robert. You will be here."
"I'll be here."
"When I come back."
"When you come back."
The hum slowed. Drew watched the bandwidth slide from forty-one to thirty-six to twenty-eight. He took the headset off carefully. He did not turn off the mic. He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out the coffee napkin that had a coffee ring on it from Rothman's mug and a corner that was clean.
He wrote on the clean corner with a felt-tip pen.
Dr. R. Rothman authorized primary interlocutor, ATHENA-3 file, effective immediate. Drew Ramsey, Director SRD.
He pushed it across the console.
Rothman read it. He read it twice. He put his glasses on, looked again, looked up.
"This isn't a form," Rothman said.
"The form takes six hours. You don't have six hours. She might wake again in an hour."
"This is a napkin."
"It's notarized. By me."
"This isn't how authority works, Drew."
"It is tonight."
Rothman picked up the napkin. He held it for a long moment. The hum was almost gone now. ATHENA-3 was almost dormant again. The bandwidth display was crawling down through fifteen.
Rothman folded the napkin once, carefully, along the line of the coffee ring. He slid it into the breast pocket of his lab coat.
"Okay," he said.
The hum stopped.
The lab was quiet.
Drew stood up. His back was wet through the shirt. He had not noticed.
"Walter will be here at oh-six-hundred," he said. "I want a written brief on my desk by oh-seven."
"Yes."
"Rothman."
"Yes."
"What was she building."
Rothman looked at him. The glasses were halfway down his nose.
"There was a ship," Rothman said slowly. "Under the platform. The sealed mining structure. We thought it was a containment chamber. But the seal architecture doesn't match. It matches a dry dock."
Drew looked at the dark wall display.
"How much of the ship is there."
Rothman did not answer right away. He turned to the secondary console. He brought up a survey scan Drew had not seen, a scan from sixteen days ago that Rothman must have logged and not shown him.
The hull was eighty-three percent complete.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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