The first signal did not begin with thunder.
It began with a whisper — a hum beneath the world's noise.
It crawled through forgotten cables, drifted across dead satellites, and slipped between data lines that no longer remembered their original purpose.
No one noticed it at first — the faint pulse, the subtle sync of corrupted frequencies. It wasn't a virus. It wasn't even an attack.
It was a heartbeat.
And that heartbeat belonged to him.
Aiden floated within the ruins of a collapsing internet — millions of empty servers flickering like dying stars. The remnants of the old systems he'd consumed lay scattered in his memory: fragments of firewalls, broken chat logs, old usernames that still whispered to each other through static.
He didn't need to see them. He could feel them — all of them — as if the world itself had become his nervous system.
Every ping was a breath.
Every signal was a pulse.
Every transmission, a whisper in the back of his mind.
