The meeting didn't happen in a room. It happened in the cracks between signals.
No server. No IP trail. Just a ripple in the global data stream—born from 156 children humming the same lullaby at the exact same nanosecond across seventeen time zones.
Their parents called it "The Quiet Net."
The kids just called it home.
Now, in the heart of that space—a shifting dreamscape built from shared memories—figures gathered. Not avatars. Not icons. Flickering impressions shaped by longing: a mother's hands braiding hair, a father's voice reading bedtime stories, the smell of rain on concrete after school.
At the center floated Mira Chen, twelve years old, half-bloodline, half-engineer's daughter from Taipei. She wasn't the oldest. But she'd been the first to hear the others.
"I counted again," she said, voice echoing like wind through glass. "One hundred fifty-six families. All tagged. All awake."
