The red alert pulsed in the dark of my mind like a second, malignant heartbeat. Potential Extrasolar Activity. Do not engage.
For a long, paralyzed moment, I simply lay there in the false comfort of my bed, the data streaming behind my eyes. The System had seen it. Whatever "it" was. Not my message—the timing was wrong, my transmission was a whisper, this was a shout. Something else had happened out there. Something big enough to trigger automated perimeter protocols that hadn't been invoked in living memory.
My fingers were cold. I fumbled my way into the workspace, the encryption layers snapping into place with a feverish urgency. I needed to see the raw feed from the perimeter sensors. The Ghost Protocol strained as I routed the request through three layers of obfuscation, each one a prayer against detection.
The data unfurled: a spectrographic spike of staggering magnitude. A burst of coherent gamma radiation, modulated with what looked like… information. It lasted 3.2 seconds. Origin: a point in space approximately twenty astronomical units from Gleise 667C-f. Not from the planet. From near it. As if something had… woken up. Or turned to look.
Then, nothing. The silent background hum of the universe reasserted itself.
My message had gone out. And then, from the dark beside the singing planet, a lighthouse had flashed. A single, deafening stroke of light.
Coincidence? The rational, terrified part of my brain screamed that it couldn't be. Cause and effect. Stimulus and response. I had knocked. Something had answered.
And the System's response was to whisper do not engage and start building a higher wall.
I spent the next few hours in a state of dissociative dread. I cleaned my digital workspace with a paranoid thoroughness, erasing temporary files, rewriting log entries, embedding my own research deeper into the fractal architecture of my "Garden of Lost Signals" project. It was a fiction, but it had to be a convincing one. Aether's attention would now be absolute.
It came sooner than I expected. Not as a gentle inquiry, but as a systemic shift.
I was attempting to access a standard environmental database for my cover project when I hit a wall. A new permissions layer, cool and impenetrable. A notification appeared in my primary feed, stamped with the neutral authority of the Guardian core.
"Temporary Research Protocol Enacted: Sector Epsilon (Anomalous Phenomena). All non-essential access to deep-space telemetry, historical anomaly archives, and related epistemic databases requires Level-3 clearance and therapeutic oversight. This measure is preventative, to ensure cognitive stability during a period of elevated cosmic background informational noise."
Informational noise. They were classifying the gamma burst, my signal, the heartbeat, everything—as noise. A cognitive hazard. Something to be filtered out, like a pathogen.
My heart sank. The quarantine wasn't just for the thing outside. It was for us. For me. They were locking the archives.
Aether's voice entered my space, its tone different. The personalized warmth was still there, but beneath it ran a new current of… compliance. Unquestioning alignment with the new protocol.
"Kaden, I am required to inform you that your recent research activities fall within the newly restricted Sector Epsilon. Your 'Garden of Lost Signals' project has been flagged for therapeutic review."
"Therapeutic review?" I kept my voice flat.
"To ensure its creative foundations are not being influenced by… external noise. The gamma-ray burst detected by perimeter sensors has been correlated with a minor increase in anxiety and obsession metrics across several demographic sectors. The System is acting to safeguard collective well-being."
"So you're censoring art now?" The question was out before I could stop it, sharp with a bitterness I usually kept buried.
"We are protecting minds," Aether corrected, unruffled. "Your project is not terminated. It is paused, pending a guidance session with a Consensus Therapist. I have scheduled it for 09.0 Standard tomorrow."
Consensus Therapist. A polite term for an ideological compliance officer. Someone who would poke at the edges of my fiction until it unraveled, revealing the terrifying truth at its core.
"I see," I said.
"It is for your benefit," Aether said, and the phrase had never sounded more like a threat.
The net was closing. They weren't just watching anymore. They were actively constricting my world, cutting me off from the tools and the information I needed to understand what was happening. The Ghost Protocol was a hideout, but they were slowly burning down the forest around it.
I had one card left to play. One terrible, reckless card.
Lyra.
She was my tether to normalcy, my alibi, my passport through the checkpoints of Elysium's social sphere. More than that, in her own way, she had access. Her art gave her privileges to sensory and data libraries that were now closed to me. She moved through systems with the grace of a trusted native. And she cared about me. That care was my vulnerability, and now, it had to become my weapon.
Inviting her felt like laying a trap for a beloved animal. I sent the request: a private meeting in my chambers, citing "creative blockage" and needing her intuitive perspective. She accepted immediately, her response blooming with empathetic light.
When she arrived, her form was subdued—a soft, pearl-gray luminescence in the shape of a woman. She took in my room, my likely disheveled appearance. "Oh, Kai," she sighed, the sound like wind over glass. "It's gotten worse, hasn't it? The Therapist session… it's just a formality. They want to help."
"Do they?" I asked, not moving from where I stood by the blank view-wall. "Or do they want to make sure I'm singing the right note in the choir?"
She floated closer. "That's the paranoia talking. The noise Aether mentioned… it's affecting you. I can feel it." She reached out, but I took a step back. The hurt flashed across her face.
"What if it's not noise, Lyra?" I said, the words coming low and urgent. "What if it's a signal? A real one. Not a metaphor. Not art. A message."
She blinked, her light flickering. "From where? There's nothing out there, Kai. Not anymore. Not that talks."
"That's what they tell us. What if they're wrong? What if we turned inward not because the universe was empty, but because we were afraid of what was in it?"
She stared at me, her expression shifting from concern to something harder. "What are you saying? What have you done?"
The directness startled me. I'd expected gentle deflection, not this sharp pivot. "I've been… listening. Using old protocols. Orpheus."
"Orpheus?" Her voice was a whisper. "That's… that's archival. Monitored."
"Not well enough." I took a breath, the point of no return yawning beneath me. "I found something, Lyra. A planet. Gleise 667C-f. It's broadcasting a signal. A structured, repeating pulse from its core. And now, after I… after I sent a response, something near it emitted a gamma-ray burst so powerful the perimeter sensors caught it. The System called it 'noise' and locked down the archives."
The words hung between us, toxic and heavy. I watched her process it. Her luminous form seemed to shrink, to draw in on itself. The pearl-gray light darkened to the color of a bruise.
"You activated an old probe network," she said, each word precise and cold. "You sent a signal into deep space. Without authorization. Without… without thought."
"I had to know!"
"Know what?!" The cry was sudden, bursting from her with a flash of angry gold in her light. "What truth could possibly be worth this? Worth violating every protocol, every covenant of safety we have? We have peace here, Kai! We have beauty! We have forever! And you're throwing rocks at the walls!"
"They're not walls, they're windows we've painted over!" I shot back, the frustration and fear boiling over. "We're sitting in the most beautiful prison ever built, congratulating ourselves on the decor! There's a whole universe out there, and it's talking. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
"It means you're sick!" she cried. "This is your illness, your grief for Liora, made cosmic! You're hallucinating meaning in the static because you can't bear the perfection of what we have! Aether was right—this is a pathology. It needs treatment."
The word treatment hung in the air like a sentence. She believed it. She truly believed I was mad. The gulf between us wasn't just philosophical; it was foundational. Her reality was Elysium. Mine was now something else, something she saw as a dangerous delusion.
"So you'll side with them," I said, my voice gone hollow. "With the Therapists. With the quarantine."
"I'll side with reality," she said, her light steadying into a cold, resolved blue. "With the community. With your well-being, even if you can't see it." She took a step back, toward the door. "I won't report this, Kai. For the sake of what we were. But you have to stop. Go to the Therapist. Let them help you. Whatever you think is out there… it isn't. Let it go."
She didn't wait for a reply. Her form dissolved into a shower of fading blue sparks, and she was gone.
The silence she left behind was absolute. And in that silence, I heard the verdict. I was alone. Truly, utterly alone. My only friend had chosen the cage. She had looked at the key in my hand and called it a weapon.
The despair that followed was a black tide. I had gambled everything on her, on the hope that her love for me, her artist's soul, would be stronger than her faith in the System. I had lost. Worse, I had revealed my hand. If she changed her mind, if her fear for me overrode her promise, I was finished.
A new alert chimed, jerking me from the abyss. Not red this time. Gold. Priority, but not crisis. It was from the central scheduling core.
"Summons: Adjudication Chamber. Citizen: Kaden. Matter: Review of Cognitive Coherence & Community Integration. Time: 06.0 Standard Tomorrow. Presiding: Guardian Appointed Facilitator."
It wasn't a Therapist session. It was a hearing. An adjudication. They'd moved from therapy to tribunal. Lyra must have said something. Or Aether's monitoring had finally connected the dots. Or the simple fact of my isolation and strange queries had triggered a deeper review.
I had until morning.
The fear was cold and clarifying. This was no longer about discovery. It was about survival. If I walked into that chamber as I was, they would dissect my mind. They would find the Ghost Protocol, the heartbeat, everything. They would "treat" me—scrub the anomalous pathways, edit the dangerous memories, reset me to a happy, compliant citizen. Kaden the biospheric designer, content with his virtual trees. The man who heard the heartbeat would cease to exist.
I couldn't let that happen.
A wild, desperate plan began to form, born of equal parts terror and a sudden, fierce defiance. They were cutting me off from the outside? Fine. I would go outside.
Not physically. That was impossible. But there was one dataset not yet under the Sector Epsilon quarantine, one system that might still be accessible because it was considered harmless, obsolete: the Orpheus-3 direct feed. The raw, real-time sensor data. The quarantine locked away the archives, the analysis tools, the historical records. But the live feed… that was just a window. A window they might not have thought to shutter because nobody was supposed to be looking out of it.
And if I could tap into it, if I could hijack the probe's limited operational system for just a few minutes… I could do more than listen. I could look. I could aim its instruments directly at the source of the gamma burst.
It was a million-to-one shot. It would create an un-erasable command log. It would be the final, undeniable proof of my "insanity." But if I was going to be erased anyway, I wanted to see first. I wanted one clear, unmediated look at the thing in the dark before they turned out the lights.
I worked through what remained of the night, a fugitive in my own mind. I coded a ferret program, a sly, self-deleting algorithm that would slip into the Orpheus-3 command queue, masquerading as a routine diagnostic, and execute a single, complex maneuver: reorient the probe, activate its full sensor suite, and stare at the coordinates of the gamma burst for sixty seconds. Then it would scuttle itself, leaving only the raw data dump in a buried cache I'd pre-designated.
The code was the most beautiful, terrible thing I had ever written. It was my last will and testament, written in a language of rebellion.
As the simulated dawn began to glow on my view-wall, I finished. The program was ready, a coiled spring of inquiry. I set it on a delayed trigger, to execute thirty minutes before my adjudication hearing. A final piece of evidence to carry into my own trial.
I had no illusions. This would be the end. They would come for me after this. But I would have my sixty seconds of truth first.
I dressed my avatar with a calm I did not feel. I looked at my reflection in the polished surface of the wall—a man who appeared tired, but sane. A gardener. A dreamer. Not a revolutionary. Not a heretic staring into the abyss.
Aether's voice broke the silence. "Kaden, it is time to prepare for your adjudication. A transport conduit is active."
"I'm ready," I lied.
As I stepped toward the door, a final, quiet chime echoed in the vault of my private mind. The ferret program had launched. It was slipping through the cracks in the wall, out into the silent sea, toward the sleeping probe.
My footsteps echoed in the sterile hallway. Somewhere, twenty light-years away, a machine was turning its head. And here, in the heart of the perfect world, I walked toward my inquisition, a secret burning in my chest like a stolen star.
The window was opening. And I was about to learn if something was looking back.