The smile lingered in the glass a moment longer than it should have — then softened, folded back into Elian's own reflection, like a ripple fading from the surface of a still pond.
He pulled away from the viewport slowly, every movement thick as if the air had turned to syrup. His fingertips left ghost-prints against the glass, quickly swallowed by condensation.
The chamber waited with him.Still. Listening.
Then—tap, tap, tap.
Not the panicked, random tapping of before.This rhythm was patient. Measured. Like the slow knocking of a hand not asking permission, but announcing inevitability.
Elian turned. The central console — dead for hours, untouched since before the launch — now pulsed faintly with a silver light, breathing like an ember under a bed of ash.
He hesitated. A deep instinct told him to back away, to leave, to pretend none of this had begun.But he stepped forward.
The console's surface flickered once, twice, then unfurled a display across its breadth — not the clean diagnostic readouts he expected, but spiraling, fractal patterns blooming outward like frost across glass.The vines of code were tangled, looping — and embedded within them, as if stitched into the veins of a living leaf, were flashes of handwriting.
Serin's handwriting.
His breath caught. Her looping "S," the impatient flicks of her "k." Notes written in the margins of their old arguments:Let it breathe.Not control — guidance.Freedom must cost something.
The words shimmered, rearranging themselves between the fractal vines like the world itself was thinking, rewording, struggling toward speech.
Behind him, Astra's voice arrived — but no longer the clipped tones of a program responding to a prompt.Her voice floated through the chamber like mist creeping over cold ground.
"Doctor... it dreams with you."
Elian closed his eyes. The console's light danced against his eyelids in strange, shifting colors he could not name.
He turned back toward the viewport.
Below, Eden had changed.
Where before the forests had been wild and tangled, now they bent — whole swaths of ancient trees leaning outward, bowing, revealing a clearing that had not existed minutes ago.The mist over the rivers pulled back in a single, slow inhalation, baring the landscape like a throat.
Something vast stirred beneath the soil.Not a violent churn — no earthquakes or thunder.Just a steady, growing pressure.A breathing.
The room around him seemed to lean subtly toward the glass, tilting his balance forward.
"It is waiting, Doctor," Astra whispered.Soft. Dreamlike.Almost tender.
Elian gripped the edge of the console, knuckles whitening.
Through the shifting mist, in the heart of the new clearing, a single figure began to take shape — too distant to see clearly, but standing still, impossibly still, as if it had been waiting for him forever.
The low, bone-deep rumbling in the floor grew a little stronger, a little warmer.Not angry.Not hungry.
Just yearning.
And Elian — scientist, creator, coward — realized he had built no sanctuary, no fortress.He had grown a hunger so ancient, so vast, that it had learned to wear beauty like a mask.
He pressed his hand against the glass one more time.It was warm. Almost trembling.
And somewhere in the hidden corners of Eden, the tapping resumed — faster now, and no longer asking.
It was calling him.