第 001 Episode| A Spectra Error

Year 1010 of the Kaiyuan Era · Jan 1 · 03:07 · Saint Tranya, Information Research Substation No. 10

Lika.K.Spunks rubbed his eyes and hit the push key.

Validation complete. He'd dumped 327 lines of power-grid alignment data into Spectra, read the whole thing in 3 minutes 42 seconds, and this time there wasn't even a typo. He leaned back; the chair gave half a bounce and let out one short creak. The coffee mug on his right had long gone mostly cold, and he couldn't be bothered to get up and heat another cup.

"All right, clocking off," he muttered to the empty office.

The screen flickered.

He knew every signal pattern Spectra could possibly produce. This one he'd never seen.

[Error_513: Unknown coordinate exception]
[TraceLog: pattern mismatch — VOID_INDEX_NULL]
[Origin: geographic coordinate cannot be located, value overflow]
[Prediction module halted: return value NaN]
[Author: L.K.S._Core]

Lika stared at the last line. Stared for about 3 seconds.

L.K.S._Core was his own private signature. He'd set it down only 8 months ago, inside an internal QuarktoLabs protocol—never made public, never committed to Spectra's main repository. Not even his own assistant knew that string existed.

It had no business showing up in an error message Spectra had generated on its own. But there it was.

"Shit," he said softly. "Who is this."

He nudged the mug aside half an inch and tapped at the keyboard.

> trace --source Error_513 --depth max

The system stalled for 0.04 seconds. For Spectra, that was a remarkably long hesitation; a normal trace command should answer within a few dozen microseconds.

[Tracing...]
[Source: Frozen Continent, Northern Reach · Listening Post T-17]
[Last human contact: 80 years 4 months 11 days ago]
[Status: Auto-mode (unattended)]

Listening Post T-17.

He remembered the designation—and didn't know why.

T-17 was a snowfield relay station in the frozen north, built on the edge of signal marker S-17-R. The human stationmaster had died on site 80 years ago, and an offline AI had been standing watch on auto ever since. By design: receive only, never transmit.

It had no outbound comms permission.

He sat forward half an inch, his elbow shoving the mug unconsciously further away.

"That's not right," he muttered, this time to the screen. "You can't even send a message."

He opened the timestamp.

Under normal circumstances this timestamp should have read "Year 1010 of the Kaiyuan Era, Jan 1, 03:07:14"—off from current server time by less than a second.

What the screen showed was:

[Timestamp: Kaiyuan Year 925, Mar 11, 02:14:08]

Lika's hands went still.

Kaiyuan Year 925, March. What had he been doing that year?

He couldn't remember. Couldn't remember 924, 923, 922 either. The memory had been cut—he could feel the cross-section, clean and sharp, like someone had worked on it deliberately. Worked on it by whom? Most likely himself. He didn't remember that either.

The chair pressed against his back, and only now did he notice his whole body was rigid. His palms were a little damp.

"Fuck." This time he said it out loud.

He pulled up the observation mirror and aimed the lens at the S-17-R coordinates.

The image came up.

Snow. Motionless snow. Under the moonlight the whole ice plain held no wind.

Then he saw that patch of ground.

About 12 meters from the center of S-17-R there was an area roughly the size of a ping-pong table where no snow had gathered. Every flake that entered that area vanished the instant it crossed in. Not melted, not blown away—just clipped straight out of the world.

The ground surface itself wasn't there either. The ice veining that should have been there, the starlight reflection, the fine grooves scoured out by wind—that patch had none of it. A void with a clean, sharp border, set into the ice plain like a screen that hadn't finished rendering.

He watched for about 10 seconds.

For one instant somewhere in there, he thought something moved beside the void—like someone over there had tipped their head up toward the lens, or like a dropped frame, the missing 0.0X of a second skipping past. He blinked, and that instant was gone. The image went back to the same void, snow still falling, nothing else stirring.

He leaned in half an inch toward the screen. His throat went suddenly dry. The low hum of the office air conditioning, which he normally couldn't hear, was abnormally clear in this moment.

"What the hell is this thing?" Not a mutter this time, and not a shout either. The sound stayed pinned in his throat.

The words had barely left him when Spectra threw a message back at him.

A question:

>>> Do you remember who wrote you?

Lika's hands hung over the keyboard.

Everything in the office was the same as it had been one second ago.

But something, somewhere he couldn't see, had finished reading him.

Right down to the part he'd never signed.

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【Ch. 001 End · Saint Tranya Information Research Substation No. 10】