Episode 002| The Observer Who Wasn't There
From the empty ice plain's side: the thing at the edge of an impossible void leaves no footprints, no breath, no sensor trace. It waits for the exact second a lens 300 meters up wakes—then lifts its head and greets the man who opens it.
Year 1010 of the Kaiyuan Era · Jan 1 · 03:09 · Frozen Northern Reach, Signal Marker S-17-R · Unmanned
Snow had been falling on this ice plain for 1,000 years.
It simply came down, turned to ice, got pressed under the newer snow—repeated a few million times over. The snow layers of the frozen north ran so deep that the ice down at the bottom had become something else: half-transparent, blue going green, light that entered it had to cross a whole winter before it came out.
Tonight's snow was a little wrong.
About 12 meters out from the center of Signal Marker S-17-R there was an area roughly the size of a ping-pong table where no snow had gathered. Any flake that drifted into that area vanished the instant it touched that layer of air. Not melted. Gone. As though the snow had passed through a sieve that clipped the picture out.
The ground surface itself wasn't there either. The texture the ice plain should have had was replaced by a void whose border was unreasonably straight, its outline like something drawn with a ruler. That patch of ground held no starlight reflection, no wind-scoured striping, not even the marks pressed in by snow—you'd think you were looking at a scrap of paper painted black and pasted onto the ice.
At this moment, within a hundred kilometers of this ice plain, nothing living and no instrument should have been there to witness any of it. Spectra, the city's net, had flagged this region a "no-data zone" 80 years ago, running a routine scan once every 6 months; the data that came back was always one gray, low-resolution block of pixels.
But tonight something here was watching.
It stood on the far side of the void.
It left no footprints—the snow surface for 30 centimeters around was as smooth as if someone had just brushed it. In the minus-46-degree air there was no fog of its breath either; the airflow around it was as still as dead water. Saint Tranya's Spectra sensor cloud held 32 floating nodes over the frozen north, and under normal circumstances S-17-R fell entirely inside its coverage—yet the data Spectra returned just now showed this region empty, not so much as a single noise pixel.
If you put a physicist on the report, he'd say nothing should be able to exist at this position.
It was there.
Then it raised its head.
The direction it lifted its head toward was a point roughly 300 meters overhead—the lens of Spectra floating sensor node No. 27. That node was offline at this moment, because the region had been listed a "no-data zone" for 80 years, and the next scan on the schedule wouldn't auto-trigger for another 3 months.
But in about 20 seconds it would be switched on by hand. A man across the Ice-Shadow Trench, at the southern end of the Saint Dora continent, inside Saint Tranya's Information Research Substation No. 10, would bypass the normal request protocol, reach straight down into Spectra's main repository to wake this node, aim it at the S-17-R coordinates, adjust the resolution, and press the observation command.
It waited there. It knew when that lens would open, and it knew who would open it.
20 seconds.
The man across the Ice-Shadow Trench pressed the observation command.
It turned toward the lens that had just opened—it had no eyes, but its posture was precise as a held gaze—and slowly, clearly, made a gesture that someone who had once met its eyes would understand.
It was a greeting.
The snow was still falling. The snow surface for 30 centimeters around it stayed smooth. The line of sight it had lifted toward ran 300 meters overhead, unseeable in the night sky of the ice plain, unmeasurable, and impossible to record.
But the man across the Ice-Shadow Trench saw it.
His name was Lika, a hacker and engineer whose reputation carried far. He had lived more than 1,000 years—more than he himself could count. Everyone else in this world didn't make it to a hundred. He didn't know why he alone could live this long—he'd searched more than 1,000 years and found no answer. Tonight was the umpteenth time in his own life he'd sat in Information Research Substation No. 10 running a power-grid validation—except this time, across the screen, he had locked eyes with something that wasn't supposed to exist.
Across the screen, all Lika saw was that the thing had moved—a faint motion he couldn't pin down, a lift of the head, or something else. He didn't know it was a greeting. Still less could he know this: that a full 20 seconds before he bypassed the protocol and woke that sleeping lens, the thing had already turned to face the screen, and out on that empty plain of snow, was waiting.
Waiting for him.
The thing out on the ice had reckoned it all ahead of time—the when, the who; while Lika, on this side of the screen, hadn't yet sensed that he was being waited for at all.
【Ch. 002 End · Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R】
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