Episode 015| The Rift Appears

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 11:00 · the Frozen Northern Reach, beyond the edge of signal marker S-17-R

Lika watched the percentage jump.

[Backup of Observer fragment: complete · 0.13%]

From 0.07 straight to 0.13 — in under a second. Those last few minutes had been 0.03 every four minutes; now it was 0.06 in an instant.

"Something's accelerating," he said softly.

He didn't wait for a reply — by now, this day, he'd given up expecting one — and lifted his head toward the bare patch.

---

Something had brightened at the center of the bare patch.

Not the brightness of flame. Flame is hot and leaps; this wasn't that. This brightness had no temperature — the heat sensor feeding back through his brain-chip still read minus 52 degrees, no thermal radiation of any kind coming from the center of the bare patch.

And yet at the center of the bare patch there now sat a circular "point of light" roughly ten centimeters across.

The light was violet-blue. A color between violet and blue, the kind Lika had never seen on any natural substance — a shade violeter than the deep-sea spectrum, bluer than the night sky.

---

The point of light began to extend.

Not to spread — spreading has uneven edges. This extension had a path. From the center outward it drew fine violet-blue lines, one after another, each one impossibly straight, as if someone were sketching on the ground with a ruler.

Those lines formed a pattern across the surface.

Lika's retinal interface captured, magnified, and converted the image into a readable format on its own.

---

The brain-chip interface threw up a new prompt:

[Symbol recognition in progress...]
[Match: partial · 22 / 47 characters]

Forty-seven characters. Twenty-two that Spectra could match against its database — Lika recognized those 22. They were Spectra's code syntax. The same syntax he'd used these past eight months inside QuarktoLabs' internal protocols.

The remaining 25 Spectra couldn't match.

---

But Lika could.

---

He crouched, his knees almost slamming into the snow.

Those 25 characters Spectra couldn't match — he recognized every one. Not the recognition of "I think I've seen this somewhere," but the recognition of "I wrote this string."

Every stroke of those 25 characters matched his own coding habits exactly.

This past month he'd just revised his coding style inside the brain-chip interface. Three of those 25 characters used the new coding style he'd only changed this month.

Which meant —

Those 25 characters had been written this month, by him.

---

"I never wrote this," Lika said softly.

He remembered every program he'd written this past month — he'd lived more than a thousand years, his memory had its holes, but he didn't lose the work log of the last thirty days. Nothing he'd written this month had needed those 25 characters.

---

Only now did the answer come to him.

Those 25 characters were being written, right now, by "him."

"Him" was not the past him — the past him used the old coding style.

"Him" was, at the very least, a Writer synced to this present moment of his, writing code on this bare patch in real time.

---

The brain-chip interface jumped again:

[Backup of Observer fragment: complete · 0.41%]

---

Lika stared at the glowing ground.

Those violet-blue lines kept extending. New characters kept appearing. The speed at which each character appeared matched the speed of his own typing.

Not a random speed.

It was his speed.

---

Across the Ice-Shadow Trench, in some underground lab pod beneath Saint Tranya, Morpheus didn't drink his black tea this time.

He watched the glowing bare patch on the screen and, for the first time, frowned slightly.

"He saw it thirty seconds earlier than we expected," Morpheus said.

The other end was silent.

Morpheus pushed the cup all the way away.

"Send her in."

【Ch. 015 End · the Frozen Northern Reach, S-17-R】