Episode 017| Resonance Event #001 (Continued)

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 11:01:47 · the Frozen Northern Reach, beyond the edge of S-17-R

In that 11:01 second, Lika's brain-chip interface flashed 31 lines of red in sync.

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He had also received Spectra's network-wide alert.

Not because he'd been bulletined — Spectra didn't know who he was; he'd used the L.K.S._Core backdoor to sever every outbound identity report — but because he himself was one of Spectra's base-layer engineers, and the backdoors he'd left over the past 12 years auto-synced every network-wide alert to his brain-chip interface.

What he was seeing now was the same thing those 360 observers at the Central Monitoring Center in Saint Tranya were seeing.

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As the red lines finished scrolling, the final event report resolved in the center of Lika's retina:

[Event number: VoidSignal_0]
[Standard designation: Resonance Event #001]
[Classification: the Rift]
[Coordinate: the Frozen Northern Reach, signal marker S-17-R]
[On-site observer: NULL]
[Note: do not attempt to contact this observer]

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"NULL."

Lika read it out quietly. Then he laughed.

Not from happiness. The laugh of a man who knows he's gotten away with something for now — that throwaway little rule he'd written eight months ago, "any observation action from a signing authority of L.K.S._Core writes NULL into the outbound identity field of Spectra's main store," had saved him today.

Spectra knew there was someone on site. But Spectra didn't know it was him.

It had even warned all its observers off contacting this NULL.

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"Thank you, me-of-back-then," he said softly.

Then he stopped.

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When he'd said that line just now — the "me-of-back-then" that surfaced in his mind wasn't an abstract figure of speech. It was a specific "him." The him who, eight months ago, in the third-floor office of QuarktoLabs, had written that rule down. Why had that him thought to write this one? Eight months ago there'd been no case at QuarktoLabs that needed this rule. At the time he'd even joked to Elena, "This one's a spare — hope it never gets used."

Yet today it happened to be protecting him.

"Happened to" — the words he trusted least.

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He pulled his eyes off the event number and fixed them on those four words, "Classification: the Rift."

"The Rift."

Over the last ten-odd minutes he'd thought of twenty-some words to describe that bare patch — "primal fracture-layer" was the one that had risen in his mind, a trigger-word some past him had written out in advance.

But Spectra had just given it another name of its own: the Rift.

Both were right.

"Primal fracture-layer" was the technical naming — it pointed to some primal level of the universe's base code being dredged up. "The Rift" was the visual naming — it pointed to a gap torn in reality. One was left by the past him with an engineer's mind; the other was auto-generated by Spectra.

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Spectra's naming logic was "find the closest word in the known dictionary." "The Rift" was a word that had long existed in human language — but Spectra had never used it to classify any event. Today it chose this word, which meant its algorithm had judged this phenomenon to be "closest in meaning to the word 'rift.'"

He suspected this wasn't merely a tool's reflex.

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Lika's brain-chip interface threw up another line:

[Backup of Observer fragment: complete · 1.04%]

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From 0.41% straight to 1.04%. Another sharp jump.

Lika stared at the number for about five seconds, then looked up at the bare patch glowing violet-blue before him.

The violet-blue characters were still surfacing — a little faster than before; he could follow them with his eyes but couldn't keep up writing them down.

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Three options stood before him now: leave, stay, go in.

Leaving was the most reasonable — back to the CV-1A, fly back to Saint Tranya, pretend nothing had happened today. Spectra thought the site was NULL; no one could trace it directly back to him in the short term.

Staying was the second-most reasonable — keep watching from beyond the edge, wait out the backup, see what that "Writer" would do.

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He'd made this kind of choice a thousand times. Every time he'd known which option was the "reasonable" one — and "reasonable" was almost always one of the first two.

But today the third option was the reason he'd come here.

If he left now, he'd go on carrying a question —

"Who is that Writer?"

He couldn't carry one more unanswered question. There were already hundreds in his head.

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Out toward the horizon — maybe 200 kilometers off — a fault-line of light kindled.

Not the sun. It was Spectra's floating sensor nodes above the Frozen Northern Reach, triggered in sync, the whole sheet of sensor cloud forming a single brilliant line from the angle of his sight.

That line was telling him — the whole world was watching this place now.

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He stood up.

"All right," he said softly. "Let's go take a look inside."

【Ch. 017 End · the Frozen Northern Reach, S-17-R】