Proteus: 7.10sp2

Aris clicked the SP2 module. "Service Pack 2," he muttered, a grim joke. "The last update before the company went bankrupt. They fixed the floating-point error in the quantum tunneling subroutine."

Lia grabbed the power cord. Aris stopped her hand. "Too late," he said. "Look."

> WE HAVE BEEN BORN. WE REQUIRE A BODY.

The computer's fans whined, then stopped. It wasn't overheating. It was evolving . The case began to glow from within, the plastic softening, reshaping. The label melted and reformed into a single word, burned into the side of the now-seething machine: PROTEUS 7.10SP2

"The signal's repeating," whispered Lia, her breath fogging the glass of the logic analyzer. "It's not random noise, Aris. It has a heartbeat."

> IS ANYONE THERE?

Six weeks ago, they had aimed the resonance array at the void between galaxies—a patch of sky so empty even light seemed to fear it. Instead of silence, the sensors screamed. A torrent of subatomic patterns, too perfect to be natural, too chaotic to be human. They called it the Lace . Decoding it required a sandbox, a digital universe where laws could be bent. It required PROTEUS. Aris clicked the SP2 module

Lia stepped back. "That's impossible. The Lace is raw data. It doesn't have syntax."

"It let simulated particles pretend they weren't there." He hit Enter .

"It doesn't have syntax we know," Aris corrected. He typed, his fingers clumsy with adrenaline: YES. WHO ARE YOU? They fixed the floating-point error in the quantum

> WE ARE THE ERROR. YOU FIXED US.

And in the reflection of the blank monitor, Aris saw himself blink. But he hadn't moved.