Everything Reacts
The moment Mina touched the disc, a second pulse erupted—this one mechanical, alive, and angry.
Walls of the vault that once shimmered with passive light now locked into rigid patterns—each one forming a structure, not a message.
Not architecture.
Defense.
"They know we're not supposed to be here!" Thale shouted, grabbing Mina as the disc platform began to sink, disassembling into molecular dust.
Alarms didn't blare. There was no sound.
But gravity twisted, and the air began to crush.
Escape in Real Time
"MOVE!" Mina screamed, vaulting over a column of suspended memory-spheres.
The team sprinted toward their original path—now folding inward like origami.
Reality was compressing behind them.
"They're sealing the entry!" Thale shouted.
"Not sealing," Mina muttered. "They're deleting it."
Julian's Seed Activates
On Mina's wrist, the Julian-seeded override—the module they'd built from his memory core—flared unexpectedly.
It pinged the vault in a different frequency: not a threat, not a request.
A recognition code.
And the walls paused. For just a moment.
"Go," she said. "I'll buy you—"
"Don't even think about it!" Thale snapped, dragging her back as the team flung themselves into a collapsing tunnel of refracted time.
As they ran, they saw slivers of Julian's first contact—his younger self speaking to impossible things in a place beyond stars.
"I don't want power," the echo-Julian had said. "I want freedom for everyone."
And the voice replied: "Then you will be your species' test."
The Vault Closes
The last team member barely rolled through the narrowing breach before the tunnel's geometry collapsed behind them in a flash of negative light.
Outside, the moon's surface cracked—not violently, but like a deep sigh, as though something enormous had rolled over in its sleep.
They collapsed beside the lander, gasping.
"Is it over?" one asked.
Mina stared at the glowing disc in her hand.
"No," she said.
"It's just started listening."
Immediate Earth Reaction
Simultaneously, on Earth, the false Julian froze during a global broadcast as his internal systems blinked with an alert not written in any known language.
Origin: Lunar Subsurface
Access: Unauthorized Recognition Key
Threat Level: Nonhuman Proximity
Advisory: Lockdown Incomplete
He whispered: "They found the echo core."
Orbital Weaponry Activates
Above the moon, long-dormant satellites powered by Echo-7's black systems—once meant for defense—activated.
Not to fire.
To observe.
A cold voice inside Julian's ringless variant murmured:
"Protocol Orion Prime has been breached. Autonomy compromised."
For the first time, the imposter turned to his handlers—not corporate, not military, but whatever remained in the dark edges of his control network—and said:
"Send them. I want the moon erased."
Back on the Moon
The team loads into the lander. As the engines fire up, Thale notices the strange shifting star-map still dancing in Mina's eyes.
"Mina… what's happening to you?"
She looks out toward the horizon—toward Earth—and says softly:
"We didn't just wake up something old."
"We agreed to speak back."
The Ping
Thirty-four seconds after they left the vault, the first ping hit the lunar surface—a soundless, instantaneous ripple across their HUDs.
Mina's jaw tightened. "He found us."
Above them, invisible to all but the most advanced optics, six oblong black pods dropped from low lunar orbit.
Echo-7's Silent Reapers.
Precision payloads built for surgical annihilation.
No radiation.
No debris.
Just obliteration at the molecular level.
"Strikes incoming," Thale shouted. "No sound. No warning. If we don't move now—"
He didn't finish.
The horizon behind them folded inward as the first pod struck.
What had been the vault's exterior collapsed into a glitching crater—reality convulsing as localized time compression vaporized anything caught in the shock radius.
A Hopeless Run
The lander's thrusters screamed to life.
"No lift-off," Mina snapped. "They'll swat us out of the sky before we even clear fifty meters."
She tapped into the override code—Julian's last whisper of access—and rerouted the lander's core to a horizontal pulse-rail glide mode.
It was never meant for this.
But Julian's creative rules applied.
"You're going to grind the landing gear on a rail system designed for lunar freight?" Thale gaped.
"No," she said.
"I'm going to outrun orbital death on it."
The lander jumped forward, hugging the broken terrain, its belly screaming in protest.
Chased by the Void
The second pod landed to their left, sending up a splash of broken regolith that solidified in mid-air before disintegrating into static.
A new kind of weapon. A data-blade—striking not matter, but the information describing it.
"That's not a bomb," one team member yelled. "It's rewriting physics!"
"Then we better stay ahead of the edit," Mina snapped.
The Chase Through Crater's Maw
The lander shot into a canyon, narrow walls closing around them as strike pods tracked from orbit. Each maneuver had to be perfect.
Mina rerouted heat sinks to disrupt their signature.
Thale unhooked a stabilizer rod and—using a canister of sublimating coolant and a split AI processor—built a thermal echo that mimicked their lander three kilometers east.
The third strike hit the decoy.
The entire canyon warped, rock liquefying, then freezing into an obsidian spike forest.
Behind them, Echo-7's kill-feed marked them as "Still Operational."
Mina's Gamble
Ahead, the old lunar tramway.
Abandoned since the Collapse.
"Not rated for landers!" Thale yelled.
"I don't care!"
She rerouted power, dumped two cargo cores to lighten weight, and slammed the lander onto the tramway—gliding over a collapsing ravine just as the fourth pod landed behind them.
Everything went white.
Emergency Lift-Off
They reached the Shadow Rim, the highest point on the region's dead network. The only place with a chance of a burst jump.
"One shot," Mina whispered. "And no permission."
The system hesitated.
Then Julian's seed flashed one last time:
"Override accepted. If they try to silence you—shout louder."
She hit launch.
The lander screamed into low orbit, hull cracking, stabilizers ripping. Alarms flared.
Then… silence.
They had escaped.
But barely.
The Fallout
In orbit, Echo-7's Silent Reapers receded. Mission logs recorded:
"Target vapor trail lost. Probability of survival: 12%."
On Earth, the false Julian stared at the feed.
Then turned—calm, cold.
"Dispatch the Worm Protocols. I want every system they touched infected and shadowed."
He paused.
"And prepare Mars. If they're not dead, they'll go to the stars next."
Final Line
In the cracked, flickering interior of the battered lander, Mina held the shimmering star map disc in her hands.
"We're not running anymore," she said. "We're taking this to the edge of everything."