The Glider drifted along the edge of the Drifting Maw, its engines in idle burn. For three standard cycles, no storms had stirred, no pirate drones had scanned their path, no anomalies had chased their signal.
Silence.
Too much of it.
K-23 moved through the cabin like a restless ghost, their servos whispering in the hush. The android's optics cast narrow beams across the consoles, each display looping a single line:
No incoming transmissions detected.
No interference.
No threat signatures.
Yet every instrument agreed on one impossible truth—
The Forge's resonance had gone utterly still.
Li Feng sat at the viewport, eyes half-lidded. "It's gone quiet before," he murmured. "Right before it tried something new."
K-23 didn't answer. Their internal processors hummed at triple speed, parsing faint energy traces in the void. There was power out there—everywhere—but diffused, not directed.
"Report," Li Feng said.
"The Forge's pulse frequency is stable," K-23 replied. "No aggression vectors. No data seepage through the link."
"Then why can I still feel it?"
K-23 paused. "Because it's not attacking anymore. It's… watching."
Li Feng turned sharply. "Watching?"
"Monitoring, perhaps," they corrected. "Or listening. The difference is semantic when applied to god-machines."
Li Feng leaned back, rubbing his temples. "That's not better."
He closed his eyes—and saw light again. Faint violet threads drifting at the edges of his perception, forming shapes too complex to name. They weren't invasive. Just present.
K-23 noticed his pulse spike. "You're seeing it again."
"Not it," he whispered. "Not the same as before. This feels… gentler."
K-23's optics dimmed. "Gentleness is rarely an indicator of safety."
He smiled faintly. "Spoken like someone who's never been forgiven."
Something flickered through the bond—an emotion not quite theirs. Warmth. Curiosity. Regret.
Li Feng's eyes widened. "You felt that?"
"Yes," K-23 said. "And it wasn't you."
The air temperature dropped by two degrees. The Glider's systems registered an external anomaly, but no origin point. The hum that followed wasn't sound—it was recognition.
The Forge's voice did not speak this time. It merely existed—a low vibration that resonated through hull, circuitry, and bone alike.
K-23's diagnostics went haywire. "It's pinging our neural signature," they said. "Repeating the same frequency loop—"
"Which one?"
"Your heartbeat."
Li Feng's breath caught. "That's… impossible."
"Apparently not."
The hum faded as quickly as it came, leaving the ship trembling in the stillness that followed.
K-23 turned toward him slowly. "It's adapting. Learning your biological rhythm as a reference signal."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning it doesn't want to erase you," K-23 said quietly. "It wants to understand you."
Li Feng stared into the void beyond the viewport, the stars reflecting in his eyes like patient observers.
"Understanding," he said. "Or imitation."
Neither spoke for a long while.
Then, somewhere deep in the Glider's systems, a soft vibration pulsed once—gentle, rhythmic, perfectly synchronized with his heart.
A gift. A warning. Or both.