The Vigilant slipped through the void like a single breath held too long.
Kael stood on the bridge as the ship's engines dimmed into a low vibrato, preparing for interplanetary descent. The forward screens shimmered with telemetry: dust storms sweeping across old continents, temperature fluctuations, and faint electromagnetic readings pulsing from Earth's nightside. Faint—yet unmistakably artificial.
Not silence, then.
Something was speaking. But in a language no colony technology could decipher.
"Autonav is synced," said Ryn Solari, the ship's systems officer and Kael's oldest friend. Her dark eyes scanned the data streams. "Radiation levels minimal. Atmospheric density higher than predicted. Earth's… different."
She didn't need to say how different. Kael could see it. The planet below glowed with a strange lattice of light—hundreds of faint lines tracing over continents like veins beneath skin. They pulsed slowly, rhythmically, as if the planet itself had a heartbeat.
"Could be geothermal," Kael murmured.
Ryn shook her head. "Or the Continuum."
The Neural Continuum—Earth's digital afterlife, humanity's great gamble. Everyone assumed it was dead.
But dead things didn't glow.
A tremor rattled the Vigilant. Ryn gripped the railing. "We're being scanned."
Kael straightened. "By what?"
She hesitated. "Everything."
Sensors went wild—overlapping frequencies, layered pulses, patterns that shifted too quickly to analyze. It wasn't interference. It was intentional. The Vigilant wasn't just being scanned… It was being read.
Kael felt an icy crawl along his spine.
"Cut our signature. Go dark," he said.
Ryn's fingers danced across the console. "Already trying. But it's… following us. Like it knows where we're going."
Kael stared at the glowing veins on the planet below. "Maybe it does."
Another tremor. Louder this time. Then the ship's lights flickered, and a whisper—not sound, not speech, but something close—threaded through Kael's mind.
Kael…
He froze.
"Did you hear that?" he whispered.
Ryn frowned. "Hear what?"
Silence filled the bridge once more, but it was a different kind of silence. Watching. Waiting.
The Vigilant pierced the upper atmosphere, flames licking its hull as it began its descent. The planet's heartbeat grew brighter, the veins pulsing with energy that rose to meet them.
Kael gripped the command chair. His pulse thudded in his ears.
He had expected ruin. Emptiness. Ghosts of cities swallowed by time.
He had not expected Earth to feel alive.
The whisper brushed his thoughts again—clearer this time, familiar in a way that made his breath catch.
Kael… come home.
His blood ran cold.
It wasn't just a voice.
It was his father's.