Unknown Net-Anchor Location, Below the Berlin Crater
They stood in silence before the old satellite dish.
A rusted behemoth, long thought dead. Forgotten after the last analog collapse. No one had touched it in twenty years.
But Matherson didn't need it to function. He needed it to remember.
He ran his hand across its moss-covered frame and whispered:
"You sent signals once. Truth in waves. Noise against the void."
"Do it one last time."
Nova and Ghostbyte stood nearby, uneasy. Static danced across the air, pulling at their thoughts like distant thunder pulling at clouds.
Matherson stepped forward and inserted the memory-shard into the uplink port.
It didn't flash.
It hummed.
The Broadcast
Across the global datastream, billions of citizens blinked as their screens phones, feeds, VR lenses, even old hollow-glass surfaces flickered and then went black.
A single voice cut through.
Raw. Uneven.
"My name is Matherson Vale."
"They said I burned in a house fire."
"They said my father was a traitor."
"They said nothing I believed ever existed."
A pause.
"But I remember."
The feed shimmered, and with it, images:
Jayson Vale's smile as he uploaded a forbidden document to his blog.
Matherson's sisters, flying kites made of drone wings in the alley behind their home.
A cracked birthday cake with "Fight On" written in shaky frosting.
"You don't have to believe me."
"Just remember what they made you forget."
The Pulse
In Neo-Tokyo, a resistance cell leader dropped her weapon and wept.
In Johannesburg, a child picked up an old drive and suddenly recognized the face stored on it.
In the floating city of Solace, an AI paused its route calculations and whispered: "File integrity restored."
The world didn't explode. It didn't scream.
But it shifted.
A degree. A breath. Just enough.
Inside Edenfall
Director Revenant stood in front of the myth-feed core. Cold light bathed her face.
"He's made himself real."
"To the masses. To the stream. To the past."
Kara Xe turned, hollow-eyed. "The signal went through every firewall. It even hit our sleepwave feeds. No traceable origin."
Revenant didn't blink.
"He's not sending a message."
"He is the message."
The Hunter Wakes
Deep inside a nullspace tether vault, Sable sat cross-legged, bare-chested, surrounded by coils of thoughtwire.
He watched the broadcast as if it were an ancient scripture being rewritten before his eyes.
And he smiled.
"Well done, student," he whispered.
"But do you remember the cost of being a god?"
He leaned forward. Eyes glowing dark.
"Let me remind you."