"Leonard?" the voice purred, smooth, seductive, and utterly chilling. "It's Maya. We need to talk."
The sound of her voice, after years of silence and layers of deliberate emotional detachment, was a physical blow. It was the last thing I expected, and the last thing my predictive analytics had warned me about. The call from Paman Ben's encrypted line, a channel I had thought sacrosanct for genuine emergencies, now felt violated. My hand, which had been resting on the Monolith terminal, clenched, tiny sparks of static flickering across its obsidian surface.
Administrator, unexpected contact, the Genesis System chimed, its voice a rare note of surprise. Source: Paman Ben's secure personal channel. Caller identity: Maya. No prior predictive model indicated this interaction.
"Ignore it, Ge
