The alert was not a sound, but a silence. It was a single, anomalous data stream within the diagnostic app’s feedback loop that simply… stopped. Not a crash, not an error report. A cessation, as clean and deliberate as a sniper’s shot.
Lyra Sable saw it first. Seated before her bank of monitors in the virology lab, her rational mind categorized the event not as a technical glitch, but as a pathogen. An intrusion. A foreign body introduced into their meticulously crafted system with the specific intent to disrupt function.
She didn’t panic. Panic was an unproductive variable. Instead, she initiated a level-five****—a source trace—and sent a single, encrypted pulse to Kael’s console: ‘Aegis compromised. Vector: external. Intent: sabotage.’
Within minutes, Kael, Selene, and a grim-faced Or
