Silence fell like a veil over the ancient city as the newly reborn Orion stepped across the obsidian threshold. Dust danced in soft spirals around her feet, caught in the weak gravity that still clung to the ruins of Earth's forgotten last cradle. Cole followed close behind, eyes scanning the carved spires and half-collapsed data obelisks that once pulsed with the knowledge of an entire civilization. Now, they were hollowed-out bones, echoes of brilliance lost to entropy and war.
Orion paused at the center of a stone circle—a place the Architect once called the Echo Ring. It had been theorized to house the final fragments of the original humanity's consciousness: ghosts encoded in fractured neural lattices. LUCENT's voice crackled gently over her shoulder.
"Residual memory echoes detected. Decryption may cause instability. Proceed with caution."
Cole touched the edge of a broken pillar, its surface rippling with latent code. "Why here? What are we looking for?"
