The road to the quarry was quieter than it had any right to be, which Rayan immediately filed under things that never meant anything good.
Mina walked a few steps ahead, moving with the easy confidence of someone who had walked this path enough times to hate it properly. Torren followed behind them, carrying the lantern higher than necessary, as if light alone could argue with whatever waited ahead. Rayan stayed between them, mostly because standing alone with his thoughts felt more dangerous than standing near other humans who might yell at him.
"So," Mina said without turning around, "next time you decide to poke ancient non-human machinery, maybe warn people first."
Rayan huffed. "I did warn people. I just did it after the fact, which is my brand."
Torren glanced over. "Your brand is going to get us eaten."
"That is also fair," Rayan said. "But at least it will be memorable."
The quarry appeared gradually, the land dipping into a wide scar where stone had been cut away years ago and never forgiven for it. Jagged walls circled the pit, their surfaces etched with tool marks and old cracks that caught the light in strange ways. The faint glow Mina mentioned hovered near the bottom, pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat that refused to stay quiet.
Rayan felt the Rootkit stir again, sharper this time, like it had smelled something familiar and did not like the memory.
ALERT: Multiple signal sources detected.
COUNT: Three confirmed.
PATTERN MATCH: Increasing divergence.
Rayan slowed. "That is new."
Mina stopped and turned. "Define new."
"There was one signal under the well," Rayan said. "This is a network."
Torren frowned. "That word again."
Rayan gestured toward the pit. "It means the problem has friends."
They climbed down carefully, boots scraping stone, Torren muttering complaints about his knees and the unfairness of aging in general. Mina reached the bottom first and held her lantern out, revealing more of the glow. Thin lines of light traced the quarry floor, faint but deliberate, forming shapes that looked accidental until they did not.
Rayan crouched, heart thudding. "These marks were not here before."
Mina looked around. "We stopped using this quarry years ago. Nothing new gets carved."
"Then something carved itself," Rayan said.
The Rootkit overlaid his vision again, peeling back illusion and guesswork until the truth sat naked and uncomfortable beneath it. The light was not magic bleeding through stone. It was infrastructure, repurposed and leaking, alien nodes half-buried and waking up like forgotten servers reconnecting to a network that suddenly remembered it existed.
OBJECTS IDENTIFIED: Signal Relay Nodes.
STATUS: Semi-active.
CAUSE: External synchronization attempt detected.
Rayan swallowed. "It is calling out."
Torren stiffened. "Calling to what."
Rayan opened his mouth, then stopped, because the answer did not feel ready to be said. "Calling to something that has not answered yet."
A low hum rippled through the quarry, deep enough to feel in the chest rather than hear with ears. Mina cursed softly and drew her knife, though she kept glancing at Rayan like she expected him to pull a solution out of thin air.
Rayan wished he could.
"Okay," he said, mostly to himself. "Let us not panic. Panicking never helped anyone debug anything."
Torren shot him a look. "You keep saying things like that and I keep dying a little inside."
The hum grew louder. One of the glowing lines brightened, then another, until the quarry floor looked like a map drawn by someone who thought symmetry was optional.
Then a voice spoke.
Not from any one place, but from everywhere at once, layered and distorted, like several recordings playing slightly out of sync.
"Observer anomaly detected."
Mina froze. "Did the ground just talk."
Rayan felt his stomach drop through several emotional floors. "Yeah. It did."
"Unauthorized modification confirmed," the voice continued, calm and cold and utterly unconcerned with how terrifying it sounded to people who had never spoken to a planet-sized machine before. "Local variables compromised."
Torren took a step back. "Rayan."
"I know," Rayan said quickly. "I know."
He stepped forward, heart pounding so hard it felt like it might shake his thoughts loose. "Hey," he said, because that was apparently his opening line when addressing alien systems. "You are running outdated parameters."
There was a pause. A real one. The hum dipped.
"Correction," the voice replied. "Parameters updated. External interference acknowledged."
Rayan winced. "Okay, that is worse."
Mina hissed, "You are talking to it like it is a shopkeeper."
"It helps me not scream," Rayan whispered back.
He focused inward, calling up the Rootkit with a desperation he did not bother hiding. Panels bloomed across his vision, warnings stacked on warnings, throughput limits blinking angrily.
WARNING: System awareness increasing rapidly.
RISK: Detection escalation.
Rayan ignored it. He had learned long ago that ignoring warnings was sometimes the only way forward.
"Listen," Rayan said, raising his voice. "Your network is broken. Your nodes are waking up out of order. You are hurting the environment."
Another pause followed, longer this time.
"Environmental degradation acknowledged," the voice said. "Collateral effects acceptable."
Rayan felt something cold settle in his chest. "That is not acceptable to the people living here."
"Local lifeforms classified as transient," the voice replied. "Observation priority maintained."
Mina swore loudly. Torren gripped his broom like it might become a weapon if he believed hard enough.
Rayan laughed, sharp and humorless. "You are monitoring a world that moved on without you, and you are surprised it changed."
Silence stretched, tense and heavy.
Then the light flared violently, one node surging brighter than the others.
"Primary directive restored," the voice said. "Observer status transitioning."
Rayan's blood ran cold. "Transitioning to what."
Before the voice could answer, the ground shook, stone grinding against stone as something deep beneath the quarry shifted. The glow shot upward in a column, piercing the night sky like a signal flare meant for something very far away.
ALERT: Incoming response detected.
ORIGIN: Unknown.
DISTANCE: Extreme.
Rayan stared at the rising light, his heart pounding, his thoughts racing ahead to a future that suddenly felt much bigger and much worse.
Mina grabbed his arm. "What did you do."
Rayan swallowed hard. "I think I told it we are worth noticing."
The hum deepened, the quarry trembling as if bracing for impact.
And somewhere beyond the stars, something noticed back.