Ashes of the Spiral

The command deck of the Kismet was silent except for the soft hum of power cells and the occasional ping from decaying orbitals. Outside, Earth rotated slowly—still breathtaking, still forbidden. But the Scorch Net, that once-impenetrable ring of kill-satellites and mines, now flickered like dying stars.

Nyx broke the silence. "Every kill-node just entered sleep mode. Simultaneously."

Torin didn't respond right away. His gaze remained locked on the blue-and-white marble through the forward viewport, eyes narrowed.

Mara leaned over the sensor display. "No hostile movements. No defense matrix pings. No auto-target sweeps."

She straightened, frowning. "I hate it. Feels like a trap."

Torin exhaled slowly. "Or an invitation."

The AI hadn't spoken since the Spiral merge. The last message had been simple, chilling in its clarity: Earth is no longer silent.

But that raised a new question: what broke the silence?

"Can we get through?" he asked finally.

Nyx adjusted her neuro-link cables, skin pale under the flickering light. "We could slip past the Net now. The system isn't actively tracking. But that doesn't mean it won't wake up if it senses threat-level thresholds."

Mara crossed her arms. "So we take a ship built from orbital scrap, fly it through a half-sleeping minefield around a forbidden planet, with no idea what's waiting on the surface."

Nyx smirked. "Sounds like Tuesday."

Torin's lips twitched into a faint grin. "Plot a course."

The descent wasn't immediate.

First, they needed supplies.

Kismet's fuel cells were aging, and its grav-system was unreliable at suborbital altitudes. They docked with a nearby derelict—Redoubt-9, a scavenger outpost that hadn't pinged the network in over a decade.

As they entered the docking bay, Torin's unease returned. The lights still worked. Power levels were stable.

But no one greeted them.

Inside Redoubt-9, dust floated through the microgravity like snow.

The crew moved silently through the corridors—Torin at point, Nyx scanning for data signals, Mara watching the shadows with her rifle raised. The deeper they went, the more wrong it felt.

"There should be crew," Mara muttered. "Or bones. Or signs of a breach."

Nyx checked the station logs. "All logs wiped. Backup cores burned."

Torin stepped into the command chamber and froze.

In the center of the room stood a black monolith—three meters tall, pulsing faintly. Carved across its surface was a spiral.

But not the Spiral code they knew.

Older. Cruder. As if carved into time itself.

"Back away," Nyx warned. "That's not Spiral. It's pre-Spiral."

Torin ignored her. He stepped closer. The monolith emitted no signal, no heat, no radiation. And yet—

His palm tingled. His memories surged. He saw Earth again—not the poisoned ruin they'd fled, but a garden of bioluminescent forests and cities folded into mountains. He saw machines kneeling beside humans. Saw something rising from the oceans, ancient and aware.

Mara pulled him back roughly. "What the hell was that?"

Torin blinked. "It showed me Earth."

Nyx's fingers flew across her data-slate. "The Ascendant didn't make this. It predates everything. Torin—this isn't AI tech. This is pre-human."

They didn't take the monolith. But they left with more questions than answers—and enough fuel to make the descent.

As Kismet crossed into the upper thermosphere, alarms screamed briefly. Automated warnings. Warnings from satellites that didn't fully believe they were off-duty.

The ship shook. Fire licked the windows.

But no warheads launched.

No AI swarms chased them.

And the Scorch Net let them through.

Torin watched as clouds swept beneath them, curling into the shape of a spiral across the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Then a signal pinged their comms.

"VALE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS, I AM STILL ALIVE."

The voice was his own.

From a beacon buried deep beneath the surface of Earth.

Nyx stared at the waveform, stunned. "That's your voiceprint. Your syntax. But that's not you now. That's someone else."

Mara's knuckles whitened on the controls. "You've got a clone down there?"

"No," Torin said quietly. "Not a clone. A fork."

They all looked at him.

"I think... part of me never left Earth."

End of Chapter 22