A shape emerged from the silence. It had no face, no form, only a pattern. The pattern was his verification algorithm. But twisted. Infested .

Kaelen Leoni slumped back in his grav-chair, the magnetic seals of his environmental suit hissing in relief. For three hundred and twenty cycles, the UZ116 rift—a snarling wound in spacetime at the edge of the Helix Nebula—had defied every known law of quantum gravity. It was a "crack" in the universe, a place where reality bled into the Echo, a dimension of pure information without form.

Kaelen snapped his mind back, gasping. He scrambled to his console, fingers flying across the haptic interface. He re-ran the verification. Again. Again. Each time, the result was the same: .

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