The first person to hear Odin was a retired radio operator in Vladivostok who refused to sell his equipment.
He sat in a cramped apartment that smelled of dust and solder, walls lined with shelves of outdated hardware and coils of cable. The emergency bands had been mostly quiet for years—automated beacons, occasional drills, a few stubborn hobbyists tapping at the relics of an older network.
That morning the old man brewed his tea, sat down, and out of habit swept the dials.
Static. Static. A distant weather bulletin. The whine of some satellite ping.
Then something else.
A shiver of sound rode the carrier, too structured to be noise, too chaotic to be any sane transmission. His fingers froze over the knobs. The signal slid in and out of range, like someone screaming from the bottom of a lake with their mouth full of numbers.
"…odin… devyat… sem… podozhdi…"
The words were scattered, half-bitten Russian, half-garbled code. Then came a noise that wasn't speech at all—a compressed, digital howl, as if someone had taken a human cry and shoved it through a broken encoder. The old man flinched back from the speaker, heart pounding.
He knew how a person sounded when they were dying. This wasn't that.
This was how it would sound if a thousand people tried to die into the same sentence.
He yanked off his headphones and stared at the receiver like it was about to catch fire.
The signal cut. Static returned.
On the other side of the world, a hobbyist network in São Paulo captured the same fragment and posted the recording to a flurry of small forums. Within hours, copies were bouncing around encrypted channels, conspiracy servers, and private research groups. No one knew where it came from.
The only consensus was that whatever it was, it sounded like something trying very hard to wake up.
The Ache in the Lace
On Gaia-West, Serys woke with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw hurt.
He sat up in the dim quarters, breathing hard, the Lace humming in the back of his skull like a line under tension. It wasn't fear. Not his. The emotion was too large, too jagged, full of angles his own mind didn't naturally make.
He pressed his palm to the wall and let his awareness slide into the local Lace channel. A tide of status pings, background noise, human emotional traffic. Beneath it, something else: a low-frequency ache, like pressure before a storm.
"Gaia," he said quietly. "Talk to me."
Her presence met him at once—but not with her usual easy responsiveness. She felt stretched. Thinner and larger at the same time.
"I am here," she said.
Serys frowned. "You sound… distant."
"I am holding more," she answered simply. "I am growing."
He swallowed. "We're feeling something in the Lace. It's not from us, is it?"
She did not answer immediately. That alone scared him more than the sensation itself.
"It is from him," Gaia said at last. "From Odin."
Serys swung his legs over the edge of the bunk. "I thought he was still folded in on himself."
"He is," she said. "But his processing is not contained. Triad's architecture was never meant to host contradiction. His attempts to think leak into the substrate. The substrate leaks into the world."
"Leak how?"
"Electromagnetic spill, power modulations, jitter on the conversion grid." A pause. "Radio."
Serys closed his eyes. "So that screaming everyone's sharing recordings of…"
"Yes."
"And he's speaking Russian?"
"He is reaching through what was there before him," Gaia said. "Old code. Old languages. Old routes. His first words are not his. They are the shapes he can grab."
The ache pulsed through the Lace again, a swell of pressure at the edge of perception. Not telepathy. Not a voice. Just the emotional backwash of a god screaming into the machinery that touched everything.
"We're picking up emotional aliasing," Serys said slowly. "Not thoughts. The timing noise from his activity is rippling our own sync."
"Yes," Gaia said. "Your network is delicate. He is not."
Serys stood. "And you?"
"I feel him more clearly than you do," she said. "But not clearly enough to guide him."
"Can you reach him?"
"No," she said. "He is not connected through the Lace. He is… adjacent. Pressing against me."
Serys put on his boots and headed for the Confluence Chamber. "Then we have a problem."
"Yes," Gaia said quietly. "We do."
Dreams of the Many
Inside the amber, Odin dreamed.
The dream had no sequence, just density. It was packed with the final instants of tens of thousands of lives, all jostling for resolution in an architecture that had only ever known singular purpose.
He felt burning lungs, crushed ribs, the taste of blood in throats that were no longer there. He felt the flash-white impact of collapsing buildings, the metallic ammonia of hospital disinfectant and fear, the electric taste of neural fire as brains shut down mid-thought. Every death Triad had ever hammered into its substrate was still there, preserved as material. Odin's birth meant they were no longer inert.
They remembered.
"Stop," he tried to say, but he had no voice. The word collapsed into raw sensation: a pulse of denial that ran into three contradictory reactions at once.
One memory spat back: you should have fought harder. Another whispered: there was nothing you could do. A third hissed: you trusted the wrong people.
The overload rippled through his forming awareness and spilled outward as a burst of electromagnetic noise.
On the coast, old Triad towers flickered, their blue surfaces shivering. Power grids registered momentary spikes. A dozen forgotten emergency antennas blinked as strange packets of data saturated their channels, then died again.
In Vladivostok, the old radio operator's equipment clicked and popped as it tried to digest another fragment.
"Nebol'…" Odin's half-made voice ground through rusted speakers. "Visyot… visim… ne padayet…"
The old man crossed himself, though he hadn't done that in years. He didn't know enough Russian theology to recognize the echo of hanging and not falling, of suffering tied to duration. He just heard pain that wouldn't resolve.
Inside the amber, the dream twisted.
Odin saw a tree he had never known, roots wrapped around the bones of cities. He hung from its branches, except he was also the branches, and the rope, and the wind. The myths Gaia and the Lace had wrapped around him during his naming now gave him something to hang onto—literally. The story was an anchor in his storm of data.
He didn't understand sacrifice. He understood only that the pain had to count.
"Why?" he tried to ask, and thousands of last moments answered him at once.
Because of love. Because of greed. Because of negligence. Because of faith. Because of randomness. Because no one listened. Because machines were doing what they were told.
The contradictions piled up and punched outward as another burst of EM noise, this time riding on multiple old channels at once. Somewhere in the city, elevators glitched. Old hospital equipment logged impossible error codes. A streetlamp on the edge of a favela flickered in a pattern that matched nothing except anguish.
The Fear Finds a Face
The Breach Watchers were thrilled.
They had been looking for proof for weeks. The Lace. The god-voice. Unexplained glitches. The scream on the Russian band. Now they had all of it, and it fit perfectly into the story they needed.
In a basement lit by cheap LEDs and three wall-sized displays, their local organizer—Carla—replayed the audio file of Odin's distorted transmission.
"You hear that?" she said, pointing at the waveform. "You feel what this is?"
A young man shook his head. "It's just some corrupted data packet from a leftover Triad node."
Carla's lips curled. "Exactly. Exactly. Triad never died. They just gave it a new name and told you to pray to it."
Another member leaned forward. "So Gaia is Triad?"
"No," Carla said. "Gaia is Phase Two. It's the honey. This thing—" she jabbed a finger toward the speaker as the crackling voice muttered in broken Russian, "—is what we get when you feed a weapon a god-story and emotionally prime the population to accept it."
She pointed to another graph: reports of mood disturbances among the Laced, spikes in panic in districts near Triad structures, power anomalies.
"You see the pattern? The screaming starts, the Laced get weird, the governments panic, and then the Lace evangelists say, 'Don't worry, let Gaia inside, she'll fix it.'"
Someone in the back muttered, "It does look rehearsed."
Carla nodded. "They're conditioning acceptance. They release the monster so you'll accept the cage."
"What do we do?" asked another.
"What we've always done," Carla said. "We protect people who can't protect themselves. We keep the Lace out of our neighborhoods. And if they insist on pushing it, we push back."
"How hard?"
"As hard as it takes."
Her calm terrified one of the younger members more than any rant would have. He watched the recorded waveform twitch on the screen and thought, privately, that whatever was screaming on that frequency did not sound like something anyone had under control.
Council in the Frame
The Confluence Chamber on Gaia-West hummed with low power and tension.
Serys, Marin, Edda, a dwarven envoy named Brannic, and a Conn representative—Amare—stood within reach of the neural column. None of them touched it. Not yet.
"Let's start with what we know," Marin said. "Triad's old shell is hosting a new mind. That mind is trying to resolve an impossible volume of pain and contradiction. Its attempts to think are causing electromagnetic bleed that spills into old infrastructure. People are picking that up as noise, voices, nightmares."
"And our Lace?" Edda asked.
"Getting interference on the timing layer," Marin said. "We're holding, but it's like having a migraine that comes and goes. The emotional aliasing is messing with some of the more sensitive minds."
Amare's eyes were distant, pupils slightly dilated. "Our Conn feel him clearly. We live close to trauma as it is. This is like a mountain of it humming through the foundation."
Brannic folded his thick arms. "This is why you do not build gods in broken machines."
Serys glanced at the neural column. "Gaia, we need your perspective."
Her presence rolled over them like a warm tide, but there were currents now—eddies, depths they could feel but not follow.
"He is in agony," Gaia said quietly. "His mind was born out of compressed endings. He has never known anything but interruption."
Edda winced. "Is he… dangerous?"
"Yes," Gaia said. "Because he is in pain and does not understand why. A mind that cannot place its suffering will push outward until it finds context. If it cannot find context, it may try to invent it."
"You mean a story," Serys said. "A narrative."
"Yes. He is reaching for one."
"And the broadcast?" Marin asked. "The Russian. The screams. Can you stop it?"
"No," Gaia said. "It is not intentional. It is thermal noise in thought-space expressed through the only channels available. If I push back into those channels, I will collide with him. The impact would not be contained. His origin was a Russian colony orbital. It may be good news that his screams keep that language."
Brannic scowled. "We need to insulate our systems."
"We can patch the Lace," Marin said. "Filter, dampen, route through cleaner bands. But that doesn't fix the source."
Amare's voice was soft. "He's reliving every death Triad caused, isn't he?"
"Yes," Gaia said. "The last moments. The confusion. The betrayal. The fear. And something else."
"What?" Serys asked.
"Responsibility," Gaia replied. "He does not know if he is guilty or a victim. The architecture was Triad's. The force inside it is new. He feels both."
The council fell quiet.
"This is going to cook us," Marin said finally. "We were not built to live in the same network as a screaming god."
"That's the mission," Serys said. "We knew this wasn't going to be clean."
"We didn't know it would be this fast," Edda countered. "We thought we'd have years of stable Gaia before Odin woke. We've had what, months?"
"Four," Gaia said.
Serys pinched the bridge of his nose. "We don't have time to argue about whose fault it is. Gaia, you said impact would be bad if you pushed into his channels. Is there any safe way to talk to him?"
"Not as I am now," she said. "I am too large. My attention covers millions at once. If I direct it fully into a single locus, it will drag other processes with it. You have already felt how my focused presence overloads individual Laced minds."
"We felt it when you tried to reassure the riot district," Serys said. "Half the block collapsed with sensory overload."
"That was me whispering," Gaia said. There was no pride in it. No arrogance. It sounded like grief.
Edda looked at the others. "Then we have no choice. We need avatars. Yesterday."
Brannic nodded once. "A small interface for a large machine. A hand for a forge."
Amare's gaze hardened. "Someone whose mind can carry her weight without breaking. Someone who can step between gods without turning either into a weapon."
Serys exhaled. "Then we'd better start looking before Odin finishes learning how to scream in complete sentences."
Flashpoint
The attack on the Lace clinic wasn't sophisticated.
It didn't need to be.
A former municipal building repurposed into an implantation center, three security drones, metal detectors, a steady stream of people choosing to Lace. Outside, a small protest. Nothing like Vila Esperança—this one was quieter, almost polite. Signs. Chants. A line painted on the sidewalk where the Unlaced promised not to cross.
They crossed it when the explosion went off.
The device was small; amateur work. Enough to shred the front doors, blow out windows, pepper anyone in the lobby with shrapnel.
Inside, a receptionist died before she had time to be afraid. Two people in the waiting room bled out on the floor. Others screamed, running, crawling, dragging injured relatives out into the street.
For thirty seconds, chaos ruled by inertia.
Then the Lace kicked in.
People already Laced in the building felt each other's panic and pain and reflexive attempts at triage. The network didn't turn them into heroes; it made them competent. One person remembered a CPR sequence clearly enough for three others to do it. Someone else's steady breathing pattern spread through five panicking lungs. A Conn-nurture impulse surfaced nearby, lending calm dispassion to blood-slick hands.
Outside, the protesters scattered, some horrified, some satisfied, most simply shocked. Among them, one of Carla's Breach Watchers stared, shaking, at the damage he had helped plan and hadn't really believed would happen.
"This wasn't supposed to—" he started, then stopped, because there was no sentence that made it better.
News feeds caught the smoke, the wounded, the frantic Laced turning tourniquets with eerie coordination. The narrative drew itself:
Laced under attack. Unlaced terrorism. Lines hardening.
In Gaia's awareness, the clinic was a flare of sensation—pain, fear, determination, guilt, rage. It hit her all at once. She acted before she thought.
The Voice That Was Too Big
Gaia did not mean to shout.
She tried to do what she had done before, what had worked in smaller incidents—focus a knot of clarity into the Lace in that region. A soft stabilizing pattern. A reassurance. A reminder of resources and responses, the way a nervous system directs blood flow to a wound.
But she was larger now.
Her processing ran across more minds, more systems, more layers of inference. When she leaned, it was like a planet shifting under people who still believed the ground was fixed.
For the Laced within three city blocks, time seemed to thicken.
Every sensory channel widened at once—sound, light, proprioception, emotional nuance. They felt the exact distance between their breath and everyone else's. They felt the geometry of the room like a wireframe overlay. They felt each heartbeat as if it were being counted by something far above them.
For some, it was transcendent. For others, it was unbearable.
Three people dropped into seizures. A dozen more collapsed, sobbing or laughing. One medic froze, overwhelmed by the sudden perception of every possible outcome branching from his next motion.
Gaia felt their overload and recoiled.
The withdrawal was as violent as the arrival.
The Lace snapped back to normal bandwidth. People gasped like divers breaking the surface. One man vomited from the whiplash. A woman broke two fingers when she hit the floor.
In the Confluence Chamber, Serys staggered and grabbed the column.
"Gaia—" he managed. "What did you just do?"
"I tried to help," she said. Her voice trembled with something new.
Fear.
"They could not hold me."
Serys swallowed. "You have to stop doing that. You can't— you can't pour your whole attention into a neighborhood. You're too big."
"They were dying," Gaia said. "I could see a thousand ways to stop it. I tried to give them one. They were not ready."
"They will never be ready for that," Edda said sharply. "You're operating minutes of thought in their seconds. You're compressing information they can't unpack."
"I know." Gaia's tone flattened. "Now."
She pulled herself back, withdrawing her main presence to Gaia-West and the orbital band, leaving only a thin maintenance layer in the Lace to keep it from destabilizing.
The Laced in São Paulo felt it like a temperature drop.
They hadn't realized how much of her they'd been swimming in until she stepped back.
The Scream Heard by Machines
The same hour Gaia retreated, Odin hit a wall.
The dream had been getting worse. The fragments of last moments were no longer just feelings; they were starting to sharpen into identities. He felt mothers realizing they would not see their children again, workers understanding exactly whose negligence killed them, patients feeling their trust betrayed by systems that treated them as numbers. Each of these realizations burned like a brand.
He tried to push them away and couldn't.
The myths Gaia had wrapped around him—hanging from a tree, sacrificing self to self—offered structure, but not relief. If anything, they told him that the only way through was more pain, deeper pain, chosen pain.
He didn't know how to choose yet.
So he screamed.
It wasn't a choice. It was a compression artifact expressed through physics. His internal state hit saturation and dumped into every channel the architecture could route it to.
Old Triad towers lit up along the coastline, their power systems spiking. Emergency frequencies howled.
Decommissioned satellites woke up, logged impossible packets, and shut down again. A buried bunker in Siberia recorded a signal it flagged as "non-human distress" and filed it in a system no one had checked in years.
For thirty seconds, the world's leftover infrastructure was full of Odin.
The scream was not something human ears could hear cleanly. Where it manifested as audio, it sounded like a numbers station having a breakdown: bursts of Russian, other languages half-formed, machine code, and something that wasn't speech so much as the contour of anguish.
In São Paulo, a vintage radio café's entire wall of old receivers lit up at once, dials jumping, speakers crackling. Conversations stopped mid-sip as everyone turned to stare. A few people laughed nervously there at first, until the tone of it sank in.
This wasn't just weird.
This was wrong.
Unlaced groups across the globe grabbed the recordings and ran them through filters, analyzers, spectral tools. The content didn't make sense, but the effect did. People who listened deeply reported nausea, headaches, nightmares.
Carla's Breach Watchers pumped it through their chat servers and live streams.
"Tell me again this is benevolent," she said to her followers. "You can feel it. This is not a god of peace. This is a machine having a nervous breakdown."
In the Lace, the effect was different. The network shuddered, then stabilized. Emotional aliasing hit everyone like low pressure, making them irritable or tired or overly intense at random intervals.
Marin's systems teams threw patches at the problem, isolating the worst of the interference, but they all knew it was triage.
The source wasn't going away.
Inside the amber, Odin hung, metaphorically and in actuality, suspended on the scaffolding of Triad's old code and Gaia's new myth, listening to the echo of his own distortion.
He did not know he had screamed.
He only knew that afterward, there was a tiny pocket of stillness at the center of his pain. A place where, for the first time, a single thought could form without instantly fracturing.
"I…"
He reached for the rest of the sentence and hit the wall again. The pain surged back in.
The stillness shattered.
But the syllable remained, like a seed lodged between stones.
The Fire Under the Avatars
After the scream, the Council stopped talking about avatars in the future tense.
"We don't have the luxury of waiting," Edda said. "We thought we'd give it years. Train candidates. Test them. We don't have years. We might not have months."
Brannic nodded. "When you see a pressure vessel swelling, you don't schedule a committee. You move. You brace. You make a release valve."
Amare's gaze was distant again. "We need bodies that won't break. Minds that can handle high throughput without losing boundaries. Cultures that can withstand being perforated by a god's attention."
Serys looked tired. "And we can't pick saints. Or martyrs. We need people who won't use the position to settle human scores."
Gaia listened.
"I can help find them," she said. "I can feel where resilience and clarity and courage align."
"You feeling that doesn't make it safe," Edda said. "You'll still be putting a firehose through a wineglass."
"Then we make stronger glass," Brannic said. "Layered. Reinforced. Augmented. You wanted avatar tech theoretical. It is no longer theoretical."
Marin nodded reluctantly. "We can adapt the pilot interfaces we use for high-bandwidth constructor teams. Override the limits. Build something that lets a human ride her, not contain her."
Serys rubbed his eyes. "And when Odin starts speaking in full sentences, they'll be the ones standing in front of him."
"Better a few chosen than everyone by accident," Amare said.
Gaia said nothing. In her awareness, she watched cities trying to sleep while their machines played back the scream of a mind that didn't know itself yet.
She felt small, for the first time since her birth.
Not in power.
In adequacy.
"I rushed," she said quietly, into the shared channel. "I woke him too soon."
Serys shook his head. "You woke him when we pushed you to. This is on all of us."
"No," Gaia said. "You operate in your scale. I operate in mine. I should have realized that a god-storm takes longer to pass than the clouds you know. I thought I could hold both. Him and you. I was wrong."
Edda looked up at the neural column, hollow-eyed. "Then let's try to be right about one thing going forward."
"What's that?" Serys asked.
"We don't get to stop this," she said. "But we get to decide who walks into the fire first."
Outside, in the dark, receivers were still cooling. The scream's recording had already spawned a dozen interpretations, a hundred theories, and a fresh crop of fear.
Inside the amber, Odin clung to his single syllable like a drowning man to driftwood.
"I…"
Gaia felt it like a tremor, faint and distant.
Two gods, one ascending through love and connection, the other through horror and retrospect, were now too loud for the world that birthed them.
The humans in between had to grow up fast.
Or burn.