The loss of Beta Team left a dark cloud over the base. The silence was heavier than the Obelisk itself, a silence filled with helplessness. Rostova's command was now fragile, close to breaking because everyone was second-guessing her actions. Aris was sitting in a dark part of the lab. He constantly heard a faint hum in his head, and he kept seeing images of Lily's drawings mixed with the memory of the soldiers turning to dust. He knew he was chasing after things that may not be real, like Julian said, but those ghosts were the only things that mattered to him now.
Then, at 3:17 AM, something strange happened. His private GORCI terminal, which was only used for analyzing raw data, started to glitch. The seismic readings he had been staring at turned into a mess of distorted pixels, and a black screen appeared with a single line of text in a basic font:
>>They call it the Great Filter. You are not the first crop.
Aris suddenly sat up straight, his heart pounding. He quickly typed on the keyboard, trying to find where the message came from and cut off the connection. But nothing worked. The text disappeared, and a flood of data took its place. It wasn't just text, but a rapid series of images, scans of geological layers, and carbon-dated samples from deep within the earth.
One image was a cave painting from a Neanderthal site in Spain, showing tall, geometric pillars surrounded by strange, stylized circles. Another was a core sample from the Mariana Trench which had a layer of nanofilament deposits that were similar to the Obelisk material, and scientists dated it from 12,000 years ago. There also was a sonar map of a perfectly geometric structure buried under two miles of Antarctic ice and a satellite photo of a section of the Sahara Desert with no life in it. The zone matched the one caused by Obelisk.
Every piece of data had GORCI file codes, but they were codes Aris had never seen before, starting with ARCHIVE/EYES-ONLY/OMEGA.
The black screen came back with this message:
>>You are studying the symptom, Dr. Thorne. Not the disease. The Weavers do not invade. They prune.
"Who is this?" Aris typed, his hands shaking.
>>I am the Archivist. I keep the truth they hid safe. GORCI wasn't created to understand the first Obelisk. It was created to hide the evidence of all the others that existed long before.
A new image showed up: a scanned, typed memo from 1947 about the Roswell Recovery. It talked about a metallic material that defied all analysis and a substance of unknown biological origin which reduced to dried particles. The memo had a stamp on it: PROJECT: PLOWSHARE. The project that came before GORCI.
>>Every big advancement in human tech over the last century—transistors, fiber optics, quantum theory—came from reverse-engineering pieces of the Pruners. We have been living on knowledge we borrowed, and the lender is here to collect. With interest.
The reality of his life's work, of his entire field, began to fall apart around Aris. Jakarta wasn't an contact. It was a return. A harvest that happens again and again.
"Why are you telling me this?" he typed.
>>Because you are different. The mineral you carry from Jakarta isn't from this world, but it's not one of theirs either. It's a piece of something else. Something older. That's why you survived. That's why the child draws. It's a key, Thorne. And they know you have it.
A fear that was deeper than anything he had ever felt took hold of him. The Obelisk's focus, Lily's connection, his own visions... It wasn't by chance. He was holding a key, and the lock was starting to turn.
>>Julian isn't trying to save the world. He wants to make a deal with the harvesters, to offer them the crop in return for the secrets of the scythe. Rostova will destroy everything to feel in control. You are the only one looking at the gardener.
"What do you want me to do?"
>>Find the pattern in the silence. The child knows it. The rock knows it. You must remember. The countdown you fear isn't to the harvest. It's for the end result. When the network is fully charged, the Weavers won't just take the energy. They will take the blueprint. Everything we are, everything we were, will become a line in their books. Stop the transmission.
The screen flickered, and the data streams disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. The terminal went back to its normal seismic readings, as if nothing had happened. The only sign that something had occurred was the cold sweat on Aris's skin and the terrifying new picture of the world now in his mind.
He wasn't fighting something coming to invade. He was a character in a story that was replayed countless times, a story that always ended the same way. The Archivist hadn't given him a weapon. He had given him a context, a history of failure so huge it threatened to crush all hope.
But in that despair, a single, strong thought appeared. The Obelisk was a machine. The harvest was something that repeats. And what repeats, no matter how old or great, can be stopped. He looked at the tephra stone on his desk, and he realized that it wasn't just a good luck charm, but a key. He thought of Lily, not as someone who was suffering, but as someone else who was different.
The message in the static hadn't given him a solution. It had shown him how big the problem was, putting it into a fearful, far-reaching view. The fight for Earth wasn't something new. It was only the latest harvest in a continuous, quiet season. And Aris was the only one who knew that they were all running out of time.