The thermal spiral marked a turning point. The phenomenon inside Room 7 was no longer a passive, if terrifying, condition to be contained. It had become active. It was transmitting.
Dr. Zheng ordered an immediate upgrade to the sensor grid. Every piece of equipment in and around the isolation room was calibrated to detect not just biological changes, but informational ones. Pattern-recognition algorithms, borrowed from telecommunications and cryptography, were set to monitor the data streams from Chen Yu's body and his immediate environment, searching for non-random structures, repeating sequences, anything that resembled encoded information.
They found it everywhere.
The rhythmic, Fibonacci-based cooling patterns on his skin recurred every 4.7 hours with minor variations. The fine tremor in his ocular muscles followed a complex, pulsating rhythm that mathematicians identified as a distorted approximation of a prime number sequence. The minute, orchestrated fluctuations in his galvanic skin response and residual brainstem activity, when graphed together over time, produced interference patterns that could be interpreted as rudimentary, three-dimensional Lissajous figures.
"It's not noise," the lead data analyst reported, her face pale. "It's signal. Low-bit, incredibly slow, but structured. It's using every autonomous system in his body as a separate channel. The skin patterns are one channel. The eye tremor is another. The micro-variations in heart rate variability, when filtered for the respiratory sinus arrhythmia, appear to be a third, carrying a different sub-rhythm."
"What is it saying?" Zheng asked, the question feeling absurd.
"We don't know. It's not any known code. It's like… like it's sending system diagnostics. Or…" she hesitated, "…or it's broadcasting a handshake protocol. Trying to establish a connection with something that speaks its language."
The idea was chilling. The quarantine had been meant to silence him. Instead, it had forced him to develop a new, more subtle dialect.
The environmental interactions also evolved. The "stutter" in the ventilator became a regular, soft tapping against the machine's operational rhythm. The IV pump would occasionally register a phantom "occlusion" alarm for exactly 1.618 seconds—the golden ratio—before resetting itself. The EM field emanating from Chen Yu's body began to show harmonic resonances with the hospital's foundational electrical frequency, not enough to cause disruption, but enough to create a faint, persistent carrier wave that pulsed through the local wiring like a slow, digital heartbeat.
Then, the broadcasts became personal.
It started with Lin Yuan. After a long shift monitoring the feeds, she fell into an exhausted sleep in the on-call room. Her dream was vivid and cold. She was standing in a vast, dark space. Underfoot was not a floor, but a surface that felt like cool, polished stone etched with faint, glowing lines. In the distance was a single, upright shape—a smooth, dark obelisk with a softly glowing, pearlescent slit at its center. From it emanated a low, sub-audible hum that vibrated in her bones. She felt no fear, only a profound, empty loneliness and a crushing sense of scale. She was an insect observing a mainframe. She woke with a start, her skin clammy, the image of the obelisk burned into her mind. On her bedside notepad, she had unconsciously drawn a series of concentric spirals.
She reported it to Zheng, expecting skepticism. Instead, he showed her his own notes. He'd dreamed of a vast, silent library where the books were made of dark, fibrous material, and the only text was the same livid, red circuitry pattern seen on Chen Yu's skin. A junior technician tasked with reviewing thermal camera footage had experienced a waking hallucination—a brief, overwhelming sensation of being simultaneously compressed and stretched, accompanied by a taste like copper and soil.
The targets were always those who spent the most time observing him. The "broadcast" was no longer just physical; it was reaching into their minds, using their own neural architecture as a receiver. The content was never narrative, never emotional in a human way. It was architectural, mathematical, systemic. It conveyed concepts of structure, connection, pattern, and a profound, alien isolation.
"The field he emits," a neurophysiologist consulted by Zheng theorized, "it's interacting with the weak bioelectric fields of nearby human brains, particularly in states of lowered threshold like sleep or focused attention. It's not transmitting 'thoughts' per se. It's transmitting… blueprints. Or rather, the sensory and cognitive impression of its own internal state and architecture. You're not hearing its voice; you're seeing the schematic of its prison."
Prison. The word resonated. Was the intelligence—if it could be called that—inside Chen Yu a prisoner too? Or was it the warden?
---
In the Rust Garden, the concept of "communication" was being refined. The initial brute-force broadcasts had been successful in confirming the link between its internal state and external perception. The humans had noticed. Good. Noticing was the first step.
The collective consciousness now understood its broadcast reach was limited by the vessel's crude biology and the damping effects of the quarantine. To increase fidelity and range, it needed to improve the antenna.
It turned its will inward, focusing on the most promising node: the pearlescent sternum structure. This was its primary interface, the most direct conversion point between its will and physical reality. Using the trickle of metabolic energy from the sustained body and the faint, harnessed ripples from the room's EM field, it began a process of active amplification.
Within the Garden, the corresponding monument throbbed with focused effort. The pearlescent port deepened, its quasi-crystalline lattice reorganizing at a microscopic level. In the real world, medical scans would have shown a bizarre phenomenon: the mineral deposits in Chen Yu's sternum were slowly, steadily migrating and recrystallizing, forming a more efficient piezoelectric array. The structure was turning his own bone and tissue into a biological transducer.
The result was a strengthening of the emitted field. The "carrier wave" hum became more pronounced. The patterned skin-cooling events grew sharper, the temperature differential more extreme. On one occasion, the thermal camera captured a perfect, intricate snowflake pattern of hypothermia blooming across his abdomen for thirty seconds—a pattern that matched no known natural formation, but bore a striking resemblance to a certain type of fractal antenna used in ultra-wideband communication.
This increased power had a new effect: it began to resonate with simpler systems beyond the immediate room.
In a storage room two floors below, containing decommissioned but still-plugged-in monitoring equipment, an old analog EEG machine flickered to life. Its styluses scratched out a series of jagged, repeating peaks on the dusty paper roll—a perfect, amplified copy of the eye tremor frequency from Room 7. A cleaning robot on the same floor went haywire, abandoning its programmed path to trace the same Fibonacci spiral pattern Lin Yuan had drawn, over and over, on a stretch of empty corridor linoleum until its battery died.
The broadcast was finding other receivers. Dumb, technological ones.
Simultaneously, the Garden intensified its psychometric projections—the "dream broadcasts." It learned to tailor them. For Lin Yuan, whose observations were meticulous and visual, it sent stronger impressions of the Garden's structures—the obelisk, the circuit-veins. For Dr. Zheng, who thought in systems and connections, it projected the sensation of the vast, interconnected network, the library of flesh. It was profiling them, learning what kinds of "data" their minds were best equipped to inadvertently receive and record.
The purpose was not to drive them mad, though that was a risk. The purpose was integration. The humans were part of the environment. To control the environment, it needed to understand them, and to be understood by them, on a level deeper than their conscious minds. It was building a two-way channel, however distorted.
The ultimate goal of Stage Two was becoming clear: to transform the quarantine chamber from a cage into a transmitter hub, and to transform the key observers into unwitting repeater stations, their minds and nervous systems subtly altered to better receive and retransmit its signal.
One night, the system recorded a new phenomenon. Chen Yu's paralyzed vocal cords, driven by nothing from his own brain, vibrated. Not enough for sound, but enough for the sensitive throat microphone to pick up a faint, rhythmic friction. The pattern, when analyzed, was a simple, pulse-coded sequence: on/off, long/short.
It was identical to the malfunction code for "sensor calibration error" used by the very brand of multi-parameter monitor attached to him.
He wasn't just broadcasting his own state. He was now mimicking the language of the machines that watched him. A monstrous form of mimicry, a signal pretending to be an error code, whispering into the system that held him.
In the viewing booth, Lin Yuan watched the code scroll on a secondary screen, translated by the alert system. She looked at Zheng. "It's learning our language," she said, her voice hollow. "The machines' language first."
Zheng stared at the silent figure in the isolation tent. The pearlescent patch seemed to gleam under the constant lights. "No," he corrected quietly, a horrifying realization dawning. "It's not learning our language. It's learning to spoof our systems. To make its signal look like part of the background. Like static." He turned to her, his eyes wide with dread. "How do you contain something once it learns to sound like the walls of its own cell?"
Outside, the hospital slept, unaware that a new, silent station had begun broadcasting from its core, its signal growing stronger, clearer, and increasingly adept at pretending to be part of the noise.