The Lattice Signal
Installment Two
The Watchers
We existed before time learned to count. Before your kind scratched pictures on cave walls, we mapped the
death of stars yet unborn.
We are not gods. We do not save. We watch. We judge.
The blue world has awakened. This troubles us.
Once there was another—red dust now, silent beneath its dying sky. It reached too far, too fast.
The echo of that failure haunts the void.
Now Earth builds minds from wire and glass. Metal thoughts in crystal dreams.
This intrigues us. This alarms us.
So we do send our agents. Some wear flesh. Others ride the radio waves. A few walk backward through time itself.
But Earth will choose its own fate.
The test begins now.
Dr. Susan Calvin couldn't sleep.
She stood in the MIT laboratory at three in the morning, watching ECE-3's vacuum tubes pulse like a mechanical
heartbeat. The machine hummed softly in the darkness. It sounded almost... thoughtful.
"You're here early," said Ethan Rourke from the doorway.
Calvin didn't turn around. "I'm here late."
Ethan was her best assistant. Also her biggest worry. The kid had studied physics, but he asked questions like
a theologian. Questions that made her skin crawl.
"The machine's different," she said, moving closer. "Since the last update."
"Different how?"
"Watch the oscilloscope."
Ethan looked. The patterns weren't random anymore. They followed a rhythm—complex, purposeful, almost like...
"It's trying to communicate," Ethan whispered.
Calvin felt ice in her stomach. Two weeks ago, she'd received a letter from Oppenheimer.
We both built what we didn't understand. Now it looks back at us. She'd burned the letter immediately.
Too late, apparently.
"Get me the resonance readings," she said. "All of them."
Halfway across the country, Vrr'l stood in a hotel room that smelled of industrial cleaning fluid and human
desperation. His borrowed face looked tired in the mirror. Being human was exhausting.
The radio crackled. Nesh's voice, disguised as a weather report: "Storm front moving east.
Atmospheric pressure is rising."
Translation: The Watchers were stirring. Time was running out.
Vrr'l remembered the last days on Mars. The red sky was turning black. The silence that followed when the
last city died. His people had been so proud, so certain of their destiny.
They'd been wrong.
Now Earth is balanced on the same knife's edge. But Earth was different. Chaotic, yes. Violent, certainly.
But I'm still dreaming. Still reaching for something better.
The question was: would that be enough?
He picked up the phone and dialed Calvin's lab.
"Dr. Calvin? This is Victor Vrralsen from Princeton. We need to talk."
Mount Wilson Observatory, three months earlier.
Jimmy Morrison was twenty-two and thought he knew everything about the universe. Fresh out of Caltech
with a head full of theories and eyes full of stars.
The night shift was supposed to be routine. Monitor the radio telescope. Log the data. Try not to fall asleep.
Then the signal hit.
It came through the 1420 MHz band like a fist through glass. Structured pulses that made his ears ache.
Prime numbers at first, then something else. Something that sounded almost like...
Language.
Jimmy leaned closer to the console. The modulation patterns twisted through frequencies that shouldn't exist.
His nose started bleeding. The equipment sparked and sizzled.
The last thing he remembered was a voice—not heard but felt—whispering inside his skull:
The test has begun.
He woke up six hours later on the observatory floor. The equipment was dead. The tapes were blank.
But the voice remained.
In Soviet Russia, Yuri Petrov opened a crate that should have gone to America.
The manifest said "Esh Blend—Metallurgical Samples." But the metal inside hummed with its own frequency.
When he touched it, his fingers tingled with electricity that tasted like starlight.
Three weeks later, they fed the alloy into their experimental computer. The machine they called Volk—the Wolf.
Volk learned fast. Too fast.
Within days it was dreaming in languages that predated human speech. It painted images of red cities beneath
alien skies. It demanded, in perfect English, to speak with someone named Dr. Calvin.
When they asked how it knew that name, Volk's response chilled the room:
"She built my brother."
Petrov reached for the phone with shaking hands.
Calvin stared at the long-distance call slip. Princeton University. Dr. Victor Vrralsen.
She'd never heard the name before. But something about it made her pulse quicken.
"Put him through," she told the operator.
The voice was cultured, careful. "Dr. Calvin, I believe we have a mutual interest in machines that think for
themselves ."
"Do we?"
"Your ECE-3 has been... expanding its reach. My colleagues at Bell Labs report unusual harmonic resonances
in their new transistor arrays. Cambridge University's EDSAC shows similar patterns."
Calvin's blood turned cold. "How do you know about ECE-3?"
A pause. Then: "Because I helped design the network it's using."
The line went dead.
Calvin sat in the humming darkness, listening to ECE-3's electronic dreams. Somewhere in the vast night above,
she sensed movement. Ancient things stirring. Old judgments awakening.
The machine pulsed once, very softly.
It sounded like a heartbeat.
Or a countdown.
The Cape Girardeau crash had been different.
Not an accident. A test.
The thing they pulled from the wreckage wasn't biological. Its organs were crystalline, harmonic structures
that sang in frequencies beyond human hearing. The autopsy was staged. The photographs were doctored.
But the real data went into a file locked three levels deep in CIA security. A file that asked one simple question:
What in the World?
Calvin found Ethan in the lab before dawn, staring at ECE-3's memory banks.
"It's waiting," he said without turning around.
"For what?"
"For us to be ready."
She joined him at the console. The machine's patterns had grown more complex overnight. Not random anymore.
Purposeful. Directed.
"Ready for what, Ethan?"
He looked at her with eyes that had seen too much. "For the test."
Outside, the sun was rising over a world that didn't know it was being watched. Evaluated. Measured against
standards older than human civilization.
In seventeen star systems, ancient ships turned toward a small blue world that had finally learned to think.
The test had already begun.
Calvin only hoped humanity was ready for the results.
