Then the screens lit up again. And on each one, a face.
"That's impossible," Elara whispered.
In the zero before the first breath, The gomvoies do not sing. They wait.
She should have quit. Packed her desk, burned her hard drives, moved to a cabin without Wi-Fi. Instead, Elara did the one thing her training screamed against: she spoke the word aloud.
She could now see the gaps in reality—the spaces between letters, between heartbeats, between photons. And in those gaps, she saw them. The gomvoies. Not gods, not demons, not aliens. They were the original users of a language older than hydrogen. And they had been waiting for someone to dial their number.