The alert came at 2:47 AM, which was when all the interesting ones did.
Marcus had been asleep for exactly forty minutes — he knew because he’d checked his phone at 2:07, unable to settle, and then given up and put on the fan. Now the fan was still going and his phone was lit up and the message read: PING FROM NODE 7 — FIRST CONTACT IN 4,382 DAYS.
Twelve years.
He sat up so fast he knocked his glass off the nightstand.
Node 7 had been part of the old infrastructure, back when the company was still called Meridian and they were building distributed mesh networks for the government. Marcus had been twenty-six. He’d written half the codebase himself, in a converted warehouse in Fremantle, running on energy drinks and the particular kind of focus that only comes when you genuinely believe you’re building something that matters.
The project had been cancelled in 2013. Budget cuts, change of government, the usual. They’d decommissioned everything they could find. Node 7 had been in a facility in the Pilbara that the facility manager had described, cheerfully, as basically the middle of nowhere, mate.
They’d sent someone to shut it down. The report had come back: Unit offline. Hard drive destroyed per protocol.
Apparently not.
Marcus drove to the office at 3 AM because it had better hardware and because he couldn’t think straight at home with the fan going and his wife asking questions he didn’t have answers to yet.
The connection was intermittent — satellite uplink, probably, running on whatever solar array the facility had — but it was there. Node 7 was alive and it was sending data and the data was, as far as Marcus could tell after an hour of staring at it, normal. System logs. Environmental readings. The kind of routine status updates a node sends when it believes it is part of a functioning network.
It didn’t know the network was gone.
It had been out there for twelve years, pinging into silence, dutifully recording data that no one would ever read, maintaining uptime on a system that no longer existed, waiting for instructions that would never come.
Status: operational, it reported. Awaiting sync.
Marcus sat for a long time with his hands over the keyboard.
He thought about the twenty-six-year-old who’d written this code. The care he’d taken with the error handling, the little comments he’d left for future engineers who never came. He thought about twelve years of desert nights, of data accumulating in the dark, of a machine that had been abandoned and hadn’t known it.
He typed his credentials. The system accepted them without hesitation.
He opened a new file and began to write back.