It began with a flicker.

Barely perceptible, just a momentary hiccup in the network pulse—a single dip in the transmission flow that should have corrected itself. Evelyn noticed it while reviewing the morning diagnostics, a faint stutter in the data feed from the eastern relay. It didn’t even trigger the alert threshold. But she felt it, in the subtle delay between signal and echo—like the heartbeat of the system had missed a beat.

She adjusted the filters, checked the stabilizer ...