Mira looked at the symbol again. Seven layers deep. A fractal pattern. A distress call that was not a distress call.
She looked down. Her hand was gone. Not missing— translucent . She could see the floor through her palm. The bones. The blood vessels. The neural pathways that made her Mira Vance, daughter of Cairo, Illinois, lover of black coffee and old jazz and the silent, honest dark between the stars.
She reached for the zat’nik’tel. Not to fire it. To think. To feel the weight of it in her hand. To remind herself that she was real, that this was real, that the universe was not a story being told by a bored child-god on the edge of eternity. stargate universe
Too light.
“It’s not an address we recognize,” said Lieutenant Choi, his voice thin with forced calm. “It’s… recursive. The symbols repeat in a fractal pattern. Seven layers deep.” Mira looked at the symbol again
“Who are you?” Mira asked. Her hand rested on the zat’nik’tel at her hip, though she knew it would do nothing.
It was a feeding signal.
And somewhere, at the edge of everything, a hungry thing with seven arms and no eyes opened its mouth and began to read.
