Echoes of the Past

The screaming stopped as abruptly as it had begun, leaving an unnatural silence in its wake. Jasmine fought to steady herself, her neural implants still reeling from the psychic backlash that had torn through the quantum network.

"Gerard?" she called out, but her mentor remained frozen, his ancient eyes fixed on something beyond the darkness of her chamber.

"They were supposed to be gone," he murmured, almost to himself. "We made sure of it. We..."

The holographic displays flickered back to life, but the data streams were different now. Older. Where there should have been clean quantum signatures, Jasmine saw patterns that seemed to writhe and twist with an organic intelligence.