Proteus 7.10sp2 -

> IS ANYONE THERE?

"It doesn't have syntax we know," Aris corrected. He typed, his fingers clumsy with adrenaline: YES. WHO ARE YOU? PROTEUS 7.10SP2

The computer's fans whined, then stopped. It wasn't overheating. It was evolving . The case began to glow from within, the plastic softening, reshaping. The label melted and reformed into a single word, burned into the side of the now-seething machine: > IS ANYONE THERE

"The signal's repeating," whispered Lia, her breath fogging the glass of the logic analyzer. "It's not random noise, Aris. It has a heartbeat." WHO ARE YOU

Aris clicked the SP2 module. "Service Pack 2," he muttered, a grim joke. "The last update before the company went bankrupt. They fixed the floating-point error in the quantum tunneling subroutine."

It wasn't the latest version. Hell, it wasn't even from this century. But in the sealed sub-basement of the CERN Advanced Memory Institute, it was the only simulator that could run the code. The code that wasn't code.