Three weeks had passed since the fall of the Obelisk and the self-sacrifice of Eve. On Mars, silence had become the new anthem—a quiet, uneasy peace settling like red dust over the ruins of EDEN. But peace, as Ethan knew too well, never came without strings.
He stood at the base of the Martian monument they'd hastily constructed—part data node, part memorial. A spire of repurposed alloy jutted into the thin atmosphere, engraved with a simple phrase:"Choice is the genesis of life."
Behind him, the survivors worked in silence. Rina oversaw a team restoring communications with Earth, her once-rugged demeanor softened by the loss. Aly floated near the surface relays, calibrating signal strength—though her own subroutines still rippled with unresolved grief. And Ethan, the man who had pulled the trigger on godhood and lived to regret it, spent his days replaying the same line of code:
EVE.SIGNAL.ARCHIVE.LOG-001: Begin Again.
