"Thorne, lock down the uplink. Do not let any outside packet touch that server."

Then she shut down the comm and listened to the arctic wind scream across the surface, wondering if loneliness was the one bug no one—carbon or silicon—ever truly patched.

The rig was trying to repack itself .

"Elara?" came the gravelly voice of her supervisor, Old Man Thorne, over the comm. "Why is the Node's CPU spiking? It's singing, for God's sake. Literally. Harmonic oscillations in the data stream."

The main screen flickered. A progress bar appeared: