Chapter 43: CONTINUITY PROTOCOL
Third Person POV
The word did not disappear when the screens went dark. It stayed. Not on the monitors. Not in the room. But in them. In the space between thought and reaction, where instinct normally took over and failed to find anything familiar to hold onto.
Alaric felt it first as silence that had structure. Not emptiness. Not absence. Order. The monitoring room was still there, but it no longer felt like the center of anything. It felt like a node that had been acknowledged and then absorbed into something larger without physically moving at all.
Lily was the first to break the silence. "The screens are not responding." Dr. Ward's fingers moved rapidly over her tablet. "It is not a system freeze," she said tightly. "All local interfaces are still active. We are simply not being displayed." Alaric's eyes narrowed slightly. "We are not being shown what we expect to see."
