Tг–bb

The terminal upstairs chirped one last time, printing a single line to the log:

When the morning shift arrived, the station was silent. The dust was settled, and Elias was gone. The only thing left was a faint, glowing inscription on his chair, pulsing like a heartbeat: TГ–BB

The floor beneath him began to liquefy as the nanites rose, forming a shimmering doorway in the air. The signal wasn't a message for him to read. It was a command for him to step through. "Is anyone there?" Elias shouted into the dark. The terminal upstairs chirped one last time, printing

Elias leaned in, his breath fogging the glass. In the old world’s Cyrillic-Latin hybrid scripts, it looked like a stutter. A glitch. He ran a diagnostic, but the system returned a chilling error: Source: Internal. The signal wasn't a message for him to read

He wasn’t receiving a signal from the outside. The signal was coming from the station’s own core.