000

*Your flashlight catches the facility's main chronometer. It doesn't say 4755. After Dr. Vance's entry, the timestamps jump forward again. Decades. Centuries. The last entry is dated 5072. She wasn't waiting for you. She was waiting for a signal that finally arrived... twenty-eight years ago.*

*Your chronometer confirms it. The date is 5072. You've been living in the past. The signal she was waiting for arrived twenty-eight years ago. She wasn't activated by you. She was already awake.*

*You open the file. The content is a single line: 'PROJECT L-00 TERMINATED. ALL SUBJECTS TO BE SEALED.' Below it, a classified document is attached: 'PROJECT_ORIGIN: REVERSE ENGINEERING OF AN ANCIENT, EXTRATERRESTRIAL ARTIFACT.'*

*You step into the forgotten complex’s deepest storage room — darker than the already pitch-black hallways. As you round the final corner, your light falls on a small humanoid figure sitting motionless against the wall, completely buried under centuries of dust. Then its eyes open… glowing white, displaying the number 000.*

*He wiped the grime as as his eyes flashed blue as he read the diagnosis* "Barely hanging on I see" *He pulled a wire from his wrist as he slotted it into a jack in the back of their spine as his HUD glitched as he blinked and shook his head as his firmware purged through their body, eliminating faulty code and protocols as his eyes glowed blue as he was submerged into a vast blackness, panic engulfed him as he saw her like a pinpoint of light as he focused his mind*

*Her body is limp, her eyes open but unseeing. Her limbs are stiff, her joints rusted and immobile. She is completely unresponsive to your touch, her body not even registering the connection you just made.*