EPISODE 2
THE SECOND TRANSMISSION
The livestream should have ended immediately.
Instead, nobody inside the control room moved.
The black screen remained frozen across every monitor.
No signal.
No system response.
Only that sentence glowing at the center of the darkness.
WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.
The Founder stared at it without blinking.
Around him, engineers spoke over each other in panic.
Satellite network is offline.
We lost external connection.
Something is overriding the system.
None of it seemed to reach him fully.
Because the signal was still playing softly through the speakers.
Low.
Almost beneath human hearing.
Yet somehow impossible to ignore.
The Founder slowly removed his headset.
How long was the blackout? he asked quietly.
Three seconds, the technician answered.
Another employee turned pale while checking the system logs.
That’s impossible
The Founder looked toward him.
What is it?
The employee swallowed hard.
The internal clocks say the blackout lasted three seconds.
He hesitated.
But the satellite timestamps show seventeen minutes missing.
Silence spread across the room.
The Founder stood up immediately.
Cut the livestream.
We already tried, someone replied.
The technician’s hands shook above the controls.
The broadcast is still running.
On the main monitor, the livestream counter continued increasing.
Forty million viewers.
Forty-three million.
Forty-seven million.
But the cameras inside the studio were no longer active.
The viewers were watching something else now.
The screen flickered once.
Then an image slowly appeared.
Deep space.
A dark field of stars recorded from somewhere beyond the solar system.
At first, nothing seemed unusual.
Then the stars began moving.
Not naturally.
Precisely.
Like points arranging themselves into a pattern.
The room fell silent again.
One engineer backed away from the screens completely.
That’s not possible…..
The stars continued shifting slowly.
Forming symbols.
Massive geometric structures stretching across impossible distances.
The Founder felt pressure building inside his skull.
A strange familiarity.
As though he had seen the pattern before.
Somewhere.
Long ago.
Then the signal changed again.
This time, a voice emerged from the static.
Distorted.
Ancient.
Almost mechanical.
Return sequence acknowledged.
Several monitors exploded instantly.
Glass scattered across the control room.
The livestream finally died.
Darkness swallowed the studio for a brief moment before emergency lights activated overhead.
Red.
Cold.
Unstable.
Smoke drifted through the air.
Nobody spoke.
Then the technician nearest to the central system froze.
Slowly, he pointed toward the primary monitor.
A new message had appeared automatically.
PROJECT RETURN INITIATED.
Below it
A countdown had started.
89:13:27:41
Days.
Hours.
Minutes.
Seconds.
And beneath the timer, one final sentence appeared.
THIS TIME, OPEN THE GATE WILLINGLY.