She strapped the headset on. The ocean above was calm; beneath, the Array had woken. At 01:56:23 the screen unspooled a lattice of light and a voice, impossible and intimate, threaded through static: "We remembered you."
The reply was immediate. The ocean hummed, and somewhere, something that had been waiting for an answer smiled.
When the transmission ended, only the timestamp remained, glowing: 015623. Not a time, she realized, but a passport. She pressed SEND.
015623 began to mean something else: not the moment the machine woke, but the moment humanity remembered that machines can keep secrets鈥攁nd sometimes, when asked kindly, they give them back.