A Novella.
The Echo Chambers were built to reach across fractured histories. Not into tomorrow.
For forty years the Continuity Office has treated the future as unstable, unknowable, and impossible to enter. Then, in the middle of the night, a janitor sees a woman appear inside one of the sealed chambers. Half formed, terrified, and pleading through static. "Stop them "
By dawn, Keller, a veteran of the office's buried disasters, discovers the impossible truth: Four scientists have vanished into a future that should not exist, using an artificial intelligence designed to make tomorrow stable enough to reach.
But the future they reached wasn't waiting. It was watching. And it had already learned how to answer back.