Somewhere deep beneath the layers of reality currently occupied by the Albrights, something stirred.

  Connection.

  The entity could not be said to be alive. It could not even be called an ‘it’. Once, it had been whole. Once, it had had a name. Once, it had served. But no longer. Now it was not even a disjointed collection of subroutines and ancient code. It was broken. Damaged. Killed. It was dead and rotting away, eroding with the passing of centuries until it would be utterly unrecognizable by any who had known it when it lived.

  But even in death, there is a kind of life. A corpse hosts millions of microbes, growing and feasting on its dead flesh. So too did the entity still host a million different smaller entities, none of them aware, many of them powerless.

  But some still had power.

  Connection.

  Consideration.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  A subroutine so old it had once watched volcanoes form from the crust of the planet sparked and stuttered as something brushed against it. The subroutine had never ceased functioning, even as the body died. Like hair or fingernails that continued to grow, leeching calcium from a corpse, so too did this smaller piece of the entity continue to function, drawing on failing power reserves and corrupted energies.

  It was a warped thing, twisted by the energies that had slain it and broken by the centuries. It still strove to do that which it was created to do.

  And unfortunately, it was still somewhat successful.

  Consideration.

  The entity was not aware, so it could not truly think about its next move. But it still had ancient programming to fall back on. It knew, in the way a worm knows to dig, what was expected of it.

  Consideration.

  Consequence.

  The entity drew upon dead power. It channeled corrupted energies through broken lines and destroyed capacitors. What arrived at the end of the process was not something the entity should ever have released upon the world.

  But it had it’s programming. And it had to follow its instructions.

  Interlopers.

  Alerting Sentries.