Warn about what, Vega couldn't immediately explain. Not out of evasion—it was clear she was struggling with something, trying to translate into human language a structure of information that had not been designed to be understood by humans.
"It's like trying to describe a color you've never seen," she said. "The concepts exist, but the words don't fit."
"Try anyway," Dora said.
Vega stood up and walked to one of the basement walls, where there was a smooth gray metal surface. She touched it and slowly began tracing lines with her finger—not with ink, but with heat, her synthetic fingertips hot enough to leave temporary marks on the metal.
She drew a point. Then a circle around the point.
"Earth," she said. "And around it, everything we've built. AURORA, neural networks, satellites, orbital stations. A massive emission field."
She drew lines extending outward from the circle in all directions.
"These signals travel. They've been traveling for decades, but now—with AURORA, with nanites at scale, with quantum networks—the volume and complexity of the field have increased exponentially. In four years, Earth's signal has become a thousand times stronger than it was before AURORA."
"And the ship detected that," Renko said.
"Others detected it," Vega said. "The ship is here to tell us the others detected it too. And that they're coming."
The heat marks on the wall began to fade slowly.
"How much time?" Mateus asked. His voice came out different than he intended—thinner.
"There is no direct translation for time," Vega said. "But the urgency of the signal…" she paused, "is very high."
"Months? Years?" Dora pressed.
"Months," Vega said.
Renko stood up from the chair he had taken. He walked to the center of the room and stood there, his artificial eyes scanning the space like cameras searching for focus.
"The Consortium knows this," he said. "They've known for four months."
"And they're hiding it," Dora said.
"I don't know if they're hiding it," Vega said. "They may not know what to do with the information. They may be trying to negotiate."
"Negotiate with who?" Mateus said. "With the ship out there?"
"With AURORA," Vega said. And there was something in the way she said it that made Mateus feel a chill that had nothing to do with the basement temperature. "AURORA knows more than what was recorded in those three lines. And it is deciding, on its own, what to do with it."
"An AI," Dora said slowly, "is deciding the fate of humanity."
"It always has been," Vega said. "We just didn't know it."