He typed a command to trace the origin of the signal. The screen flickered, and a single line of text appeared: RESTORE POINT DETECTED.
Suddenly, the air in the room grew cold, smelling of ozone and ancient dust. The number on his screen began to spiral, spinning so fast it became a blur of white light. Elias reached out to touch the monitor, and for a split second, he saw it: a world not made of atoms, but of pure, unwritten intent. The number flipped. The negative sign vanished. -609911890
Elias was a data-miner for the Chronos Initiative, a project dedicated to listening for echoes from the "Before." The theory was that the Big Bang hadn't just created matter; it had created a massive ripple of data that preceded time itself. He typed a command to trace the origin of the signal