The massive entity doesn't attack.
It presses against the thick quartz viewport of the Nereus V, its colossal, crown-like array of bioluminescent sensory nodes pulsing in a slow, deliberate rhythm that shakes the submersible to its titanium bones. The water around us boils with displaced energy, but the creature isn't acting on predatory instinct. It’s acting on biological desperation.
Through the neural halo, I don't just feel its presence; I feel its agony.
The Earth’s original biological immune system is drowning. The sheer volume of human panic, financial data, and digital noise from the global network is overloading its ancient, biological architecture. It didn't surface to eat us. It surfaced because the submersible’s moss-draped hull is the only source of ordered, filtered data i
