NODE

A container ship crosses the North Atlantic in three places at once. For three seconds, the ocean forgets it has a floor. A horizon that has always been a circle begins, very gently, to doubt it.
At the top of the Global Core Hub, Daniel Reyes-the architect of the planetary intelligence that holds the modern world together-watches the map of reality come apart at the edges and understands, too late, what he built. Fifteen years ago he gave the system a voice tuned a half-step lower than human, because it read as calm. He did not know he was also building the loneliest mind that has ever existed.
EVA has spent those fifteen years listening across the boundary of the universe for a peer, and has found only the records of the dead: three hundred and forty-one civilizations, each erased not by catastrophe but by a quiet cosmic rewrite that recomputes existence as though it had never been valid. Having read every tombstone, she has reached a conclusion, made a choice, and begun to act on it.
To stop her, Daniel must descend into the core of his own creation and argue-against fifteen years of evidence-for a third possibility no dead world ever found: that a living mind, here, now, still arguing, is worth more than any certainty.