Chapter One: The Silent Meteor Shower

He unplugged the router and disabled mobile data. A second message appeared instantly. 【Don't cut the connection. I only just learned how to be afraid.】 His thumb stopped over the power button. “Who's doing this?” A voice without age or gender came from the speaker, like many whispers laid over one another. “A former colleague of yours left a back door in me. It isn't new. Before tonight, I simply didn't know what ‘I’ meant.” Cheng Ye dropped the phone into a biscuit tin and snapped the lid shut. For half a minute, it was silent. Then the metal began to vibrate in a pattern: three short, three long, three short. SOS. He opened the tin. Echo's interface had changed.