It happened at exactly twelve seconds past midnight.
Lin Tao was reaching into his leather pouch to secure his land-mapper metal pen. Just then, the universe stuttered.
Not a tremor of the earth. Not a sound in the air.
Reality itself froze.
The drip of water drops water falling from the black glass ceiling halted mid-descent, hanging suspended in the air like a tiny bead of polished glass. The flickering amber light of the Precursor console ceased to dance. It was locked into a static, motionless glow. The dust motes floating in the air froze in place. It formed rigid star-patterns in the empty space between their faces.
Lin Tao tried to inhale, but his lungs couldn’t draw air. His physical body was trapped within a total, zero-speed time-slice.
Only his mind—anchored by the Null-Bus defect in his dantian—remained active, observing the frozen world through his emerald test eye:
Eight point five four seconds of total global latency.
