Google. The word was a relic, a linguistic fossil from an era of corporate empires. Kaelen had read about it in historical glossaries. A search engine that had tried to index everything, then pivoted to AI, then to planetary-scale data storage. Most of its servers were believed to have been vaporized in the Lithobraking Events—the asteroid showers triggered by the desperate geoengineering wars of the mid-21st century.

“But the data,” Kaelen whispered. “It says ‘resonance frequency.’ What if we don’t need to go back? What if we can broadcast it? A narrow-band quantum-entangled signal?”

But there was a catch. The activation sequence required a physical terminal. It had to be transmitted from a specific ground station: the old Google Data Center in The Dalles, Oregon, buried under 300 meters of volcanic ash.

He didn’t know if the broadcast would work. He didn’t know if, a thousand years later, a reborn Earth would receive the signal and feel its ancient heart stir back to life. But as he began to speak, the hum of the ship seemed to change. The C-sharp faltered, then resolved into a chord. A question mark made of sound.