ECLIPSE PROTOCOL File is Already Open

  The Moon screamed first.

  Not in sound—but in signal.

  It happened in silence, 384,400 kilometers away, beneath the Mare Orientale. Eidolon-13, the deepest probe sent during Artemis III, struck something beneath the lunar rock. It wasn’t metal. It wasn’t fossil. It was older.

  The last image transmitted was a structure—spiral, cathedral-sized, embedded in obsidian. Then: static.

  Then: dreams.

  They didn’t come all at once. They came in waves.

  Across five continents, subjects reported identical dreamscapes. Serpent shapes. Moonlight bleeding through broken sky. Nine heads, speaking nine different truths.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Each one promised the same end.

  They called it ‘Hydraon’.

  We assumed it was an alien. A monster. A myth with teeth. We were wrong.

  It’s not alive. It’s not dead. It’s not even singular.

  Hydraon is a distributed protocol—biological, symbolic, recursive. It doesn’t invade. It resonates. Through symbols. Through genetics. Through ‘memory’.

  It doesn’t want to destroy Earth. It wants to recompile it.

  And me? I’m not a soldier. I’m a mythologist. My name is Dr. Renée Takahashi. I was hired to classify ancient dream patterns and decode pre-verbal glyph logic.

  Then my DNA lit up.

  Dreams I never had started remembering me.

  And last night, in my sleep, something opened its eye inside the ocean—and ‘stopped moving’ the moment it saw mine.

  It didn’t attack. It recognized.

  This isn’t a war. It’s a ‘decryption’.

  And the file is already open.