Dr. Aris Thorne first saw the anomaly on a Tuesday. It was a blip in the quantum noise of the Large Hadron Collider’s secondary feed—a signal so faint and so perfectly structured that it could not be explained by any known particle or field. He named it URE-004: Unidentified Recurring Echo, the fourth of its kind. The first three had been dismissed as sensor ghosts. This one was different. It pulsed with the rhythm of a conscious thought.