"Are you... a human?"
Of all the scenarios he'd imagined during the ten-hour flight through interstellar darkness, this hadn't been among them. He'd prepared himself for hostility, for incomprehension, for the possibility of being ignored entirely by something so vast it might not register his existence at all.
But recognition? Direct communication? A question that implied not just intelligence, but specific knowledge of humanity?
The shock paralyzed him for several heartbeats. His enhanced mind raced through implications, trying to understand how a cosmic entity floating in the void beyond the solar system's edge could possibly know what humans were.
The system had called these beings administrators, but what did that mean in practical terms? Did they catalog species? Monitor civilizations? Or had this creature somehow observed Earth from impossible distances?
