"It shouldn't be here," Elias muttered. "It's an ancient Windows archive. No origin, no transfer log. It just... appeared after we passed the nebula."
But the file was a self-replicating logic bomb. The "Crowjob" wasn't a virus; it was a blueprint. The Icarus wasn't a salvage ship anymore—it was being disassembled. The drones were stripping the outer plating, reconfiguring the ship into a massive, hollowed-out sphere. A nest.
"Found a ghost in the machine?" Captain Vane asked, leaning over Elias’s shoulder.
Against every safety protocol in the manual, Elias mounted a virtual sandbox and double-clicked. The extraction bar crawled with agonizing slowness. When it finished, a single executable appeared: NEST.exe . He ran it.
The bridge lights flickered. The hum of the life support systems shifted pitch, oscillating into something that sounded eerily like a rhythmic caw. On the main viewscreen, the stars didn't change, but the data overlay did. Thousands of coordinates began streaming—not for planets or stations, but for "perches."