Detection Pulse A3S2 v.2
The room smelled of paper and filtered air.
Steenberg didn’t look up when the analyst entered. The door hadn’t made a sound, but the boy still moved like someone who didn’t want to be remembered.
A thin folder slid across the table.
“It’s small,” the analyst said. “But too clean.”
Steenberg closed the volume he had been reading—A Treatise on Monetary Equilibrium—and opened the file without comment.
There were only three pages.
A block timestamp that didn’t match any known testnet
A cluster of wallet addresses structured in a high-entropy but non-random pattern
A liquidity injection from no identifiable fund or institution, yet traced through three stablecoin pools and a pseudonymous ETH relay node
He flipped the last page and saw it:
a recursive draw schema embedded in a contract tree. No issuer. No owner. No signal flare.
It was not a prototype.
It was live.
He tapped twice on the edge of the folder.
“Location?” he asked.
“No fixed node. It’s seeding itself through secondary relays. Volume’s low. Spread’s wide.”
“Entry point?”
“Impossible to say.”
The analyst hesitated.
“We caught a transmission match from a NOSTR relay yesterday. Off a cryptojournalist profile. It used a term—‘lottery constitution.’”
That stopped Steenberg mid-turn.
He stood and walked to the wall, where a low-saturation map of digital financial anomalies was projected. Most points pulsed amber or green. One had turned grey. Then black.
He circled it once with his index finger. Eastern Europe. Time-aligned.
“Prepare a divergence protocol,” he said. “Nothing aggressive yet. Just start watching the watchers.”
“What do we call it?” the analyst asked.
“Nothing,” Steenberg said. “We don’t name it until we know if it wants to be seen.”
He picked up the Borges paperback from his desk—the one he'd taken from the intelligence archives a decade ago. A sticky note was tucked between the pages.
The quote was underlined in red:
"Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. Look: this is my hand. It has killed, it has been killed."
He folded the folder shut, placed it atop the book, and looked out the window.
Snow was falling in Basel.
The pulse had started.
