THE CARTOGRAPHERS OF SILENCE

In 2387, humanity discovered that the universe has an acoustic signature — a background hum older than light itself — and that certain rare humans are born "deaf" to it. These people, called Nullborn, were historically dismissed as medical curiosities until a physicist named Imre Kovac realized something terrifying: the hum isn't noise. It's a containment field. And the Nullborn are holes in it. Kaveh Oduya is a Nullborn smuggler working the derelict shipping lanes between Jupiter's moons when a dying woman presses a data-sliver into his palm and whispers a coordinate that shouldn't exist — a point in space the hum goes completely quiet. When he investigates, he finds a structure: a cathedral-sized lattice of something that isn't matter, humming a counter-frequency that rewrites his memories every time he looks away from it. Inside, he meets the Cartographers — a scattered order of Nullborn who have spent three centuries mapping the silent places. They tell him the hum was built by something that came before us to keep something else out. The silent zones are weakening. And every Nullborn born in the last decade has been born closer to the boundary, as if something on the other side is learning our shape. Kaveh has to decide whether to help the Cartographers reinforce the containment — sacrificing the Nullborn as living patches in the field — or crack it open and finally meet whatever has been pressing against the walls of reality, patient as geology, for longer than stars have burned.