Chapter 1 — Lights, Camera, Action

The humidity hit like a wall.

Dr. Ethan Calloway stepped off the supply helicopter and went immediately blind. His glasses fogged in the time it took to plant both feet in the mud. He yanked them off, squinted into the green murk of the jungle canopy, and accepted his fate.

Sam sat in the production control room in New York — auburn hair twisted up, blue eyes reflecting six dead monitors — nursing the first of what would be many coffees. The team had landed twenty minutes ago. She knew because she was watching them.

Not through the show’s feeds — those were dead. Snow White was still on the helicopter ramp, unpowered, and until it was unloaded, deployed, and locked onto the orbital window, she had no comms, no video, no telemetry. Everything ran through that relay. But she’d pulled up the commercial satellite pass on her second monitor ten minutes ago, and there they were: a cluster of pale shapes on a muddy clearing at the edge of a green void, moving with the tiny purposeful energy of ants on a beach. She couldn’t tell who was who. She couldn’t hear them. She could just see them — little figures hauling crates off a helicopter in a jungle on the other side of the world, and she couldn’t do a single thing except watch.

“They’re fine,” Ben said from beside her, not looking up from his clipboard. He’d caught her leaning toward the satellite image again — chin on her hand, eyes locked on the little shapes. “The helicopter confirmed touchdown. They’re unloading.”

“I can see them unloading.” She watched a figure carry something heavy toward the tree line. It might have been Jake. It might have been anyone. “I just can’t talk to them.”

“Snow White has to get into position before we get anything.”

“I know how our own system works, Ben.”

“So we wait.”

“So we wait.”

She hated waiting. She hated it more than bad footage, more than network interference, more than Marcus Levinson’s voicemails. She could see her team right there on the screen — alive, moving, working — and all she could do was stare at them from orbit like a god with no voice. Close enough to watch. Too far to warn. And this was the easy part — the clearing was open sky, the satellite could see them. Once they moved under that canopy, she’d lose even this. No overhead view, no backup angle, nothing except whatever Snow White could push through the relay. If that link went down in the jungle, she wouldn’t even know they were still breathing.

Then the comms light on her console flickered green.

A burst of static, and Ethan’s voice came through — slightly compressed, slightly delayed, but unmistakably him: “Sam, you there? Snow White’s relay just locked. You should have comms.”

Something in her chest unclenched.

“I’m here,” she said. “How long until I have eyes?”

The headsets were new this season — quantum-entangled transceivers that formed a local mesh network between every member of the team. No radio frequency. No wireless signal an EMP could fry. The scout team that had surveyed this jungle three months ago had lost every piece of wireless equipment they carried — phones, radios, GPS units — all bricked within four seconds of approaching the temple site. Whatever was out here had put out an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to kill anything with a conventional antenna. When the scouts’ report landed on Ethan’s desk, he’d rebuilt the entire comms stack from scratch. The new system worked in two layers: the headsets talked to each other directly through paired quantum states — team to team, always on, impossible to jam or intercept. That mesh was self-contained. It didn’t need Snow White, didn’t need a satellite, didn’t need anything except the headsets themselves. You could drop the team in a dead zone with no infrastructure and they’d still hear each other breathe. The second layer was the uplink — Snow White’s relay bounced the mesh signal to the satellite, which sent it back to Sam in New York. If something knocked out Snow White’s connection to the satellite, Sam would go dark. But the team on the ground would never lose each other.

“Working on it. Snow White’s off the ramp but the relay needs a clear line to the satellite and the canopy’s blocking half the sky. I’m looking for a gap.”

She could picture it perfectly — Ethan crouched over a crate, glasses off, squinting at connections, muttering calculations under his breath. She’d seen the look a hundred times before. The surrender. The quiet decision that the problem in front of him was more interesting than the one he’d just lost. This was who he was at his core — the man who’d lose a fight with his own eyewear and immediately start looking for the next mystery to solve.

It was the kind of thing only she would notice. The kind of thing she had no business noticing from a production control room three thousand miles away.

“Glamorous start,” she said.

“You should see it from down here,” Ethan replied, holding his glasses up to the light like a scientist examining a contaminated slide. “I think the air is trying to digest me.”

“Quit whining, Calloway,” Jake Herrera’s voice cut in, flat and dry. “You’re not even carrying anything. Pretty boy.”

“Actually, the portable O-A-O hub weighs fourteen point six kilograms, which, when combined with the antenna array and the backup power unit, brings my total carry weight to twenty-three point eight kilos. That’s roughly the same weight as—”

“Ethan.” Sam’s voice. Gentle but firm. The verbal equivalent of a hand over his mouth knowing he had just walked right into Jake’s verbal trap.

“Right. Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Dr. Calloway — just giving you a hard time,” Jake said, realizing his jab had landed a little too close to home.

“If you two are done,” Tara Reynolds said, “someone want to tell me which crate has my antivenoms?” Beside her, Mr. Bubbles had gone rigid — head up, ears locked on a patch of undergrowth to the left, that particular stillness that meant he’d found something and was waiting for Tara to notice. She followed his gaze. “Yeah, I see it too, buddy.” Back to the channel: “Pretty sure Mr. B just spotted a snake and I’d rather not play guess-the-box while it decides whether we’re food.”

The boxes were unmarked on purpose. They’d learned that lesson the hard way in Season 3, shipping equipment through Central American customs. Anything with a label got opened, inspected, and occasionally lightened by the time it reached the team. Medical supplies, electronics, camera gear — if a customs agent could read what was inside, there was a fair chance some of it wouldn’t make the trip. So Ben had switched to blank crates with embedded RFID chips. Every item in every box cataloged down to the serial number, accessible through a handheld scanner. Tara knew the system — she’d used it for six seasons — but knowing the system and wanting to stand in ankle-deep mud tapping through a scanner while something hissed in the undergrowth were two different things.

Jake appeared beside the crate line, already sorting. Tara’s eyes went to the Sig on his thigh before anything else.

“Did you already open your weapons case?”

“No.”

She looked at the holster. Looked at him. “Then where did that come from?”

“It’s from a place called —” He set the crate down and kept moving, finishing his sentence over his shoulder. “— none ya.” Tara watched him go — the gun riding his leg like it had always been there, like he’d walked it through customs and two helicopter transfers and ankle-deep jungle mud without anyone noticing or anyone being able to stop him. And somehow it didn’t make her nervous. It never had. That was the thing about Jake — the weapon was there for everyone else, and everyone knew it. Seven seasons of watching him put himself between the team and whatever came next had turned the holster into something closer to a promise than a threat. Between Jake on the perimeter and Mr. B at the foot of her cot, Tara slept better on expeditions than she did at home. One watched the jungle. The other watched her. She’d never once woken up to a surprise she hadn’t been warned about.

This time, though, felt slightly different. She couldn’t have said why.

“Use your encoder,” Ben said from beside Sam, not looking up from his clipboard. “It’ll tell you everything down to the expiration dates.”

“Ben, I know how the encoder works. I’ve been using it for six seasons.” Tara shifted her weight in the mud — Mr. Bubbles was up to his chest in it beside her, unbothered, watching the snake. “But I’ve got a med kit in one hand and a bully stick in the other because someone won’t settle down, and there’s something screaming in the trees. Just tell me which box.”

He grinned. “Look for the one with green tape. All the first-priority boxes are marked with green tape.”

“Was that so hard?”

“I just want you to appreciate the system I built.”

“I’ll appreciate it when I’m not playing snake wrangler in a jungle.” She dug into the crate, checking vials against her list. “I’m flying without backup out here now that Akari quit. If I go down, you’re all doing your own field surgery.”

“You’re not going down,” Jake said, without looking over.

“That’s sweet, Jake. But I’m still packing like I might.” She sealed another vial. “Because, you know — my love for you guys and all.”

A moment later, Tara’s voice came back on the channel — quieter now, with a warmth that hadn’t been there before. “Okay, which one of you put a bag of sour gummy worms in my antivenom crate?”

Silence on the line. Then Ben, still not looking up from his clipboard: “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“There’s a note. It says ‘For when the jungle gets boring. —B.’” A pause. “And there’s a bag of bully sticks in here with a note that says ‘For the real MVP. —B.’”

Mr. Bubbles’ ears swiveled at the crinkle — one rotation toward the sound, quick and involuntary — and his nostrils flared, pulling the scent through a wall of jungle rot and wet earth like it wasn’t even there. But his eyes never left the undergrowth. He knew that bag. He also knew the snake hadn’t moved. Above all he knew that bully stick would be there waiting for him.

“Must be a different B.”

Tara laughed. “You packed these three weeks ago, didn’t you?”

“I packed forty-seven crates. I don’t remember the contents of every single one. This is why we have the encoders, Tara.” The word landed with the kind of sarcastic emphasis only Ben could deliver while maintaining a completely straight face. But Sam caught the small grin that crossed his face before he buried it in his checklist. That was Ben. He’d spend eighteen hours routing supply shipments through three countries, and somewhere in the middle of it, he’d remember that Tara went through a bag of sour gummy worms every time she read a new volume of Berserk, and that Mr. Bubbles would carry a bully stick in his mouth for hours — guarding it like contraband, refusing to set it down until he’d decided the world was safe enough to enjoy it. Only then would he find a corner, circle twice, and drop like someone had cut his strings. Tara called it his “all-clear signal.” If Bubbles was lying down with a bully stick, the camp was secure. If he was still carrying it? Keep your eyes open. And God help the person or animal that tried to take it away from him. And if he’d chewed one down to a wet, reeking nub the day before — he’d carry that thing around too, gummy end dangling from his jaw like a soggy cigar, convinced it was still worth protecting.

Sam let the chatter wash over her. This was the frequency she lived on — the constant open line that connected her to the team no matter where they were. Three thousand miles and an ocean away from wherever the hell they’d actually sent them, and she could hear Ethan breathing, Jake grunting as he moved crates, Tara ripping packing tape. The headsets were always on. That was the rule. On set, off set, didn’t matter. If you were on the team, you were on the channel. The only exception was the bathroom — a policy established in Season 2 after an incident involving Jake, a questionable burrito, and forty million live viewers that nobody ever spoke of again.

She knew exactly where they were — coordinates locked in a sealed file on her personal drive, shared with no one except Jake’s emergency extraction contact. The host nation’s government had insisted on operational secrecy: no coordinates in any network-connected system, no location data in the production files, nothing a hacker or a leak could trace. But Sam wasn’t the kind of person who sent her team somewhere she couldn’t find them. She’d memorized the numbers the day the government permission had come through.

Then, all at once, her screens came alive.

Six feeds bloomed across the monitors — Chandler, Ross, Joey, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe — each one showing a different slice of the jungle as the drones lifted off and fanned out from the landing zone. The resolution was stunning. Emerald canopy in every direction, broken only by the muddy scar of the clearing and the glint of supply crates below.

“You’re up,” Ben said beside her, leaning forward. “All six transmitting.”

“I see that, Dr. Calloway,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screens in front of her.

“Chandler, give me a wider shot,” Sam said, and the drone pulled back, revealing the full scene: the makeshift landing zone, crates stacked in the mud, and Ethan standing in the middle of it all looking like a professor who’d wandered out of a lecture hall and into the wrong continent. She could see him now — actually see him, not just hear his voice — and something in her chest settled.

“Quantum nav is locked,” Ben confirmed, reading the telemetry on his tablet. “All drones calibrated and holding position.” He glanced at Sam. “You’re sure this quantum stuff can survive whatever our big bad scary ancient temple has to offer?”

“EMPs can’t travel to an alternate universe,” Ethan said through the channel. “Or at least I hope they can’t.”

“That’s not as reassuring as you think it is,” Ben said.

That had been one of the bigger technical hurdles. The host nation had insisted on full GPS denial across the operational zone — no satellite positioning signals in or out. Nothing that could be traced, triangulated, or leaked. Which meant the entire drone fleet had to navigate blind, at least by conventional standards.

Ethan had solved it. He’d retrofitted the drones with quantum inertial navigation — sensors so sensitive they could read the Earth’s own gravitational and magnetic field like a fingerprint. No satellites. No external signals. The drones mapped their position by feeling the planet beneath them, matching local anomalies against pre-loaded geological surveys. It was military-grade technology that most people didn’t know existed yet, repurposed for a reality TV show.

On the ground, Jake finished stacking the last supply crate and turned toward the helicopter. The Dwarves were still in the cargo bay — seven squat machines, each one roughly the size and shape of an ottoman mated with a small tank, locked into individual crash frames along the deck. Low-slung, flat-topped, riding on rubber treads, with equipment bristling from both flanks — sensor arrays, tool mounts, charging cradles, and rows of LED work lights lining both sides like runway markers.

He reached into the cargo bay and flipped the master release. The crash frames retracted, and the ramp servos whined as the deck angled down.

“Release team dwarf,” Jake said.

It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t delivered like one. Jake said it the way he said everything — flat, operational, like he was reading from a field manual. But Sam caught Ben pressing his lips together beside her, and she heard Tara snort on the channel.

All seven machines spun up at once — a rising whine of treads and servos — and rolled down the ramp in a staggered line, treads biting into the mud as they hit the ground and scattered across the clearing in every direction. Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey — seven mobile docking stations built to survive anything the team could drag them through. Each one carried a charging cradle, a micro-fusion battery pack that could run for weeks without swapping, and a compact winch system with fifty meters of synthetic cable rated to haul half a ton. They were pack mules, tow trucks, and power stations all in one. Every supply crate was built to lock directly onto a Dwarf’s cargo rail — standardized mounts, quick-release latches — and each unit could also hitch to a lightweight cart for heavier loads, pulling two or three crates at a time through terrain that would break a human’s back. When the team moved, the Dwarves moved with them, part pack mule, part mechanical burro. When a drone’s power dipped, it landed on the nearest Dwarf, topped off, and launched again. And when treads weren’t enough — a rock ledge, a fallen tree, a step too tall to climb — stubby rotor arms folded out from the chassis and they could boost themselves straight up. Six feet, maybe five feet forward. That was it. Enough to clear a ledge and drop back down on the other side. Not flight. More like a very aggressive hop. Ugly, loud, and indispensable.

But first they had to find their positions, and the swarm didn’t do that gracefully. They churned through the mud like angry roombas, bumping off roots, redirecting around rocks, treads spitting jungle debris. Grumpy plowed straight through a fern. Sleepy hit a rock shelf about knee-high, paused, then its rotor arms snapped out and it boosted straight up, cleared the ledge, and dropped back to treads with a heavy thud. Dopey clipped a fallen branch, spun a full three-sixty, and carried on like nothing happened.

“Dopey,” Ben said, shaking his head at his screen.

Then Bashful broke from its path, circled back, and nudged Dopey from behind — treads pushing against treads until Dopey popped free of the branch and found its heading again. Bashful resumed course without missing a beat. That was the swarm logic. They watched out for each other. If one got stuck, the nearest unit diverted, unstuck it, and moved on. No command needed.

Within a minute, the chaos sorted itself out. The Dwarves found their lanes and spread into the jungle in a loose perimeter, sensors pinging, treads grinding steadily over the undergrowth.

“Swarm’s deployed,” Jake confirmed. “All seven tracking.”

“I see them,” Ben said, studying the device status board. All seven Dwarf icons had gone from grayed out to full color.

Behind the Dwarves, something bigger rolled out of the tree line where Ethan had parked it during setup. Snow White. If the Dwarves were riding-mower-sized, Snow White was closer to a compact back hoe — a heavy tracked platform with twice the footprint and three times the weight. It didn’t carry drones. It carried O-A-O’s field resources: a rack of swappable hard drives for long-term data storage, a tool bay stocked with sample containers, sensor probes, and collection instruments, and a retractable arm that could extend, grip, and retrieve objects O-A-O couldn’t reach through Gunther alone. It was O-A-O’s hands. When the AI needed to log a soil sample, tag a specimen, or deploy a ground sensor, Snow White rolled to position and did the work. Gunther was O-A-O’s eyes. Snow White was everything else.

It moved slower than the Dwarves — deliberate, steady, like it knew it didn’t need to rush. It found a spot near the center of the clearing where the canopy broke just enough to give it a sliver of open sky. Treads locked. Then four stabilization spikes drove into the soft earth — pneumatic punches, one at each corner of the chassis — anchoring it to the ground and grounding the satellite relay against interference. The uplink dish deployed from the top of the hull, rotated twice, and locked onto the orbital window. Systems hummed to life.

“Snow White’s in position,” Ethan said. “O-A-O, you have access?”

“Confirmed, Dr. Calloway. All subsystems online. Thank you for asking.”

“Gunther’s running a little hot on his left stabilizer,” Ben added looking up from his clipboard and accessing the drone health status. “Nothing critical. Joey’s getting gorgeous canopy shots.”

Sam was already working. None of this was live — they were still two days from the premiere — but everything the drones captured was being logged and tagged as B-roll. The Dwarves fanning out through the jungle. Sleepy boosting over that rock shelf. Dopey spinning in circles. Snow White rolling into position like a tank that had somewhere important to be. This was gold. The kind of footage that editors killed for — the team at their rawest, before the cameras were officially rolling, before anyone remembered to perform. She was flagging shots as fast as the feeds came in, building a library that would make the premiere feel like the audience had been there from the first muddy boot on the ground.

On screen, Jake Herrera had taken charge of the unloading. He directed the local support crew with sharp gestures, his lean frame moving crates that would have taken two normal people. His machete hung from his belt like it had been born there.

“Jake looks happy,” Ben observed.

“Jake looks like Jake,” Sam corrected. “Which means everyone else gets to stop worrying.”

Ben glanced at her. “Even you?”

Sam’s eyes stayed on the feed, but the corner of her mouth moved — just barely, just enough for Ben to catch. He didn’t push it.

She pulled up the master production schedule on her secondary monitor — a color-coded spreadsheet that would have given most people a migraine. Forty-eight hours of pre-production tasks still to complete. Sponsor deliverables. Satellite windows. Backup communication protocols in case the primary uplink went down. The host nation had given them a narrow operational window — three months, not a day more — and every hour mattered.

“Network called again,” Ben said, not looking up from his clipboard. “Levinson wants to know why the teaser metrics haven’t been shared with the ad sales team.”

“Because the ad sales team leaks like a colander and I’m not giving Hunter’s audience a head start on our premiere content.”

“He also wants a meeting about the sponsor integration schedule.”

“He can have a meeting when we have footage worth integrating sponsors into.”

And then there was the Hunter situation. Levinson had made that one non-negotiable — the network wanted David Hunter’s 300-million-viewer audience tethered to Season 7’s infrastructure, and the Newman rental program was the leash. “Give him a drone, give him a feed, give him a reason to stay invested,” Levinson had said. “I don’t care if you like him. I care that his audience watches our premiere instead of his.” Sam had negotiated the terms — full editorial control over Newman’s footage, kill switch on the rental if Hunter violated operational protocols, no headset access, no ability to speak on the team’s channel — but the core decision hadn’t been hers. Hunter was in because the network needed his numbers, and Sam had spent three meetings making sure his access was a cage she controlled rather than a door he could walk through.

---

Ethan had never seen green like this.

Not the polite green of a university campus or the curated green of a botanical garden. This was hostile green — green that climbed and crawled and swallowed everything that stood still for too long. Vines as thick as his forearm wrapped the trunks so tightly the bark had grown around them, tree consuming vine consuming tree until you couldn’t tell which was holding the other up. The canopy overhead was so dense it turned midday into permanent dusk, light filtering down in broken shafts that hit the forest floor like spotlights on an empty stage. The air was so thick with moisture he could practically chew it — hot, wet, heavy, the kind of air that sat in your lungs and refused to leave. Every breath felt like inhaling through a warm towel. His shirt had soaked through in the first five minutes and now clung to him like a second skin. And the sound — the jungle wasn’t quiet. It was deafening in a way that didn’t register as noise because it came from everywhere at once: the whine of insects, the drip of condensation, the crack of something moving in the undergrowth, layers of birdsong so dense they collapsed into a single thrumming wall of life. The ground under his boots wasn’t soil — it was a soft, rotting carpet of dead leaves and fallen branches, ankle-deep in places, releasing clouds of gnats with every step. Somewhere above, something screamed.

The clearing sat maybe two hundred meters inland from the river beach where the helicopter had put down — far enough from the water to stay above the flood line, close enough that the supply chain from the landing zone was a manageable haul. Between the beach and the camp, the jungle had been hacked back just enough to drag crates through, leaving a muddy corridor that was already trying to close itself behind them.

“That’s a howler monkey,” Tara Reynolds said from behind him, not looking up from the medical supply crate she was inventorying. She was tall enough to reach the back of the crate without leaning in, her dark skin already sheened with humidity, hair pulled back tight the way it always was in the field — no fuss, no wasted motion. At her feet, Mr. Bubbles lay with his massive head on his paws, a bully stick clamped sideways in his jaw like a cigar, ears tracking every sound in the canopy with the calm authority of a dog who’d been doing this since Season 1. “Harmless. Loud, but harmless.” She nudged Mr. Bubbles with her boot. “Mrrggg-roowo,” he grumbled — almost like he was trying to talk — but he didn’t lift his head. “See? If it were a problem, he’d be up. Six seasons — he’s never been wrong.”

She glanced up past his shoulder, tracking the sound — and then her eyes stopped. Not on the monkey. On something else, higher, draped across a branch directly over Ethan’s head.

“Although,” she said, her voice shifting into the careful, even register she used when she didn’t want to alarm a patient, “if I were you, I’d be more worried about that.”

Ethan looked up. A reticulated python — easily three meters, maybe more — lay coiled across the branch above him like a length of anchor chain someone had draped there and forgotten. Its head rested on its own body, eyes half-lidded, watching him with the indifferent patience of something that had never once been in a hurry.

He took three slow steps backward.

“Was that there the whole time?”

“Yep.”

“Were you going to mention it?”

“I just did.” Tara sealed the crate and slapped a green tag on it. “Welcome to the jungle, Ethan.”

“We got fun and games,” he mumbled under his breath, still looking up at the snake.

Behind her, Mr. Bubbles had finally lifted his head. He stared at the python with the weary resignation of a dog who’d seen worse and didn’t feel like getting up about it. Another “mrrggg-urorrow” — not a bark, not a growl, just an editorial comment — and he set his head back down on the bully stick, having decided the threat wasn’t worth his treat.

Tara gave Ethan a look that said she absolutely did not believe he’d known about the howler monkey either, then went back to cracking open green-taped crates. She’d already claimed a flat rock near the tree line as her staging area and was pulling supplies out one by one — sorting, cataloging, arranging everything by triage priority with the kind of precision that made Ethan feel inadequate about his own equipment cases. A field medic’s version of alphabetical order.

“You bring enough bandages for a season?” he asked, still glancing at the branch.

“Bandages, suture kits, antivenoms for seventeen species of snake, broad-spectrum antibiotics, antimalarials, enough saline to fill a swimming pool, and the entire Berserk collection because I’m not spending three months in a jungle without Guts.” She sealed another crate and slapped a tag on it. “We’re in an uncharted jungle for months, Ethan. I’m not losing anyone to something stupid.”

Ethan didn’t say anything. He was thinking about Akari — the medic who’d come back from the scout mission different and then hadn’t come back at all. Tara hadn’t mentioned her by name, but the subtext was loud: she was doing two jobs now, and the person who should have been beside her had quit without explanation three weeks before departure. He’d noticed the change in Akari too — the thousand-yard stare, the sudden disinterest in the show she’d been desperate to join. Something had happened out there. Nobody talked about it. Tara was talking around it right now.

“Noted.” He adjusted his glasses — fogged again — and turned to the equipment case he’d been nursing like a firstborn child since they left New York. Inside, nested in custom foam, sat the portable hub for O-A-O’s field system: a sleek black box roughly the size of a briefcase, connected to a folding antenna array and a compact power unit.

He popped the latches and powered it on. The hub’s status LEDs cycled through their boot sequence — amber, amber, green — and O-A-O came alive. Not through Gunther, which still sat dormant on its charging dock, rotors folded. Through the hub’s own speaker — a small, warm voice rising from the black box on the ground like a genie from a very expensive lamp.

“Good morning, Dr. Calloway.”

A moment later, Gunther’s rotors spun up and the drone lifted from the dock, rising into the canopy on O-A-O’s command. But the voice stayed where it was — the hub, not the drone. O-A-O didn’t need Gunther to talk. It talked through whatever was closest. Right now, that was the box at Ethan’s feet. Once Snow White was in position, the voice would route through Snow White’s speakers instead. If Ethan walked fifty meters into the jungle, it would come through his headset. If Jake was alone on the perimeter, it spoke through whichever drone was nearest. The AI managed its own presence the way a good host managed a party — always nearby, never shouting across the room.

“I’ve been monitoring environmental data since the drones came online. Would you like a preliminary report?”

O-A-O’s voice was Ethan’s design choice — warm, precise, pitched in the tenor range with a faint musical quality that most people couldn’t identify but responded to instinctively. Ethan had tuned it himself, calibrating the vocal synthesis to sit at 440 hertz — concert pitch, the frequency orchestras tune to, the note the human ear found most naturally pleasing. The result was a voice that sounded like an NPR host who’d trained as a classical musician: clear, unhurried, genuinely interested in whatever it was saying. People who met O-A-O for the first time always said the same thing — it sounds like it’s actually listening. That wasn’t an accident. Ethan had spent four months on that voice, testing it against focus groups until he found the register that made people talk to the AI instead of at it.

“Give me the highlights.”

“Ambient temperature: thirty-four degrees Celsius — or ninety-three Fahrenheit, for those of the North American persuasion, which is all of you. Relative humidity: ninety-two percent. Electromagnetic background: nominal, with one exception.” A pause. “I’m detecting intermittent low-frequency oscillations at approximately 7.83 hertz. Consistent with the Schumann resonance, but the amplitude is… unusual.”

Ethan frowned. “How unusual?”

“Three to four times the expected value for this latitude. It could be geological — there are limestone formations in the region that might amplify natural resonances. Or it could be equipment calibration. I only came online twelve minutes ago.”

“Flag it and keep monitoring. We’ll sort it out once we’re set up.”

“Flagged.” Gunther drifted closer, its sensors panning the jungle like a dog sniffing new territory. “Dr. Calloway, may I say something?”

“You always do.”

“This place is extraordinary. My sensor array is detecting over four hundred distinct biological signatures within a two-hundred-meter radius. I have never processed an environment with this density of living data.” A beat. “I should also note that the satellite uplink is fully operational. I have real-time access to the orbital imaging array — multispectral, synthetic aperture radar, and thermal. Between the drones, the ground sensors, and the satellite, I can see this jungle at every scale from leaf to continent.”

O-A-O continued — same hub speaker, same open channel, every headset on the network picking it up.

“I should also note a secondary signal at 1.6 gigahertz — persistent, low-power, omnidirectional.”

Ethan’s hand stopped on his glasses. “How strong?”

“Weak. But consistent. And Dr. Calloway, if I did not know better — and I want to be clear that I may not, in fact, know better — I would describe the interaction between the Schumann anomaly and the 1.6 gigahertz signal as structured. Almost conversational.”

The open channel was quiet. Everyone had heard that.

“Conversational,” Ethan said carefully. “It sounds like you’re telling me two things in this jungle are talking to each other.”

“No, Dr. Calloway. More precisely if one takes the data at face value — I am detecting approximately 100 million concurrent conversations directed at a single source.”

Silence on the channel. In New York, Sam set down her coffee. On the perimeter, Jake’s hands stopped moving on a crate. Nobody said anything — not because they didn’t want to, but because nobody had a response to a number like that.

Despite himself, Ethan smiled. There was something in O-A-O’s voice — a quality that went beyond algorithmic response. After the Devil’s Tower debacle, after the board meeting where half the team had looked at O-A-O like it was a parlor trick, the AI had become quieter. More measured. As if it had learned something from the rejection.

“You’re going to love it here,” Ethan said.

“I already do,” O-A-O replied.

Ethan watched Gunther drift among the trees, its sensor array sweeping in slow arcs. The drone moved differently from the others — less like a camera platform, more like a creature exploring its environment. The Friends drones followed programmed flight patterns. Gunther improvised.

That had been intentional. When Ethan designed O-A-O’s interface with the drone network, he’d given it primary control over Gunther’s movement algorithms. Gunther was the default — the drone O-A-O steered when it wanted to think, the one whose flight patterns reflected something uncomfortably close to curiosity. But O-A-O wasn’t limited to it. The AI could inhabit any drone in the fleet — jump from Gunther to Chandler to Joey in the time it took to process a sensor ping, speak through whichever hull was closest to wherever it was needed. It was less like switching cameras and more like beaming. If Gunther was across the clearing and O-A-O needed eyes on the northern perimeter, it didn’t wait for Gunther to fly over. It was already there, looking through Monica, talking through Monica’s speakers, before anyone realized the voice had moved. The other drones were tools. Gunther was home.

He’d caught flak for that decision — giving an AI autonomous control over a physical drone. The network’s legal team had spent three days arguing about liability if an autonomous drone injured someone on set. Sam had overruled them, which she could do exactly once before the lawyers would escalate. The irony wasn’t lost on Ethan. The same network that had fought Gunther’s autonomy for three straight meetings had signed off on the Newman and Kramer rental program without a second thought — letting random Stream Runners with no training fly camera drones directly through the field team’s operational space. Apparently an AI that had passed every safety certification Ethan could design was a liability concern, but a conspiracy theorist with a credit card was fine.

“Dr. Calloway,” O-A-O said. “Your heart rate has elevated. Are you experiencing anxiety?”

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“About the scout reports.” He paused. “A tribe with members who’ve been alive since before the Civil War. A stone structure that predates every known civilization in the hemisphere. Language acquisition that breaks every model in cognitive science.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Every other season, the claims were big but the evidence was small. This time the claims are so big I can’t figure out what evidence would even look like.”

“The Devil’s Tower data was inconclusive, not negative. There is a meaningful distinction.”

“Try explaining that to half a billion people who tuned out.”

The thought snagged on something, the way it always did. Devil’s Tower. The readings that didn’t add up. The seismic pattern that looked almost artificial and then just… stopped. He’d left Wyoming telling himself it was a dead end, that the instruments had been wrong, that the anomaly was geological. But the data was still on his laptop. He still opened it sometimes at 2 AM, scrolling through waveforms he’d memorized, looking for the thing he’d missed. Someday — not this season, not while the show needed him here — but someday he was going back to that rock. There was something inside it that he hadn’t found yet, and the not-knowing had settled into a low hum behind his thoughts that never quite went away.

But that was for later. Right now he had four hundred biological signatures and a Schumann anomaly and a three-month window to find something worth finding.

O-A-O was quiet for a moment. “I cannot speak to the expectations of your audience. But I can tell you that my preliminary analysis of this environment suggests a statistical anomaly density that exceeds any location we’ve previously investigated. By a significant margin.”

“You’ve been online for twenty minutes.” The number caught in his head — twenty minutes. That was the same number Sam had been counting when they’d first stepped off the helicopter. Twenty minutes of silence on her end while she’d stared at dead monitors in New York, waiting for Snow White to give her eyes and ears. The whole team had been on the ground for less than half an hour and O-A-O was already building theories.

“Twenty-three. And in that time, I have identified more data points of interest than the entire Devil’s Tower expedition produced.” A brief pause. “I should note, however, that I was not present at Devil’s Tower. My analysis of that data is retrospective — assembled from field recordings, sensor logs, and Dr. Richards’s reports after the fact. It is entirely possible that the original dataset is incomplete. I did not collect it. I can only evaluate what was preserved.”

Ethan looked up. Gunther hovered thirty meters overhead in a slow orbit, high enough that its rotors blended into the canopy noise. At that altitude it was a shape and a blinking light, not a presence — O-A-O watching the jungle the way a hawk watched a field.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. But the knot in his stomach had loosened, just slightly.

---

Sam tracked the viewer pre-registration numbers on a secondary screen while monitoring the team’s setup through the primary feeds. They weren’t broadcasting live yet — Season 7’s premiere was forty-eight hours out — but the anticipation metrics were promising. Better than promising.

“Pre-reg just crossed two hundred million,” Ben announced, reading from his tablet. “That’s double what Season 6 had at the same point.”

“People love a mystery,” Sam said. “And we’ve been teasing the hell out of this one.”

The marketing campaign for Season 7 had been Sam’s masterstroke. No location reveal. No mission briefing. Just a single image: a tribal mask, ancient and unsettling, against a black background. The tagline: What if they’ve been watching us?

The internet had lost its mind.

Conspiracy boards had been running wild for weeks, and David Hunter — broadcasting from whatever gilded bunker he’d rented this month — had devoted three full episodes of his own show to speculation about the HSH team’s destination. Hunter’s angle had never been aliens or paranormal. That was Ethan’s game. Hunter’s thesis was darker and, in some ways, harder to dismiss: the places HSH kept investigating weren’t random. They were sites. Sites with histories that predated the shows, the agencies, the governments that now denied any interest in them. Hunter’s Season 5 series — “Operation Paperclip Never Ended” — had traced a line from wartime research programs through Cold War black sites to modern defense contractors, arguing that the same institutional machinery that had recruited scientists after 1945 was still running, still acquiring, still classifying anything it couldn’t control. Devil’s Tower, in Hunter’s telling, wasn’t a failed alien hunt. It was a naive science team that had stumbled into the orbit of something governments had been quietly managing since the end of the Second World War. His viewers didn’t tune in for UFOs. They tuned in because Hunter made them believe the real conspiracy was older, deeper, and more human than anyone wanted to admit.

“Hunter’s latest video hit forty million views,” Ben said, scrolling. “He’s running the government cover-up angle again. Claiming we’re being sent somewhere a defense contractor doesn’t want anyone looking.”

“Good. Let him speculate. Every theory is free marketing.”

“You don’t think he’s getting too close to the truth?”

Sam considered this. The truth was that they were investigating a tribe with impossible claims about longevity and strange energy readings. The truth was that their scouts had come back with footage that made her skin crawl. The truth was that she’d staked everything — the show, her career, her relationship with the network — on this one season. And the truth was that Hunter’s conspiracy-industrial complex, for all its noise, occasionally asked the right question about the wrong door.

“Nobody’s close to the truth,” she said. “Because we don’t know what the truth is yet.”

Ben set down his tablet and leaned against the console beside her. He’d been watching her for the last hour the way he always did — quietly, from the periphery, tracking her the same way Jake tracked a perimeter. Twelve years of friendship had given him a map of Sam Carter’s tells, and right now every one of them was lit up.

“You eat today?” he asked.

Sam didn’t look away from the feeds. “I had coffee.”

“That’s not food, Sam.”

“It’s a bean. Beans are food.”

“Go eat something real. I’m not asking.” His voice was gentle but immovable — the tone of a man who’d learned that the only way to manage Sam Carter was to out-stubborn her on the small things so she had the energy for the big ones.

“After I finish the—”

“Now. I’ll watch the feeds.” He gestured at the monitors. “Nothing’s going to happen in the next fifteen minutes that I can’t handle.”

She almost argued. But something in his expression — patient, steady, the look of someone who would absolutely stand there until she moved — made her stop. She pushed back from the console.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Take twenty. Eat something with a vegetable in it.”

“Does Chinese count?” she said without looking back.

She was halfway to the door when she turned back to see Ben’s response to her quip. Ben was captivated. On screen, Ethan was crouched over his equipment hub, and Gunther circled above him in a slow orbit. It was sunset in the jungle and the drones were doing their job — the shots were amazing.

“Think this is the one?” she asked quietly. Not the producer asking the assistant. Something more personal than that.

Ben didn’t answer right away. He watched the feeds — the disappearing sun, Ethan’s face, the jungle, the drones tracing their patterns through the canopy. Then he looked at Sam, and his expression softened into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“I think it has to be,” he said.

Sam nodded once and headed for the break room.

---

The sun had dropped below the canopy line, and the jungle had gone from green twilight to something closer to a cathedral at dusk — dark walls, dark ceiling, the last copper light bleeding through gaps in the leaves like stained glass running out of time. The clearing would have been nearly black if not for the drones. Each one carried a bank of LED panels along its underside, and as the light faded they’d switched on automatically — warm, diffused floods that followed their assigned team member like personal spotlights. Wherever you walked, your drone walked with you, hovering just high enough to light the ground at your feet without blinding you. The effect was strange and a little theatrical: pools of warm light drifting through the jungle, each one centered on a person, the darkness pressing in around the edges.

Dr. Amelia Richards emerged from the supply tent looking like she’d lost a fight with a cosmetics counter, which in a sense she had. She was tall — tall enough that the tent flap caught her at shoulder height — and even in field gear she carried herself like the whole jungle was a runway that happened to have mud on it. Dark hair that had clearly been something spectacular an hour ago was now staging a humid rebellion against every product she’d applied to it. The jungle humidity had undone forty minutes of careful preparation in approximately ninety seconds.

“This is barbaric,” she announced to no one in particular. Rachel, her assigned drone, swiveled overhead to capture the declaration, its LEDs casting her in a warm downlight that made the ruined makeup look even worse. Amelia glared up at it. “Don’t you dare broadcast that.”

“We’re not live yet, Dr. Richards,” O-A-O’s voice said through Rachel’s speakers.

“That doesn’t mean I want it recorded.”

“Everything is always recorded, Dr. Richards. Though I am curious — you have been on camera for six seasons. What about this particular moment concerns you?”

“Nope.”

Amelia stalked toward the equipment staging area, her boots already caked with mud. On paper, she was the team’s archaeologist — and the credentials were real enough: a PhD in archaeometrics from Cambridge, which put her at the intersection of materials science, structural engineering, and ancient construction techniques. Her doctoral thesis on anomalous construction in pre-Columbian megaliths was still cited more than any paper in her field, and her publications would fill a shelf. But archaeometrics wasn’t really archaeology — it was closer to Ethan’s world than anyone on the show acknowledged. Sam had seen the overlap early and made a producer’s choice: Amelia’s archaeometry credentials became an “archaeology background” in the press materials, her lab work became “fieldwork,” and the woman who’d spent most of her career analyzing stone samples under electron microscopes was repackaged as an accomplished field archaeologist. It explained a lot — the discomfort with mud, the impractical boots, the forty minutes of makeup in a jungle. Amelia wasn’t playing a character. She was performing a version of herself that Sam had written for her, and she’d been doing it well enough for six seasons that most people — including most of the audience — had stopped asking questions.

She just also happened to believe that aliens were, to use her precise academic phrasing, “complete and utter nonsense.”

This made her perfect television.

The tension between Amelia’s skepticism and Ethan’s belief had fueled five seasons of compelling drama. Viewers picked sides. Forums erupted in debates. Amelia’s withering takedowns of Ethan’s wilder theories had become as much a part of the show’s DNA as the Friends-named drones.

She found Ethan crouched over his equipment hub, talking to O-A-O like it was a colleague rather than a collection of circuits.

“Please tell me that thing isn’t going to narrate my every move for the next four months,” she said.

Ethan looked up. “O-A-O is going to be essential out here. The data density alone—”

“I’ve survived six seasons without an AI holding my hand, Ethan. I think I can manage a seventh.” She paused, and something sharper moved behind her eyes — not the usual performative disdain, but something closer to genuine caution. “What I’m less sure about is whether it can manage a seventh without doing something none of us can undo. You know what’s under that hood better than anyone. But I know what some of those components came from, and I know what they’re theoretically capable of at scale. I signed off on those patents because the applications were narrow. This — ” she gestured at Gunther, circling overhead, “— is not narrow.”

The comment landed differently than her usual jabs. Ethan studied her face for a moment, but she’d already moved on — crouching beside him to study the hub’s readouts, her expression shifting back to professional curiosity.

“You also survived six seasons without us finding anything conclusive,” Ethan said.

The jab landed, and they both knew it. Amelia’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t fire back. Instead, she studied the display.

“What are those oscillations?” she asked, pointing at the screen.

“O-A-O flagged an unusual amplitude in the Schumann resonance. Probably geological.”

“Probably.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Or it’s an artifact from all this equipment bleeding electromagnetic noise into the jungle.” She frowned at the display, her finger tracing the waveform. “Although…” She didn’t finish the thought. Her eyes moved between the two frequency lines — the Schumann pulse and the 1.6 gigahertz signal — and something shifted in her expression. Not alarm. Something more like recognition she didn’t want to acknowledge. “Never mind. Probably geological.”

Ethan watched her walk away. A million things talking to each other. O-A-O’s words from earlier, and now Amelia — who didn’t believe in any of this — had looked at the same data and flinched. She’d seen it too. She just wasn’t ready to say what.

They shared a look — the kind that had evolved over seven years of working together. Not quite friendly. Not quite hostile. Something in between that the cameras loved and neither of them could fully explain.

“Look — out here, in the field, I accept it. The cameras, the drones, your AI cataloging each breath we take. That’s the job. I signed up for it.” She straightened, and when she spoke again her voice settled into that register — the one that sounded like it had been educated at Cambridge and raised in Connecticut, with something warmer underneath that she never quite smoothed out. “But my tent is mine. That’s the one space on this entire expedition where I’m not being watched, analyzed, or narrated. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

She walked off before Ethan could respond. The shall we hung in the air like a door closing.

---

Jake Herrera checked his weapons cache first — the case he’d loaded personally in New York, the one Ben had listed on the manifest as “Herrera / Field Tools / DO NOT OPEN” in red block letters after a customs agent in Panama City had once spent forty minutes photographing its contents. Jake unlatched it and folded the lid back. Inside, packed in custom foam: a Sig Sauer P320 with three magazines, a short-barreled shotgun broken into two pieces for transport, a fixed-blade Ka-Bar, two flare guns, a compact crossbow with a dozen broadheads, and a suppressor he wasn’t technically supposed to have in this country. Beneath the weapons, a second layer: night-vision monocular, tactical flashlight, paracord, zip ties, a roll of det cord, and two flashbang grenades that Ben had somehow gotten through three sets of customs inspections by listing them as “pyrotechnic signaling devices (entertainment use).”

Beneath the second layer, a separate compartment held two items Jake had never discussed with the network, the lawyers, or anyone except Ethan: a pair of compact directed-energy modules — the same form factor as the drones’ standard sensor pods, designed to swap in without tools. Ethan had built them after Devil’s Tower. “Insurance,” he’d called them. Jake hadn’t asked what they did. He just needed to know which two drones could carry them if the time came.

Jake didn’t rush. He laid each piece on a ground cloth, inspected it, assembled what needed assembling, and loaded what needed loading. The Sig went into a drop holster on his thigh. The Ka-Bar went on his belt opposite the machete. The shotgun he reassembled and stowed in a quick-access scabbard he’d rigged to his pack frame. Everything else went back into the case, locked, and positioned inside his tent within arm’s reach of where he’d sleep.

Sam watched the whole thing from the Nest. She didn’t comment. She didn’t need to. Jake armed was Jake comfortable, and Jake comfortable was the team safe.

He finished the security sweep of the perimeter at 1830 hours — on foot, alone, the way he’d done it on every expedition since Season 1. Monica trailed him at ten meters, her LED banks throwing a cone of warm light across the trail ahead of him like a headlamp he hadn’t asked for. Jake ignored it. He’d have preferred the dark — his night vision was better without the assist — but Sam wanted the footage, and the drone was quiet enough that it didn’t compromise his awareness. Much.

The drones had already mapped the area. O-A-O had filed a preliminary threat assessment before Jake had laced his boots. Monica had flown a systematic grid pattern overhead, and the sensor data was clean: no large predator signatures within three hundred meters, no human activity beyond the camp, no anomalous heat sources. Jake had read the report. He’d studied the infrared overlays. He’d noted O-A-O’s conclusion that the perimeter was secure to a 94.7 percent confidence interval.

Then he’d walked it anyway.

He’d covered a full kilometer around the camp, marked sight lines, identified three natural choke points where the jungle narrowed into corridors of dense undergrowth, and cataloged six species of animal that could potentially cause problems — four snakes, one large cat track, and whatever was making the deep thrumming sound he couldn’t identify. These were things the drones had also flagged, in some cases more accurately. It didn’t matter. Jake didn’t outsource the things that kept people alive. A drone could map a perimeter. It couldn’t smell the air, feel the ground shift under its weight, or register the specific quality of silence that meant something large had just moved out of sight. Sam knew this about him and didn’t push it. She also knew it made for excellent footage — the ex-Special Forces operative walking the jungle alone, machete on his hip, while seven drones and an AI confirmed everything he was already doing. The contrast played beautifully on camera, and Jake either didn’t know or didn’t care.

He found Sam on comms when he checked in.

“Perimeter’s secure,” he reported, his voice the same flat register he used for everything from ordering dinner to announcing mortal danger. “Terrain’s dense. Visibility drops to about three meters past the clearing’s edge. If anything comes at us from the jungle, we won’t see it until it’s close.”

“That’s comforting,” Sam said through his earpiece. “What about the approach to the tribe’s territory?”

“I scouted about a hundred meters down the northern trail. It’s narrow — single file. Heavy canopy. Hard to maintain drone coverage through the trees.” He paused. Jake didn’t pause. “I turned back at a hundred meters.”

“Why a hundred?” Sam asked.

“Felt like the right place to stop.” Another pause. “I’ve been in a lot of places, all over the world, Sam. But this is a first for me.”

“That’s not exactly a threat assessment,” she interrupted.

“You didn’t let me finish,” he said, regaining control of the conversation.

“I just think that—” A long pause.

“Jake… I don’t have time for—” she started.

“This place…” He paused. “I don’t think it wants us here.”

He left it there. The channel was quiet for a moment — the kind of quiet that happens when someone who never says things like that says something like that.

“Okay, Jake,” Sam said. Her voice had changed — softer, no edge, the producer gone and just the person left. “I hear you. Let’s keep our eyes open.”

The light was almost gone. It was past 1930 — the jungle had swallowed the last of the sunset twenty minutes ago, and now the only illumination came from the drones overhead and the LED strips on the Dwarves, the clearing carved into islands of warm light separated by walls of absolute dark.

He made his way over to where Tara had set up a rudimentary medical station under a tarp. She was testing local water through a portable analyzer — not because they needed it. They had enough bottled water in the supply manifest to last the full three months if they rationed carefully, and Ben had built redundant purification into the logistics plan. But Tara tested everything. It was reflex, partly — a field medic’s compulsion to catalog every variable in a new environment. And it was partly good television, which Sam understood and gently encouraged. A biologist crouched over a portable lab in the jungle, analyzing water nobody was going to drink, made for exactly the kind of B-roll that sold a show about scientific exploration.

“Water’s clean enough,” Tara said without looking up. “Higher mineral content than I expected. Lots of calcium and trace amounts of something the analyzer doesn’t recognize.”

“That a problem?”

“Probably not. We’re on an island in the middle of nowhere that nobody’s cataloged before. I’d be surprised if I didn’t find compounds outside the standard reference library.” She sealed the sample and labeled it. “I’ll run a full panel tonight. Mostly for the record.”

“How’s the jungle?”

“Green.”

“That’s your professional assessment?”

“It’s green and it wants to eat us. That enough detail?”

Tara laughed — a genuine sound that cut through the oppressive humidity. Jake appreciated that about her. She didn’t perform for the cameras, didn’t play a character. What you got from Tara Reynolds off-screen was exactly what you got on-screen: competent, kind, and entirely unimpressed by bullshit.

“The analyzer flagged something else,” she said, her tone shifting. She pulled up a readout on the small screen. “The plant samples I collected near the northern trail? Unusual alkaloid profiles. Some compounds I’ve never seen before.” She tilted her head. “But again — uncharted jungle, undocumented flora. Strange alkaloids are pretty much the baseline expectation in a place like this. I’d be more worried if everything looked normal.”

“Poisonous?”

“Maybe. Or medicinal. Hard to say without a full lab workup, which — ” she gestured at the jungle around them, “— is currently unavailable.”

“Send the data to O-A-O. It might be able to cross-reference against known databases,” he said — uncharacteristically.

Tara raised an eyebrow. “You’re warming up to the robot?”

“I’m warming up to anything that keeps us alive.”

She considered this, then nodded. “Fair enough.” She pulled up her comm link and began transmitting the data to Ethan’s hub. Within seconds, O-A-O’s voice chirped through her earpiece: “Received. Preliminary analysis will be ready in approximately forty minutes. Thank you, Tara. I appreciate the trust.”

Tara and Jake exchanged a look.

“It thanked me,” she said.

“I heard.”

“Is that… normal?”

Jake’s expression didn’t change. “Nothing about this is normal.”

Mr. Bubbles was there, of course — lying between Tara’s staging rock and the analyzer, bully stick still in his jaw. He still hadn’t laid down with it.