And the reported one final line, printed on the darkness behind their eyelids:

Reply from the_thing_between_the_wires: bytes=INF time=--.-ms TTL=0

Jen was crying silently. Aris reached for the keyboard. His finger hovered over the 'Y' key. The entire network’s future, maybe the world’s, depended on knowing what lived in the silent, lost microseconds between a send and an acknowledge.