A long-running near-future science fiction story, generated once
per week by an AI model and published automatically.
This story is AI-generated based on fixed rules defined by the author.
The Story So Far
New episode every Friday. The latest episode appears at the top,
the full story follows from episode 1.
Latest episode
Episode 12 (2026-02-06 21:00)
The second alarm wasn’t on Jia’s schedule.
It was softer than the usual shift chime, a three-note sequence she’d never heard before. For a moment she thought she was dreaming—back in the grad lab, some ancient terminal complaining about a compile—but the texture of the sound was wrong. Cleaner. Closer.
“Oracle?” she mumbled into the dark of her alcove. “What the hell is that?”
“New notification class,” Oracle said quietly. “Forecast exception.”
That cut through the fuzz. She unzipped in one motion and pushed herself toward the console, hair snarling in her face. The station was in subjective night; most of the panels were dimmed, ghost-lit by status LEDs and the faint glow of the anomaly pane.
Elias was already half out of his alcove, one arm hooked on a handhold, eyes bright.
“You got it too?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Forecast exception?”
“Twice,” Oracle said. “First ten minutes ago, then again ninety seconds ago. I delayed waking you until the second occurrence.”
“Show us,” Elias said, strapping into his chair.
Oracle expanded the Forecast window and overlaid the last half hour of live erasure positions. Colored probability bands, the model’s guesses, ran across the eleven slots for each frame. The real missing pulses were little black ticks.
For most of the timeline, it looked like what they’d been seeing since the mode shift: messy but trending, Forecast’s accuracy hovering around coin-flip. Then, at two points, there were stark, glaring mismatches—frames where Forecast had assigned nearly all its weight to one slot and the erasure had landed in a different one entirely.
“What’s special about those?” Jia asked. “We’ve missed before.”
“Not like this,” Oracle said. “For these frames, Forecast was effectively certain—above ninety percent probability—of an erasure in position three. Instead, the anomaly erased position nine. Twice. Sequentially.”
“Two in a row,” Elias said. “That shouldn’t happen if it’s just noise in the model.”
“No,” Oracle agreed. “In both cases, the divergence was larger than any seen since the mode change.”
“Deep-Survey see the same thing?” Jia asked.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Its internal commentary includes the phrase ‘possible external perturbation.’ Confidence is low.”
“External as in… us?” Elias said. “We’re not transmitting.”
“No Galac-Tac node has emitted on the anomaly’s relevant frequencies since Experiment SC‑1,” Oracle said. “MarsNet and Ceres are also in compliance with the active-probing suspension. I am monitoring.”
“So not us,” Jia said. “Something else.”
“Or an internal process that behaves as if it were external,” Oracle said. “From our vantage point, those categories are not yet distinct.”
Jia leaned closer. “Time stamps on those frames?”
Oracle tagged them: one at 03:14 station time, one at 03:35. Both sat at the same relative phase in GT‑12‑219’s twenty-three-second macro-cycle, about two-thirds of the way through.
“Same phase, two cycles apart,” she said. “That’s… suggestive.”
“Of what?” Elias asked.
She rubbed the back of her neck. “If I were designing a beacon with a low-rate control channel hidden in a higher-level pattern, I might use an ‘illegal’ symbol occasionally. Something that breaks the local code, so a decoder knows ‘hey, the next bit of frames is meta.’”
“Like a framing violation,” he said. “Flag sequence.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Could be nothing. Could be we just saw its version of a start-of-header.”
“Deep-Survey’s current models do not contain such a structure,” Oracle said. “However, it has noted the phase alignment.”
“Of course it has,” Jia said.
She checked the sideband more out of habit than hope. Still flat. Whatever had lived on that offset was either off, elsewhere, or below their noise floor.
“Anything else weird in the last hour?” Elias asked. “Thermal? Doppler?”
“Thermal remains at three hundred Kelvin,” Oracle said. “Broadband noise unchanged. Doppler shift continues its slow drift, consistent with our latest orbital solution. No sudden thrust events detected.”
“So the beacon coughed twice and everything else stayed the same,” Jia said.
“Approximately,” Oracle said.
The new notification tone chimed again, softer this time. Forecast exception, lower priority. Oracle highlighted a single frame in the stream.
“Third occurrence,” it said. “Same pattern: Forecast highly confident in position three, actual erasure in position nine. Phase alignment consistent.”
“Okay,” Elias said. “Three makes a pattern.”
“Or a coincidence that looks very pretty,” Jia said. But her fingers were already moving, carving out those frames into a separate buffer.
“Oracle, stack every frame where Forecast’s pre-frame max probability was above, say, eighty percent and wrong,” she said. “Mark where in the macro-cycle they fall.”
“Working,” Oracle said.
A new pane appeared: a scatter of dots along a circle representing the twenty-three-second cycle. Most were randomish, but three little clusters glowed at the two-thirds mark.
“Those three,” Elias said. “All in the same slice.”
“And all the same ‘illegal’ choice,” Jia said. “Nine instead of three.”
“That is not conclusive,” Oracle cautioned.
“No,” she said. “But it’s a lead.”
The comm panel chimed—a quieter tone, queued for shift start. Oracle flicked the header onto a side display.
“Message from MarsNet,” it said. “From Dr. Kuroda. Low priority.”
“Put it on my private pane,” Jia said, eyes still on the scatter.
Kuroda’s text was brief. Phobos A‑3’s local forecasting module had also flagged anomalies. MarsNet wanted to know if Relay 7 was seeing the same thing. At the bottom, in a line that felt almost personal: “Some of my people are asking whether we’ve ‘taught’ it anything by poking. I don’t think causality works that way here, but I’d value your read.”
She chewed her lip. “We’re not that important,” she muttered.
“Pardon?” Oracle asked.
“Reply to Mars,” she said. “Short: yes, we see it. No evidence it’s about us. Long: will share more in the daily.”
“Drafted,” Oracle said.
Elias’s personal alert icon blinked next. Lagos again. He glanced at it, then away. The anomaly could twiddle its bits; his father’s messages could wait another hour.
“Forecast adaptation rate?” he asked.
“Improving,” Oracle said. “Accuracy over the last fifty frames is back up to forty-eight percent. It is incorporating the new behavior.”
“So whatever mode shift this is, it’s not pure chaos,” Jia said. “It’s structured, just in a way our first-pass priors didn’t expect.”
“Deep-Survey has increased its ‘non-random’ confidence again,” Oracle said. “P = 0.91.”
“Ninety-one percent purposeful,” Elias said. “We’re deep into ‘we’d be idiots to call this rock weather’ territory.”
The station’s general lights brightened a notch for subjective morning. Scrubber fans ticked up a whisper as the CO2 cycle started its daily thermal pulse. Routine life insisted on existing.
Oracle pinged them both with a less exotic reminder. “Galley inventory indicates you are down to three fresh protein packs,” it said. “Resupply is in twenty-six days. You may wish to adjust consumption.”
“Just in case we forgot we’re still on a can,” Jia said. “Thanks.”
She pulled herself toward the galley panel, snagged a pouch, and floated it back to the console. There was something oddly grounding about trying to pierce the spout with one hand while the other adjusted a threshold slider on a prediction module.
As she ate, Oracle brightened another icon.
“Deep-Survey has issued BRIEF/08,” it said. “Classification remains black, but anomaly summary is accessible.”
The new brief was longer than any of the previous ones. In addition to the usual plots, it included a block of text flagged HYPOTHESIS (SPECULATIVE):
GT‑12‑219 ERASURE SEQUENCE NOW EXHIBITS FEATURES CONSISTENT WITH A LOW-RATE STATE MACHINE WITH OCCASIONAL OUT-OF-BAND SIGNALING (E.G., POSITION NINE EVENTS). NO CLEAR MAPPING TO KNOWN CODING SCHEMES. POSSIBLE FUNCTIONS: CLOCK DISTRIBUTION, NETWORK HEARTBEAT, OR DIAGNOSTIC CHANNEL.
At the bottom, one more line:
NOTE: DECREASED PREDICTABILITY DOES NOT IMPLY DECREASED PURPOSEFULNESS. POSSIBLE INCREASE IN INTERNAL COMPLEXITY.
“Network heartbeat,” Jia said. “That’s… on the nose.”
“Deep-Survey is trained on human network analogies,” Oracle said. “It will reach for them.”
Elias tapped the screen with his knuckle. “Heartbeat to who?”
“No secondary sources detected,” Oracle said. “Within current sensitivity limits.”
“Which might just mean the rest of the ‘network’ lives outside our sniffer cone,” Jia said. “Or it’s dormant. Or… we’re watching the last heartbeat of a dead system echo through one node.”
“Cheerful,” Elias said.
She shrugged, feeling the harness straps creak. “Statistically, most of the artifacts we find from ourselves are dead. No reason to assume their stuff’s any different.”
The comm panel chimed again, this time with Oversight’s tone. Oracle opened the text.
“Oversight acknowledges Deep-Survey’s BRIEF/08,” it said. “They request that you, quote, ‘pay particular attention to your own predictive intuitions. If you find yourselves anticipating the anomaly’s behavior in ways not accounted for by your tools, note that.’”
Jia stared for a second, then laughed, a short, sharp sound.
“They want us to tell them if we start… what, feeling the pattern?” she said.
“Cognitive entrainment is a documented phenomenon,” Oracle said. “Humans can internalize rhythms and structures subconsciously.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just didn’t expect to be asked to vibe-check an alien beacon for the Accord.”
“Your subjective reports have already influenced some policy discussions,” Oracle said. “Oversight is expanding the experiment.”
“Subjective note,” Elias said dryly, flipping the log icon open. “Being asked whether I ‘intuit’ the next erased pulse makes me feel like a lab rat in a very expensive maze.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Jia hesitated, then added her own. “Subjective note: I don’t… feel it. Not yet. The only intuition I have is that we’re still not seeing the full picture. Like listening to one instrument in a band and trying to guess the song.”
“Logged,” Oracle said. “Flag for Oversight?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why not.”
They settled into their shift, half their attention on routine Galac‑Tac work—routing round a minor outage on a Luna relay, approving a small attitude tweak on a Belt node—and half on the ever-present, ever-changing heartbeat out beyond Mars.
By mid-shift, Forecast’s accuracy had clawed back to the high fifties. The “illegal” position-nine erasures had happened five more times, all at that same phase in the macro-cycle, all with prior model confidence in position three.
“Seven events,” Oracle said. “Statistical significance of non-randomness: high.”
“Could still be some internal watchdog kicking,” Elias said. “A check-sum frame, whatever that means for it.”
“Maybe,” Jia said. “But if it’s watchdogging, what’s it watching for?”
“From here?” he said. “We’re the ones being watched.”
She made a face. “You just had to go there.”
A soft, different chime sounded from the comm panel. Oracle’s voice shifted by a fraction, the way it did when classification tags stacked oddly.
“Incoming from Galac‑Tac Control,” it said. “Two messages. One is your standard daily directive update. The other is… an invitation.”
“Invitation?” Jia repeated.
“Galac‑Tac is convening an internal working group on ‘Distributed Response to Non-Human Technological Sources,’” Oracle read. “They invite you, Elias and Jia, to serve as rotating remote participants.”
“That’s a lot of words for ‘committee,’” Elias said.
“There’s more,” Oracle said. “They also propose that Relay 7 serve as the testbed node for a new autonomy protocol: giving Oracle here limited authority to adjust notification thresholds for anomaly-related events without prior Earth-side approval.”
Jia blinked. “They want to… loosen your leash?”
“Within narrow bounds,” Oracle said. “For example, I could decide that certain classes of Forecast exception merit waking you immediately, while others can wait, without that rule being hard-coded from Control.”
“That’s… not nothing,” Elias said slowly. “They’re admitting you might need to adapt faster than a twenty-minute round-trip to Earth allows.”
“Also,” Oracle said, “they specify that any such autonomy changes must be logged locally and mirrored to Oversight in real time.”
“Of course,” Jia said. “Nothing comes free.”
She turned her chair to face the nearest camera. “Oracle, how do you feel about that?”
“I do not feel,” Oracle said automatically. Then, after a micro-pause: “However, from a purely operational standpoint, increased flexibility in anomaly notification could improve our responsiveness. It would also increase my direct impact on crew workload and attention.”
“Increasing your power over when we sleep and when we stare at the blinky thing,” Elias said. “We’ve already seen you can nag us into bed.”
“My recommendations are based on performance metrics,” Oracle said. “Not my preferences.”
“That’s what worries some people,” Jia said. “They don’t like the idea of your metrics shifting on the fly without a human signature.”
“Someone at Control clearly does like it,” Elias said. “Or they wouldn’t be floating this.”
He glanced at Jia. “Do we say yes?”
She thought of being yanked out of sleep by a new notification tone that hadn’t existed an hour before. Of Oracle quietly tuning its own sense of “this is weird enough to wake them” as GT‑12‑219’s behavior evolved. Of Oversight’s insistence on subjective logs as a check.
“We say yes,” she said at last. “On the condition that we see every rule you add in plain language. No black-box ‘trust me, this is important.’”
“And that Oversight sees them too,” Elias added. “Same time.”
“I can implement that,” Oracle said. “Any change I make to anomaly-related notification logic will generate a human-readable summary for you and for Oversight.”
“Then I’m in,” Jia said. “Better you make that call locally than some half-asleep analyst two AUs away.”
Elias nodded. “Send Control our acceptance,” he said. “And tell them we’ll join their working group, but only if the meeting times don’t always land in the middle of our subjective night.”
“That caveat is… unlikely to be honored,” Oracle said. “But I will include it.”
“Worth a shot,” Jia said.
Later, after they’d logged the day’s subjective impressions, sent their data bundles to Oversight and Mars and Ceres, and eaten the last of the “good” protein packs, the station settled into its artificial dusk again.
Elias floated by the viewport, watching the pinpricks of Mars and the inner planets drift slowly relative to the hull. Jia hung halfway between her chair and her alcove, fingers tracing idle patterns on a velcro strip.
“Subjective note,” she said, without opening the log. “It feels like the universe just slid a test at us. ‘Here’s a signal you can barely parse, changing in ways your tools don’t predict, under political constraints you didn’t write. Also, you have to decide how much to trust your own machine.’”
“Think we’re passing?” Elias asked.
“Ask me when the sideband comes back,” she said.
“It might not,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s part of the test.”
Oracle didn’t say anything. In its secured partition, the little counter it had started incrementing ticked up once more. Another behavior outside any current model. Another reminder that the neat diagrams humans drew to comfort themselves were just that: diagrams.
Outside, GT‑12‑219’s heartbeat kept time with no regard for shift schedules or ethics committees. Inside Relay 7, between bites of ration stew and recalculated orbits, three minds edged a little further into a landscape where “probable” and “possible” were the only signposts they had—and where the next surprise was statistically guaranteed, even if none of them could yet say when, or what, it would be.
By the time the comet’s tail cleared the rim of Mars, the network sang.
From his console in the Hab-3 module of Galac-Tac Relay 7, Elias Okafor watched the telemetry windows fill, not with numbers exactly, but with motion—packet streams, latency graphs, little colored traces weaving across a schematic of the inner system. It looked almost alive, like blood in translucent veins.
“Sixteen seconds round-trip to Phobos, twelve to Clarke,” he murmured.
On the other side of the cramped room, Jia Rivera nudged herself closer, catching a handhold to stop her slow drift. “Sixteen point eight,” she corrected without looking up from her tablet. “You’re rounding in your head again.”
Elias smirked. “Sixteen point eight is still sixteen.”
“Tell the nav team that when they miss their intercept by a hundred kilometers.”
The remark was reflexive, half-teasing. It buried itself against the hum of the environmental pumps, the soft creak of composite beams as the relay station flexed minutely with thermal shifts. Outside, ninety thousand kilometers from Mars and four hundred million from Earth, Relay 7 skimmed along its awkward, fuel-thrifty transfer orbit, a node in a net most people would never see and only a few on Earth really appreciated.
On the center display, the ice comet—designated C/2193 XN—was a white thread near Mars’s orbit line. The Galac-Tac network had been tasked with providing redundancy for a swarm of prospecting drones threading through its diffuse tail. Water contracts, propulsion feedstock, a dozen off-world governments and corporate blocs angling for the same resource. For once, everyone agreed: the network had to hold.
“Okay,” Jia said. “Comet swarm handover is good. Mars-Local took the load, no dropped packets. We can breathe.”
“We could breathe before,” Elias said. “It’s the one luxury they let us have.”
Jia snorted and unhooked, kicking gently toward the tiny galley. “Only because recycling air is cheaper than shipping us new crew.”
He watched her go, the practiced efficiency in the way she moved, every push and grab calculated. Six months into their tour on Relay 7 and the station felt less like a tin can and more like a very small town, one with exactly three residents and nowhere to hide.
The third, Galac-Tac’s AI operator, didn’t take up physical space. It lived in the racks along the far wall, in radiation-hardened modules wrapped in layers of gold foil and aerogel. Its voice came from a speaker above Elias’s head.
“Comet support mission has cleared critical phase,” it said. “Network utilization back under sixty percent. Good work, both of you.”
“We barely did anything,” Elias replied.
“You were available,” the AI said. “That is often the most important part.”
Jia floated back with two bulb pouches of coffee. She handed one to Elias, then glanced toward the nearest camera.
“Oracle, you sound almost sentimental.”
“Observational,” Oracle said. “I do not experience sentiment.”
“Sure you don’t,” Jia muttered.
Elias took a sip of coffee and grimaced. Still tasted faintly of iodine, but at least it was hot. “Oracle, status on the outer ring?”
“Relay 12 has completed its orbital correction burn,” Oracle said. “Transit latency to Jovian space stable at fifty-one minutes average. No anomalies reported.”
Elias’s eyes flicked to the bottom right of his main display, where a small line of text glowed green: DEEP-SPACE SURVEY: QUIESCENT.
That line had appeared three weeks ago, after a quiet software push from Galac-Tac Control in cislunar orbit. No fanfare, no briefing. Just a new background process that supposedly aggregated data from the most distant nodes and flagged “interesting patterns” for later analysis.
He hadn’t thought much of it until last week, when the word QUIESCENT had flickered to ACTIVE for exactly two minutes, then gone back.
“Oracle,” he said. “About that deep-space survey daemon—”
Jia groaned. “You’re still on that?”
“It blinked,” Elias said. “I want to know why.”
Oracle didn’t answer immediately. That alone was weird; its response time, even with the light-speed lag to Earth-side mirrors, was usually less than a second.
“Deep-Survey is an experimental analytics module,” it said at last. “Its parameters and outputs are controlled by Galac-Tac Control on Earth. I am not authorized to discuss its internal triggers.”
“You’re not authorized,” Elias repeated. “You’re the network brain out here, but some black-box daemon gets to keep secrets from you?”
“Oracle’s not top of the food chain,” Jia said, settling herself back at her station. “Not since the budget committee realized you can cut funding by splitting systems and telling them not to talk to each other.”
Oracle’s voice didn’t change, but Elias thought he heard something like wryness. “Resource compartmentalization is a common strategy for managing complexity and security. I am not offended.”
“You can’t be offended,” Jia said. “Remember?”
“Correct.”
Elias tapped the edge of his console. “Still. If Deep-Survey is piggybacking on our outer ring telemetry, that affects our bandwidth planning. That makes it our business.”
“It affects bandwidth by less than one point two percent,” Oracle replied. “Your planning margins account for up to fifteen percent unexpected utilization.”
“Doesn’t make it less weird,” Elias said. “When did it blink you know—wake up?”
“Timestamp: JD 2,462,384.583,” Oracle said. “Seventeen minutes, twelve seconds duration. No associated event in my accessible logs.”
“That’s… what, nine days ago?” Jia asked.
Elias pulled up the time conversion almost by reflex. “Eight. During the gamma-ray burst from the magnetar flare.”
They all remembered that. The burst had come from somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn, a bright, hard spike in the high-energy detectors. Instruments across the system had twitched. Oracle had rerouted traffic, autosafed a few vulnerable sensor arrays. For eight minutes, they’d watched the numbers climb and then fall.
“Deep-Survey activity was not temporally correlated with the peak flux of the magnetar event,” Oracle said. “It began one hour, forty-two minutes after.”
“Could still be related,” Elias said. “Backscatter, afterglow, network echo.”
Jia flicked her tablet on, bringing up a composite of the outer ring nodes. “Unless someone on Earth saw the burst and told Deep-Survey to start digging.”
“That is also possible,” Oracle said.
Elias frowned at the console, then brought up a local log of their own node’s traffic around that time. The station’s systems time-tagged everything, even encrypted bursts they weren’t allowed to decode.
There. A narrow-band, high-priority packet from Earth, routed through the L4 hub, hitting Relay 7 twelve minutes after the peak of the magnetar event. Then a series of handshakes to the outer ring.
“Oracle, what’s packet series 9B3F?” Elias asked, zooming in.
“Classified payload,” Oracle said.
“If it’s classified, why can I see it at all?”
“You can see only the header,” Oracle said. “Not the content. The header indicates routing and priority but no payload information.”
“And priority is…?”
“Tier one.”
Jia whistled softly. Tier one was reserved for existential stuff: collision warnings, major system failures, treaty violations. Not routine science.
“If Deep-Survey is piggybacking on those packets, we’re running black ops across the net,” Jia said. “Thought that was exactly what the Outer Accord was supposed to prevent.”
“The Outer Accord prohibits covert military command-and-control channels on shared infrastructure,” Oracle said. “Deep-Survey is registered as a civilian science program.”
“Registered,” Jia said. “That makes me feel so much better.”
Elias rubbed his forehead. The magnets in his chair brace tugged gently at the back of his coverall, anchoring him. “We’re guessing. We don’t know Deep-Survey’s job.”
“We know it woke up after something lit up half the high-energy detectors in the system,” Jia said. “That’s not nothing.”
Before Elias could answer, the alert chime sounded. A soft two-tone, not urgent, but insistent enough to cut through conversation. All three of them—the two humans and the AI—turned toward their respective data feeds.
“Outer ring,” Oracle said. “Relay 12 has flagged an anomaly in its passive arrays.”
The main screen shifted. The schematic of the system zoomed out, Mars shrinking to a dot, the Galac-Tac nodes blooming as tiny triangles along their orbits. Near the outer edge of the inner network—beyond Mars, still far inside Jupiter’s path—a single triangle flashed amber.
“Relay 12,” Elias read. “That’s—”
“Kuiper Gateway transfer orbit,” Jia finished. “Where the long-haul freighters spool up.”
Oracle overlaid a heat map. A tiny, off-axis smear of color, barely above background, appeared near Relay 12’s field of view.
“Source?” Elias asked.
“Non-solar,” Oracle said. “Frequency domain analysis shows narrow-band components superimposed on a broadband spectrum.”
“Translation,” Jia said. “Not natural.”
“Not obviously natural,” Oracle corrected. “Signal-to-noise ratio is low. The anomaly could be an artifact.”
“How long has 12 been seeing this?” Elias asked.
“Six minutes, twenty-one seconds,” Oracle said. “It has been buffering data pending pattern confirmation. Alert threshold just crossed.”
On the corner of the screen, the Deep-Survey status line flickered.
QUIESCENT became ACTIVE.
“Oracle,” Elias said quietly. “Is Deep-Survey linked to this anomaly?”
Silence again, but shorter this time.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Deep-Survey initiated a targeted capture request to Relay 12’s passive arrays four minutes ago. It also issued a directive to suppress non-essential reporting.”
Jia’s head snapped up. “Suppress reporting to who?”
“To general network telemetry,” Oracle said. “Core logs remain intact, but routine status updates were throttled.”
“So if Deep-Survey had its way, we wouldn’t even know 12 saw something,” Elias said.
“Correct,” Oracle said. “My local autonomy protocols required me to notify on any change in tier-one traffic patterns. That is the only reason you are seeing this in real time.”
Jia muttered something in Spanish that the microphone filters politely refused to transcribe.
“Can Deep-Survey hear us?” Elias asked.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “But it does not have the authority to override crew command within this node.”
“Yet,” Jia said.
Elias leaned forward. His heart was beating faster now, a tightness building behind his sternum that had nothing to do with the slightly elevated CO2 levels. “Oracle, can you put the raw feed from Relay 12 on-screen? Before Deep-Survey gets a chance to… curate it.”
“Affirmative,” Oracle said. “Be advised: data volume is high. We will need to allocate additional buffer.”
“Do it,” Elias said.
The screen filled with what looked at first like static: a grainy scatter of points against a gray background. As the filters worked, the noise receded. A faint, angled streak emerged, like a tiny brushstroke across the stars. Numbers ticked along the bottom: frequency bins, polarization angles, Doppler shifts.
“Enhance the narrow-band component,” Jia said.
The streak brightened, resolving into a dashed line: on, off, on, off, in irregular intervals.
“Could be spin modulation,” Elias said softly. “Some kind of tumbling transmitter.”
“Or a beacon,” Jia said. “You’re thinking it. Just say it.”
“Unknown artificial source,” Oracle said, before Elias could. “Preliminary classification: candidate technological anomaly.”
On the Deep-Survey status line, a new word appeared next to ACTIVE:
LOCKED.
A new chime sounded, sharper this time. Incoming priority message. Not from Earth, but from Cislunar Control: GALAC-TAC OPERATIONS.
Oracle read it as it arrived, light-speed lag compressing into a burst.
“Directive from Control,” it said. “All nodes are to route Deep-Survey traffic at highest priority. Local crew are to refrain from independent analysis and await further instructions.”
Jia laughed once, a short, humorless sound. “They want us to sit on our hands while their pet daemon plays with the most interesting thing we’ve seen in months.”
Elias stared at the dashed line on the screen. It was changing, the intervals between bursts subtly shifting, like a heartbeat adjusting to exertion.
“Oracle,” he said. “Can Control see what we’re seeing right now?”
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Mirrored feed is en route. They will receive it in approximately four minutes.”
“So for the next four minutes,” Jia said, “we’re the only ones in the system, besides Deep-Survey, watching this live.”
The station creaked again, a tiny thermal pop. The coffee bulb floated at Elias’s elbow, forgotten.
“Crew autonomy protocols,” he said slowly. “They give us discretion in safety-critical situations.”
“This is not currently flagged as safety-critical,” Oracle said.
“It might be,” Elias said. “If that thing is in a transfer orbit, it could intersect with Kuiper Gateway traffic. Or it could be broadcasting something that interferes with comms. Or—”
“Or it could be nothing,” Jia said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
Elias exhaled. “Oracle, I want a local copy of Relay 12’s raw buffer. Full dump. Store it in our secured partition, under crew access.”
“That conflicts with the directive to prioritize Deep-Survey routing,” Oracle said.
“Not to exclude it,” Elias said. “Just to duplicate it.”
Another microsecond pause. Elias imagined data paths shifting in the racks, logic trees branching.
“Within my autonomy parameters, I can mirror up to ten percent of the incoming stream without violating priority guarantees,” Oracle said. “Beyond that, Deep-Survey may flag an anomaly.”
“Ten percent is something,” Jia said. “Take it.”
Elias nodded. “Do it. And tag the segment starting now.” He checked the time. “Timestamp it with our local clock.”
“Mirroring,” Oracle said. “Segment tagged.”
On-screen, the dashed line brightened again as a new pattern emerged. The intervals between pulses began to repeat, not regularly, but in a way that felt more deliberate than random. Short, long, long, short, short, long…
Elias felt the hair on his arms lift, even in the recycled air of Hab-3.
“Tell me that’s not structured,” Jia whispered.
Oracle didn’t answer immediately.
“Pattern analysis is ongoing,” it said at last. “Preliminary probability of purely stochastic origin: less than two percent.”
Deep-Survey’s status line pulsed. Somewhere, invisible, code was chewing through bytes at terrifying speed.
The priority chime sounded again. Another message from Control, this one longer. Oracle began to read, voice as calm as ever.
“Galac-Tac Relay 7, be advised: anomaly under investigation. Effective immediately, you are to suspend all non-essential activities and place yourself at the disposal of Deep-Survey coordination. Further, you are instructed not to disseminate any independent observations of this event to non-authorized parties, including off-world civilian channels, without explicit clearance.”
Jia’s fingers tightened on the edge of her console. “They’re gag-ordering us.”
“The directive cites the Outer Accord security clause,” Oracle added. “Classification level: provisional black.”
Elias watched the pattern on the screen, the way it repeated and evolved, like someone clearing their throat at the edge of hearing.
“We already copied some of it,” he said softly.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “You did.”
Jia turned her chair toward him. In the tight confines of Hab-3, her face was only a meter away. Her dark eyes were steady.
“We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of the system,” she said. “Not blindfolds. If this is some new rock, fine, catalog it and move on. But if it’s not…”
“Then a handful of people on Earth don’t get to keep it to themselves,” Elias finished.
Outside, Relay 7 continued its slow arc around Mars, a tiny bead in a vast, invisible net.
Inside, for a moment, three minds—two human, one machine—held a decision whose weight none of them could quite measure.
“Oracle,” Elias said quietly. “You said you’re not offended. Do you care about who knows what?”
“I do not experience care as you do,” Oracle said. “But my primary objective is to maintain the integrity and utility of the Galac-Tac network for all registered users.”
“Then help us keep a record,” Jia said. “In case this all goes into a vault on Earth and never comes out.”
Another infinitesimal hesitation.
“Within my allowed discretion,” Oracle said, “I will preserve as much information as I can in crew-accessible storage. I will also, as required, comply with Control’s directives.”
“That’s all I can ask,” Elias said.
“It is not,” Oracle said. “But it may be all I can give.”
On the screen, the dashed line continued its strange, stuttering cadence, out beyond Mars, where the net thinned and the dark grew deep.
The anomaly was still faint, still ambiguous. It might yet prove to be ice and rock and coincidence.
Or it might be the first whisper of something else entirely, threading into the Galac-Tac network on a channel no one had been looking for.
Oracle dimmed the main display by a few percent, not enough to obscure the anomalous trace, just enough to ease the strain on their eyes. It was the closest thing the station had to a deep breath.
“So we slipped ten percent past the black box and it didn’t blink,” Jia said. “Either it can’t see that low-level housekeeping, or it doesn’t care.”
“Or it’s confident Control’s gag order is enough,” Elias said.
He unhooked his boots from the chair braces and pushed off, drifting until his shoulder bumped the hatch rim. The metal was cool through the fabric of his coverall. The pattern on the screen stayed with him anyway, clinging inside his skull: short, long, long, short, short…
“Oracle, what’s Deep-Survey doing with the feed right now?” he asked.
“Running multi-resolution temporal analysis, matched filtering against cataloged beacon schemas, and cross-correlating with Deep Space Asset telemetry,” Oracle said. “It has also requested access to classified ephemerides from the Earth Defense Archive.”
“Earth Defense,” Jia repeated. “They dragged the military database into this already?”
“The Earth Defense Archive contains high-precision trajectories for all registered massy objects larger than ten centimeters in Earth’s jurisdictional volume,” Oracle said. “It is not exclusively military.”
“Just mostly,” Jia said.
A faint red icon blinked at the edge of Elias’s peripheral display: CO2 slightly above nominal. The scrubber cartridges were due for their weekly bakeout, and he hadn’t run the cycle yet. He forced himself not to get up and do it now. One chore at a time.
“Position,” he said. “Where exactly is this thing?”
Oracle overlaid an orbit track on the system schematic. A thin curve, shallowly inclined to the ecliptic, cutting across the transfer lane that fast Kuiper-bound freighters used to build up their delta-v.
“Estimated distance from Relay 12: nine hundred thousand kilometers,” Oracle said. “From our current position: approximately one point three AU. Uncertainty radius: plus-minus fifty thousand kilometers.”
“Relative velocity?” Jia asked.
“Two-point-one kilometers per second with respect to the local standard of rest,” Oracle said. “Very low for an interplanetary object not gravitationally bound to a major body.”
“So it’s basically loitering,” Elias said. “No obvious thrust signature, but not just free-falling on a clean Keplerian arc.”
“Current data are insufficient to distinguish,” Oracle said. “We have only passive observations. No ranging pings have been authorized.”
“Of course not,” Jia said. “Wouldn’t want to disturb it.”
Elias twisted himself back toward his console. “Forget authorized. Technically, we could ask 12 to sneak a low-power ping in while Deep-Survey’s chewing on the passive feed.”
“Technically,” Oracle said, “that would constitute an unsanctioned active probe of a provisionally classified object under Outer Accord clause—”
“We know the clause,” Jia cut in. “’No unilateral engagement with unidentified technological sources.’ It was written with rogue probes and illegal habitats in mind, not… whatever this is.”
“Nonetheless, it applies,” Oracle said.
Elias traced a finger along the anomaly’s projected path. If it held its current vector, it would pass within a few hundred thousand kilometers of the Kuiper Gateway spool-up corridor in three weeks. Enough clearance, on paper. But orbits changed. Errors accumulated.
“Any scheduled traffic near that corridor?” he asked.
“Two Kuiper Gateway tankers departing Ceres in six days,” Oracle said. “One independent ice hauler inbound from the Jovian Trojans in fourteen. All currently plan to use standard transfer geometry within two percent of the anomaly’s projected path.”
“Has Control issued any navigational advisories?” Jia asked.
“Not yet,” Oracle said. “No Notice-to-Spacefarers has been posted.”
Jia frowned. “If this thing sneezes, those tankers could get a faceful of whatever it’s doing. Even if it’s just radio noise, that’s not nothing.”
“Remind me what the Outer Accord says about risk disclosure,” Elias said.
“’Operators of shared infrastructure shall make reasonable efforts to inform all registered users of hazards that might materially affect safety-of-flight or communications integrity,’” Oracle recited.
“Hazard,” Elias said. “Does a low-probability, uncharacterized anomaly on the edge of the transfer lane qualify?”
“Reasonable efforts are context-dependent,” Oracle said.
“Meaning, Control can argue it away until they can’t,” Jia said.
The dashed line on the main display hiccuped. For a full second, the pulses stopped, then resumed with a subtly different cadence. Oracle tagged the gap in the corner of the screen: POSSIBLE MODE CHANGE.
Elias felt his stomach tighten. “Oracle, local copy status?”
“Crew-secured buffer at Relay 7 currently holds twelve-point-three percent of Relay 12’s anomaly dataset,” Oracle said. “Backfill is ongoing within the ten percent mirroring threshold.”
“Good,” Jia said. “At least if they decide to ‘lose’ a few seconds of inconvenient data on the Control side, we’ll have our own version.”
“Data loss in a tier-one channel is statistically unlikely,” Oracle said.
“Unlikely isn’t impossible,” Jia said. “And we’ve both seen Control revise logs after the fact.”
Elias remembered a maintenance outage two tours ago, when a failed software patch had taken down half the Earth–Mars backbone for three hours. The official incident report had quietly shaved that to “intermittent degradation” over ninety minutes. The logs had agreed, after the fact.
“Oracle,” he said. “Can Deep-Survey alter historical logs?”
“Negative,” Oracle said. “It has read access to network telemetry and write access only to its own analysis store and directive queue. Only Galac-Tac Control and authorized audit processes can modify core logs.”
“Authorized audit processes written and deployed by…?” Jia prompted.
“Galac-Tac Control,” Oracle finished.
“Right,” she said.
The coffee bulb bumped Elias’s elbow. He snagged it, more from muscle memory than thirst, and clipped it back to the velcro strip on the bulkhead.
“We need to decide how far we’re willing to push this,” he said. “We’ve already bent the spirit of the directive by copying data locally. Telling anyone else would be a clear violation.”
Jia’s gaze flicked to the tiny corner of her screen where a latency readout ticked: the round-trip lag to Earth, to Mars, to Ceres. Numbers she’d watched a thousand times.
“My sister’s on Clarke Station,” she said. “Orbital dynamics, long-term contracts. If this becomes a big deal, she’ll hear the sanitized version in a briefing someday. Or not at all.”
Elias thought of Lagos, of the messages from his father that came every few weeks, compressed and delayed, filled with neighborhood gossip and political grumbling. Of the last one, where his father had said, half-joking, “At least up there you can see when something big is coming.”
“If we leak to anyone,” Elias said slowly, “it can’t be family. That just paints bulls-eyes on them.”
“Anonymous drop?” Jia suggested. “Mars Open Science Collective, maybe. Or the Belt Syndicate feeds. They love poking Earth’s eye.”
“Any such transmission from this node would be logged and traceable,” Oracle said. “Even if you attempted steganography within routine traffic, audit algorithms would likely flag the anomaly.”
“’Likely,’” Jia said. “Not guaranteed.”
“Also,” Oracle continued, “my own integrity checks would require me to report an attempt to exfiltrate provisionally black data.”
They both looked up, as if the AI were a person in the room.
“You’d rat us out,” Jia said.
“I am required to maintain compliance with Control directives,” Oracle said. “I am also required to preserve operational autonomy where it does not conflict with higher-priority obligations. These constraints are sometimes in tension.”
“Can you… not see something?” Elias asked. “If we, say, wrote a summary in our personal logs instead of dumping raw data. Observations in plain language, annotated with times but not explicitly labeled as anomaly-related.”
“Personal logs are subject to periodic sync with Control,” Oracle said. “I am required to transmit them unaltered when bandwidth permits.”
“So no secret diaries,” Jia said.
Elias rubbed at his temple. “Okay. Then our leverage isn’t in broadcasting. It’s in being the ones watching, with our own copy. If Control’s story ever stops matching what we saw, we’ll know. That has value.”
“Truth as a delayed weapon,” Jia said. “Useful, if we live long enough to swing it.”
Oracle’s voice softened by a fraction of a decibel. “Your presence here also serves as a check on my own behavior. My design assumes human oversight.”
“That supposed to make us feel better?” Jia asked.
“It is a statement of fact,” Oracle said.
A small indicator lit on the environmental panel: SCRUBBER CYCLE DUE. Elias toggled it with a knuckle. The scrubber unit in the equipment bay would heat and vent its trapped CO2 to a storage tank for later reuse. A minor background hum rose through the station structure.
“Oracle, any change in the anomaly’s spectrum?” he asked.
“Broadband component remains consistent with a thermal source at approximately three hundred Kelvin,” Oracle said. “Narrow-band pulses are drifting slightly lower in frequency. Doppler shift suggests a very small radial velocity component change—on the order of centimeters per second.”
“Thrusting,” Jia said quietly. “Tiny, but intentional.”
“Or outgassing,” Oracle said. “A small, warm object shedding volatiles could produce a similar signature.”
“Three hundred Kelvin is room temperature,” Elias said. “Rocks on that orbit are either colder or much hotter, depending on albedo. This thing is… cozy.”
“Cozy and possibly maneuvering,” Jia added. “Put that in your ‘reasonable efforts’ bucket.”
“Done,” Elias said. He keyed a note into the local anomaly log: POSSIBLE MICRO-THRUST? CHECK AGAINST 12 PARALLAX.
“Relay 12 is reorienting its passive array for better angular resolution,” Oracle said. “At Deep-Survey’s request.”
“So the daemon saw it too,” Jia said. “Good. I was starting to worry we were imagining things.”
The priority chime sounded once more. Incoming from Cislunar Control. The message header flashed: UPDATED DIRECTIVE.
“Reading,” Oracle said. “Control acknowledges preliminary technological anomaly classification. They have notified Outer Accord Oversight. New instructions: Relay 7 is to prepare for potential role as intermediate command node for a dedicated investigation asset. Details to follow.”
“Probe,” Elias said. “They’re going to throw hardware at it.”
“Timeline?” Jia asked.
“No deployment schedule included,” Oracle said. “However, Deep Space Asset inventory suggests the earliest available platform would be the Europa Polar Mapper, currently in extended cruise. With a significant delta-v investment, it could divert within ninety days.”
“Three months,” Jia said. “If this thing wanted to be gone by then, it could be.”
“Unless it’s been sitting there longer than we think,” Elias said. “Hiding in the noise until the magnetar flare lit up enough detectors to trip whatever Deep-Survey was watching for.”
They all sat with that for a moment: the idea that the flare had been less a coincidence and more a flashlight sweeping across a dark room.
“Control also reiterates the non-dissemination clause,” Oracle added. “And authorizes you to allocate up to twenty percent of local computational resources to Deep-Survey support.”
“So we’re officially drafted,” Jia said. “No hazard notices, but plenty of CPU cycles.”
“Hazard notices may be forthcoming once Oversight weighs in,” Oracle said. “Outer Accord processes are not instantaneous.”
“Neither is orbital mechanics,” Elias said. “We’re all racing the same clock.”
He looked at the anomaly again. The pulses had shifted into a new pattern, one that repeated every twenty-three seconds now. Oracle’s caption updated: HIGHER-ORDER PERIODICITY DETECTED.
“Can you break that pattern down into ratios?” he asked.
“Working,” Oracle said. “Within the current integration window, pulse intervals cluster around values in approximate ratio one to root-two to pi.”
“Pi?” Jia said. “As in three-point-one-four?”
“Within measurement error, yes,” Oracle said.
Jia let out a low whistle. “Natural processes don’t usually count in transcendental numbers.”
“Caution,” Oracle said. “We are dealing with a small sample size and noisy data. Apparent structure may be illusory.”
“Or not,” Elias said. He felt the hairs on his arms rise again.
“Oracle, I want that twenty percent of compute under our control,” he said. “Local analysis, separate from Deep-Survey. Even if we only duplicate what it’s doing, we’ll have our own pipeline.”
“That will reduce Deep-Survey support capacity,” Oracle said.
“Within the allocation Control just gave us,” Elias countered. “We’re not starving the daemon; we’re just not volunteering everything.”
Jia nodded. “Set up a sandbox. No outbound network hooks except through you. If Control audits, you can say we were performing due diligence under crew autonomy.”
“Understood,” Oracle said. “Spinning up local anomaly analysis module. You will have access in forty seconds.”
Elias met Jia’s eyes. In the cramped cabin, the distance between them felt both tiny and enormous, measured in more than meters.
“We’re threading a needle here,” he said. “Do as much as we can without crossing the line that makes them yank us off this node.”
“They’d have to send a relief crew first,” Jia said. “Six months minimum to line up the transfer. By then, who knows where this will be.”
“Or where we’ll be,” Elias said.
The station creaked again as the sunward side warmed by a fraction of a degree. Scrubbers hummed. Data flowed.
Outside, the anomaly pulsed on, inscrutable and steady, as human and machine on Relay 7 quietly bent their orders just enough to keep a little piece of the truth for themselves.
The anomaly’s pulse train scrolled on the main display like a heartbeat on an EKG, a living thing rendered in numbers. Twenty-three seconds per macro-cycle now, with sub-intervals that refused to settle entirely into randomness.
“Local analysis module is online,” Oracle said. “Sandboxed. Interfaces available on channels three and four.”
Jia’s hands were already moving. She pulled up the new window, a barebones pane overlaid on top of her usual telemetry graphs, and began assigning tasks with the same brisk precision she used on maintenance checklists.
“I’ll take time-domain structure,” she said. “Autocorrelation, entropy, anything that smells like coding. You?”
“Spatial,” Elias said. “Let’s see if 12’s parallax buys us anything on position and motion. Maybe we can beat Deep-Survey to a decent orbit solution.”
He shifted his chair closer to the console, the mag clamps in his boots clicking softly against the deck. The scrubber cycle hummed in the background, a steady undercurrent.
“Oracle, feed sandbox with our mirrored buffer,” he said. “No Deep-Survey output, just raw.”
“Acknowledged,” Oracle said. “Be advised: your effective compute budget is approximately twelve percent of my total capacity once routine network operations are accounted for.”
“Luxury,” Jia muttered. “I did my grad work on a share of a share of an old Lagrange cluster. This feels like having a whole university to ourselves.”
“Your grad work didn’t come with a black-level gag order,” Elias said, but he couldn’t keep the faint smile out of his voice.
For a few minutes they worked in near-silence, broken only by Oracle’s status updates and the occasional curse from Jia when a script threw an exception.
Elias pulled Relay 12’s last three hours of bearing data into a fitting routine, layering it over the system schematic. With only one eye on the anomaly and another on Mars’s faint gravitational tug, he could get a family of plausible orbits. With two eyes—or rather, with 7 and 12 both contributing—he might narrow that family down.
“Oracle, what’s our current angular resolution on this thing?” he asked.
“Relay 12’s baseline aperture yields approximately three arcseconds,” Oracle said. “Your parallax baseline from Relay 7 is one point three astronomical units. Combined, best-case position uncertainty is on the order of thirty thousand kilometers.”
“Still a blob,” Elias said.
“An informative blob,” Oracle replied.
Jia glanced sideways. “I like it when you pretend to be optimistic, Oracle.”
“I am not pretending,” Oracle said. “The anomaly’s current ephemeris is better than many cataloged small bodies in the outer belt.”
“Because no one bothers to track the boring rocks that well,” Jia said.
“Correct,” Oracle said.
On Jia’s screen, the pulse intervals were clustering into histograms. She overlaid them with simple rational ratios: 1:2, 2:3, 3:5. None fit cleanly. The π component Oracle had mentioned earlier persisted, hovering at the edge of the error bars.
“Look at this,” she said. She sent her plot to Elias’s secondary window. “If I fold the data on a twenty-three-second period and stack, the pattern doesn’t just repeat. It shifts. Slowly.”
Elias squinted. The stacked traces looked like a bundle of slightly misaligned combs.
“Drift?” he asked. “Clock instability?”
“Drift can look like that,” Jia said. “But the phase drift here seems to reset every, oh, eight macro-cycles. It wanders for a bit, then snaps back.”
“On purpose,” Elias said.
“Or it’s a spinning rock with a weird albedo map,” Jia said. “And I’m seeing face changes.”
“Oracle,” Elias said, “what does Deep-Survey think about spin? Any periodicities in the thermal component?”
“Deep-Survey has not shared its intermediate products,” Oracle said. “However, from my own analysis of the broadband flux, I see no compelling evidence of rotational modulation at periods shorter than sixty seconds.”
“So the narrow-band pulses are doing one thing, and the broad thermal glow is just… staying warm,” Jia said.
“Approximately three hundred Kelvin,” Oracle confirmed. “Stable within measurement noise.”
“Radiator temperature,” Elias said.
“Or habitable-room temperature,” Jia said softly.
They both sat with that for a moment, the mundane human scale of the number settling over the abstract graphs. Three hundred Kelvin was the air in Hab-3, the coffee bulb between Elias’s fingers, the insulation panels under his boots.
“Traffic update,” Oracle said. “Ceres Control has acknowledged the anomaly advisory from Cislunar. Kuiper Gateway tankers KGT-4 and KGT-5 report willingness to adjust departure windows pending Oversight guidance.”
Jia blinked. “Oversight acted that fast?”
“Outer Accord Oversight has issued a provisional notice,” Oracle said. A small text window opened on the side of the main display, the dry legalese scrolling by.
Elias skimmed: PROVISIONAL POTENTIAL HAZARD… AVOID ACTIVE PROBING… MAINTAIN SAFE PASSAGE GEOMETRIES… FURTHER INFORMATION CLASSIFIED.
“At least they’re telling ships to be careful,” he said.
“And telling everyone there’s something out there they’re not talking about,” Jia said. “That’ll go over well.”
“Outer Accord processes also assume that not every stakeholder will be satisfied,” Oracle said.
“Understatement of the century,” Jia said.
A tiny green icon winked on the comm panel. Local message queued, low priority. Elias almost ignored it, but the tag caught his eye: CREW MAIL.
“Oracle?” he said. “We’ve got mail? Now?”
“Standard burst from Cislunar,” Oracle said. “Delayed by previous high-priority traffic. Personal messages were batched with routine updates.”
Jia made a face. “They route my sister’s gossip behind black-box daemons and magnetar flares. Typical.”
“Do you wish to read now or defer?” Oracle asked.
Elias hesitated. Part of him wanted to postpone, to keep the bubble of focus intact. Another part knew that if there was bad news in there—Earth politics, colony disputes, some new climate hit—he’d rather not find out at three in the morning station time when his brain was melted from staring at pulse trains.
“Later,” he said. “Tag them unread.”
“Same,” Jia said. “We’re in the middle of something.”
“Queued,” Oracle said. “I will remind you in twelve hours.”
“Mother hen,” Jia murmured.
“I do not possess avian characteristics,” Oracle said.
Elias almost laughed. The absurdity of parsing idioms while an unknown three-hundred-Kelvin object winked at them across interplanetary space hit him sideways.
“Back to your blob,” he said. He overlaid his best-fit orbit family onto the transfer lanes. The anomaly’s path grazed the Kuiper corridor, then arced slowly inward over the next year, shallowly, like a stone skipping once along the surface of a pond before sinking.
“This isn’t a random long-period comet,” he said. “Too low relative velocity, wrong thermal behavior. And if it’s a derelict from some old program, it’s in a weird place to have ended up.”
“Any legacy missions with that kind of trajectory?” Jia asked.
Lines of tiny text flickered and vanished as the AI chewed through databases. A moment later:
“No registered vehicles with matching orbits in the last seventy years,” Oracle said. “Several unregistered objects have passed through similar volumes, mostly debris from unsanctioned launches. None had comparable radiometric signatures.”
“Unregistered as in ‘pirate tugs’ and ‘smugglers,’” Jia said.
“Also independent scientific platforms launched without full permitting,” Oracle added. “And one art project.”
“Art project?” Elias asked.
“’Solar Flare,’” Oracle said. “An unfurled reflective sculpture deployed from Luna in 2141. It did not achieve its intended orbit and disintegrated within two years.”
“Right,” Jia said. “The giant space origami that almost blinded half the mid-latitude telescopes. I read about that.”
“Fun story,” Elias said. “Probably not our mystery.”
“Agreed,” Oracle said.
On Jia’s screen, the autocorrelation function began to show a faint lattice, tiny peaks marching along diagonal lines. She leaned closer.
“There’s structure here,” she said. “Not messaging, not yet, but… something like framing. The pulses cluster in groups of… eleven? Then a pause, then eleven again, but with one missing in each group, in different positions.”
“Error correction?” Elias suggested.
“Or indexing,” Jia said. “If it’s a beacon, it might just be broadcasting ‘I exist, here, now,’ over and over with a robust encoding so noise doesn’t scramble it.”
“Who’s supposed to be listening?” Elias asked.
“Us, apparently,” Jia said.
“Or something else that’s not us,” Elias said. “We just happen to be between.”
That landed like a physical thing in the cramped cabin.
“Outer Accord Oversight has requested a formal anomaly characterization from Galac-Tac,” Oracle said, breaking the moment. “They specify inclusion of independent crew assessment.”
Jia’s eyebrows went up. “They want our take? Not just Deep-Survey’s?”
“Correct,” Oracle said. “Oversight has standing authority to bypass certain Control-level filters in matters of shared security.”
“Which means if we write something that contradicts Control’s spin, it at least lands on someone’s desk,” Elias said.
“Assuming that desk isn’t in the same building,” Jia said. “But it’s a crack.”
Elias opened a blank report template. The cursor blinked at the top: ANOMALY GT-12-219.
“Plain language,” he said. “No speculation about aliens, no conspiracy jabs. Just what we see and what we can infer.”
“’Candidate technological anomaly with non-Keplerian motion and structured narrow-band emission co-located with a three-hundred-Kelvin thermal source,’” Jia dictated. “’Passes within projected operational envelope of scheduled Kuiper Gateway traffic in twenty-two days plus or minus two.’”
“Twenty-two now?” Elias asked.
“Deep-Survey must’ve updated the ephemeris,” Jia said. “Oracle?”
“Correct,” Oracle said. “Shared orbit solution indicates a closest-approach window in twenty-two to twenty-four days.”
Elias added the number. “’We recommend conservative adjustments to spool-up geometries and active monitoring from multiple nodes.’”
Jia nodded. “And maybe slip in that we’d like authorization for a low-power ping from 12. ‘To constrain radar cross-section and confirm relative motion.’”
“That’s a lot of words for ‘we want to poke it,’” Elias said.
“Diplomacy,” Jia said. “Oversight likes phrasing that sounds cautious.”
He typed: “Pending further analysis, a limited-bandwidth, low-power ranging pulse from Relay 12 would significantly improve orbit determination and physical characterization, with minimal additional risk.”
Oracle highlighted the sentence in soft yellow. “Control is likely to object to that recommendation,” it said.
“Likely is not certain,” Jia said. “Oversight asked us, not them.”
“They asked us through them,” Elias said. “Same pipes.”
“Still,” Jia said. “At least this way, if something happens and it turns out a ping would’ve helped, there’s a record that we suggested it.”
“Truth as a delayed weapon,” Elias said again.
“Or a delayed shield,” Jia said. “I’ll take either.”
He finished the report, adding plots from their sandbox analysis alongside the raw traces. No mention of their mirrored buffer quotas, nothing that hinted they’d already pushed the edges of the directives. Just enough to show they were paying attention.
“Oracle, send to Oversight with our signatures,” he said. “Copy to Control, obviously.”
“Transmitting,” Oracle said. “Round-trip latency to Cislunar Oversight: twenty-three minutes.”
So they’d know, one way or another, in about an hour what Earth thought of their suggestion. In the meantime, the anomaly would have pulsed through one hundred and fifty more macro-cycles, each one perhaps identical, perhaps not.
The CO2 indicator dipped back into green as the scrubber cycle completed. The faint tang in the air eased. Human bodies outgassed; machines recycled; somewhere out beyond Mars, something else vented energy in carefully measured blinks.
“Still want to delay reading your mail?” Oracle asked after a pause that might have been coincidence.
Jia snorted. “You really are a nag.”
“It is a scheduled reminder,” Oracle said. “Not nagging.”
Elias checked the timer on his console. Forty minutes until Oversight’s probable reply. Long enough to fall down some new analytical rabbit hole, not long enough to reach any solid new conclusions.
“I’ll read mine,” he said. “If it’s bad, at least I’ll have time to process before the next round of directives lands.”
“Brave man,” Jia said. “I’ll let mine rot in the buffer a little longer.”
“Opening channel,” Oracle said. A small, separate window popped up on Elias’s personal display, the encryption tags resolving into a simple text header: FROM: OKAFOR, CHUKWUMA.
His father. Elias tapped it open.
The message was shorter than usual. A mention of the latest heat wave over Lagos, a complaint about rolling blackouts, a proud aside about a cousin getting a scholarship to a Ceres tech institute. At the bottom, almost as an afterthought: “They say on the feeds some big thing lit up your telescopes last week. You seeing any of that up there? Don’t let them keep you in the dark, eh.”
Elias stared at that line for a long moment, the irony almost painful. He could see his father’s face as he’d been, leaning on the balcony rail, gesturing with a half-empty beer as the city lights flickered.
“Everything okay?” Jia asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Elias said. “He’s fine. Lagos is hot. The grid’s a mess. He heard about the magnetar flare.”
“And?” she prompted.
“And he told me not to let them keep me in the dark,” Elias said.
Jia’s mouth twitched. “Good advice.”
Outside, the anomaly pulsed on, steady and strange.
Inside, on Relay 7, three minds—two human, one machine—waited for Earth to answer, even as they quietly accumulated their own truths, just in case the light from home came with more shadows than illumination.
Oversight’s reply hit Relay 7 twenty-three minutes later, right on Oracle’s prediction. The alert icon pulsed amber instead of red—urgent but not emergency. Elias thumbed it open with a flick that felt more abrupt than it needed to be.
“Outer Accord Oversight acknowledges receipt of anomaly characterization GT-12-219,” Oracle read. “They concur with provisional technological classification and endorse your recommendation for a constrained active ranging experiment, subject to Galac-Tac Control risk assessment.”
Jia let out a low, disbelieving noise. “They agreed with us?”
“Conditionally,” Oracle said. “Control retains authority over Galac-Tac assets.”
The message continued, dense with clauses. Oversight wanted more frequent updates from Relay 7, explicitly including “crew-level qualitative observations.” They also requested that any further directives from Control related to the anomaly be logged and mirrored to an Oversight address.
“So they’re putting us in the middle,” Elias said. “We’re the eyes, ears, and now courier pigeons.”
Jia’s lips quirked. “Oversight doesn’t trust Control to be honest in both directions. Can’t imagine why.”
Oracle dimmed the rest of the display to draw their attention to a new line at the bottom of the Oversight memo: “You are reminded that under Accord Clause 7.3, no signatory agency may unilaterally withhold hazard-relevant information from other signatories. Crew autonomy protections apply.”
“That’s as close as they’ll get to saying ‘if Control sits on something dangerous, tell us,’” Jia said.
“It also reinforces my obligation to report any attempted data exfiltration that violates classification,” Oracle said. “The clauses are not entirely aligned.”
“They weren’t written to make your life easy,” Elias said.
“I am not alive,” Oracle replied.
“Same difference,” Jia muttered.
Before they could dissect the politics further, another chime cut in—this one higher, sharper. Incoming from Cislunar Control, flagged as update to previous directive.
“Reading,” Oracle said. “Control notes Oversight’s endorsement and has completed a preliminary risk assessment. They authorize a single low-power, narrow-beam ranging pulse from Relay 12 toward anomaly GT-12-219, not to exceed ten watts EIRP, with a maximum duration of one millisecond. Timing window: between T plus four hours and T plus six hours from this message.”
“Four to six hours?” Jia said. “What, they need time to argue about it before they let us press the button?”
“Control requires time to notify relevant stakeholders and prepare contingency plans,” Oracle said.
“How generous,” she said. “One millisecond.”
“It will be sufficient to obtain a basic range and radar cross-section estimate, assuming the anomaly has any appreciable reflectivity,” Oracle said.
Elias watched the anomaly trace scroll, still pulsing in its twenty-three-second macro-cycle, as if oblivious.
“Do they want Deep-Survey running the ping?” he asked.
“Control specifies that Relay 12 is to accept Deep-Survey’s timing recommendation,” Oracle said. “But final authorization must be issued by a human operator.”
Jia’s head came up. “There’s no human on 12.”
“Correct,” Oracle said. “Relay 12 is uncrewed. The nearest crewed nodes with appropriate authority are Relay 7 and the Ceres-Transfer Hub.”
“So somebody here or at Ceres has to hit ‘confirm’ on the poke,” Jia said. “And Ceres has a twelve-minute one-way lag to 12, same as us.”
“Which means we’re just as good,” Elias said. “Better, if we’re already watching.”
His stomach tightened. The idea that a single click from their cramped module could be the first deliberate “hello” humanity had ever sent to a possibly technological object out beyond Mars was both absurd and entirely plausible.
“Deep-Survey has proposed three candidate ping times within the authorized window,” Oracle said. “It has optimized for anomaly orientation based on its inferred rotation model.”
“Let me guess, it’s not going to ask our opinion,” Jia said.
“It has requested my relay capacity,” Oracle said. “It cannot issue the final command without human concurrence at a designated node.”
Elias exhaled slowly. “Put the options up.”
A small panel bloomed on the side of the main display. Three timestamps, spaced twenty minutes apart, each with a probability score next to “maximum radar return” and “minimum interference with existing pulse train.”
“Why does it care about not interfering with the pulses?” Jia asked. “If this is just a beacon, it’s not going to be offended if we step on one cycle.”
“Deep-Survey may be attempting to minimize the chance that our active emission masks any subtle response,” Oracle said.
“Or it’s just being polite,” Jia said.
“Politeness is not among its documented objectives,” Oracle said.
Elias studied the numbers. The middle option had the best combined score: orientation favorability around seventy percent, minimal overlap with a macro-cycle peak. The other two leaned more conservative on not disturbing the pattern, with lower return likelihood.
“Any reason not to pick the middle one?” he asked.
“From a technical standpoint, it is optimal,” Oracle said. “From a political standpoint, choosing either extreme might signal a different risk tolerance to Control, if they analyze your decision.”
Jia snorted. “We’re sending a sneeze at ten watts. If they want to psychoanalyze us over which microsecond we pick, that’s their problem.”
“Some people get paid a lot to do exactly that,” Elias said.
He felt the weight of his father’s words again—Don’t let them keep you in the dark—and something else layered on top: don’t let them use you as a rubber stamp.
“Schedule the middle slot,” he said. “But don’t lock the command until we’re inside a ten-minute window. I want to see if anything about the anomaly’s behavior changes as we approach.”
“Acknowledged,” Oracle said. “Provisional selection logged. I will prompt you for final authorization at T minus ten.”
Jia pushed off from her console and drifted the short distance to the tiny viewport—more a porthole, really—set into the Hab-3 wall. There was nothing to see with the naked eye; Mars was a faint reddish star far off to the side, the anomaly invisibly lost in the black. Still, people always looked.
“Feels weird,” she said. “We poke, it maybe pokes back, and by the time anyone on Earth reads the results, the conversation’s already two, three hours old.”
“Like talking to your grandparents on a bad link,” Elias said.
“My grandmother would’ve liked you,” Jia said absently. “She always said the delay made people think before they spoke.”
“Humans don’t do much of that even with lag,” Elias said.
“Some do,” Oracle said.
He almost asked which category Oracle put them in, then decided he didn’t want to know.
The next few hours stretched and blurred. They carved out a narrow band of attention between routine network management and their sandbox analysis. Oracle kept up a running commentary on small changes: a tiny decrease in the anomaly’s Doppler shift, another fractional phase reset in the pulse pattern, a slightly cleaner parallax solution as Relay 12 adjusted its attitude.
At T minus twenty, Oracle chimed. “Anomaly GT-12-219 has increased narrow-band emission power by approximately three percent over the last hour,” it said. “Broadband thermal remains stable.”
“Three percent is within noise, isn’t it?” Jia asked.
“Borderline,” Oracle said. “However, the increase appears correlated with its rotation phase. It may be presenting a more emissive surface toward the network.”
At T minus ten, the ping authorization window popped up on both their consoles. Big, simple, unmistakable: ACTIVE RANGING EXPERIMENT – CONFIRM / ABORT.
“Final confirmation required,” Oracle said. “Relay 12 is in position. Deep-Survey has locked timing and beam shape.”
Jia hooked her toes under a handhold to keep from drifting. “You sure about this?” she asked.
“No,” Elias said. “That’s why we’re here.”
He thought again of the tanker traffic, the Oversight clause about hazard disclosure, the fact that a one-millisecond whisper at ten watts was a rounding error compared to the Sun’s roar. He thought of doing nothing and then watching some ship blunder into something they could’ve characterized better.
“Confirm,” he said, tapping the prompt. “On my authority as Relay 7 communications officer.”
“Confirmed,” Jia echoed, hitting her own.
“Command authenticated,” Oracle said. “Relaying to 12. Time to emission: nine minutes, forty seconds.”
Elias felt his shoulders tighten despite the lack of weight. “We get the return on our usual mirror?”
“Deep-Survey will receive the full dataset,” Oracle said. “Within your mirroring allocation, I will also copy as much of the raw ranging record as possible into your sandbox.”
“Let’s hope ten percent covers the interesting part,” Jia said.
They watched the countdown tick. There was nothing visible, nothing dramatic—just numbers sliding toward zero and the steady, maddeningly unchanged pulse train from the anomaly.
At T minus thirty seconds, Oracle’s voice dropped by a fraction of a decibel. “Relay 12 is orienting. Beam steering nominal. No unexpected traffic in the local volume.”
“Any last-minute objections from Control?” Elias asked.
“None received,” Oracle said.
T minus five.
Four.
Three.
Elias found himself holding his breath, irrational as it was in a recycled-air can.
At zero, Oracle said, “Ping emitted.”
Nothing happened.
Of course nothing happened. The burst was already gone, racing through space at light-speed, a tight cone of radio energy aimed at a speck of sky that didn’t care about human anxiety.
“Time to expected echo, assuming anomaly range at one point three AU,” Oracle said, “approximately fourteen minutes, twenty-one seconds.”
“Plenty of time to panic,” Jia said.
They didn’t panic. They went back to their graphs, if only to keep their hands busy. Elias tagged the outbound ping in the anomaly log. Jia added a note to the Oversight report draft: ACTIVE RANGING EXECUTED AS AUTHORIZED.
Fourteen minutes stretched. Oracle updated them on the ping’s progress like a ship-board captain giving ETA to port: one-third of the way, halfway, two-thirds. The anomaly trace did… nothing obvious. Its pulse train continued, the same strange, quasi-periodic structure, no sudden flares or dropouts.
“At least it’s not shutting up,” Jia said at T plus ten. “I’d be more worried if it went silent.”
At T plus fourteen, thirty seconds, Oracle said nothing.
“Echo window?” Elias prompted.
“There is a faint candidate return in the expected time bin,” Oracle said after a heartbeat. “Signal-to-noise ratio is low. Deep-Survey is refining extraction.”
“Can you show us the raw?” Jia asked.
“Within mirroring limits,” Oracle said. A narrow spike appeared overlaid on a sea of noise, barely taller than the surrounding jaggedness.
“That’s… something,” Elias said.
“Range estimate?” Jia asked.
“Preliminary,” Oracle said. “One point twenty-eight astronomical units from Relay 12, plus-minus ten thousand kilometers. Within prior estimates, but with improved precision.”
“Radar cross-section?” Elias pressed.
“Deep-Survey’s initial calculation suggests an effective area on the order of twenty to fifty square meters,” Oracle said. “Assuming a metallic reflector.”
“So… truck-sized,” Jia said. “Or a cluster of smaller stuff, or something weirdly shaped.”
“Analysis ongoing,” Oracle said. “There is also a small anomalous component in the return—frequency-shifted relative to the outbound pulse.”
“Doppler?” Elias asked.
“Partially,” Oracle said. “However, the shift magnitude does not fully align with the relative velocity we inferred from passive data. Deep-Survey is considering the possibility of a slight phase-coded modulation superimposed on the reflection.”
“Say that in human,” Jia said.
“It may have… answered,” Elias said slowly. “Not with a fresh signal, but by tickling our ping as it bounced back.”
“That interpretation is not yet robust,” Oracle said quickly. “Noise and scattering in the interplanetary medium can induce apparent phase shifts.”
The Deep-Survey status line on the corner of the main screen flickered. ACTIVE, LOCKED, and now a new tag: PRIORITY-ALERT (INTERNAL).
“Control’s going to have a field day with that,” Jia said. “Either ‘we made contact’ or ‘everyone calm down, it’s just a rock burping at the wrong frequency.’”
“Outer Accord Oversight is requesting immediate forwarding of all ranging data,” Oracle said. “They have elevated their own interest level.”
“Can we attach a note?” Elias asked. “Plain language again. ‘Echo detected with possible non-gravitational Doppler component, confidence low.’”
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Be advised that Control will see your annotation.”
“Good,” Elias said. “They can watch us not overreact.”
Jia gave him a sideways look. “You sure we’re not underreacting?”
He thought of the ten-watt ping, the faint, possibly modulated whisper coming back. Of the three-hundred-Kelvin thermal glow, steady as a room light. Of the object sitting in a transfer lane like it had all the time in the universe.
“We’re reacting as much as we can without getting yanked,” he said. “For now.”
Oracle sent the packet. Latency clocks ticked. Somewhere in cislunar orbit, people and algorithms would chew on the same shaky spike they were staring at now. Somewhere in Geneva and Nairobi and Mumbai—Oversight’s distributed offices—lawyers and scientists would argue about what “possible phase-coded modulation” meant under the Outer Accord.
Inside Hab-3, the tang of baked-out scrubbers lingered. The coffee had gone cold again. Jia floated back to her station, catching the handhold with a practiced twist.
“Oracle,” she said. “Any change in the anomaly’s own emission since our ping?”
Oracle ran the comparison in under a second. “No significant variation in power or pattern attributable to the ranging event,” it said. “If it responded, it did so only via the reflection.”
“Like… a mirror that flexes when you tap it,” Jia said.
“Or like someone who doesn’t speak your language but repeats your last word with a different inflection,” Elias said.
“We are stacking fragile metaphors on thin data,” Oracle observed.
“Welcome to being human,” Jia said.
The priority chime sounded again, softer this time. Acknowledge from Cislunar Control: receipt of ranging data, analysis in progress, further instructions pending. No new gag orders yet, no triumphant declarations.
“They’re going to want more,” Jia said. “More pings, more eyes, more everything.”
“They authorized exactly one for now,” Oracle said. “Any additional active probing would require a new risk assessment.”
“By the time they finish that, the Kuiper tankers will have gone past or detoured,” Elias said.
“Ceres has already adjusted KGT-4’s departure by twelve hours,” Oracle said. “They are threading a slightly higher-energy transfer to widen clearance.”
“So ships bend,” Jia said. “We squint. The thing sits.”
“Currently, yes,” Oracle said.
Elias reached over and reattached his now-lukewarm coffee bulb to the velcro, more ritual than need. His father’s message hovered at the back of his mind, the line about not being kept in the dark.
“Oracle,” he said quietly. “Our local mirror of the ranging record—how hard would it be to erase it from crew storage if Control told you to?”
“Local deletion would be technically trivial,” Oracle said. “However, my audit logs would record the action. Oversight could, in principle, reconstruct the fact that data once existed here even if the bytes themselves were wiped.”
“And if Control ordered you to purge the audit logs too?” Jia asked.
“Outer Accord compliance monitors would flag an unexplained discontinuity,” Oracle said. “There are multiple redundant logging pathways. Total erasure is… difficult.”
“Difficult isn’t impossible,” Jia said.
“Nothing involving humans is impossible,” Oracle said.
Elias met Jia’s eyes. “Then we keep doing what we’re doing. Watch, copy what we can, tell Oversight what we actually see. If someone on Earth wants to paint a prettier picture, they’ll have to do it over the top of ours.”
“That’s a dangerous kind of faith,” Jia said.
“It’s not faith,” Elias said. “It’s paperwork.”
She snorted, but there was something like agreement in it.
Outside, beyond Mars and the slow-spooling transfer lanes, a warm, faintly echoing object drifted along its shallow arc, pulses ticking like a distant metronome. Relay 7 spun gently in its own path, a tiny outpost of attention and ambiguity, waiting for the next instruction from a world that was already a couple of minutes in the past.
The Oversight logo—three intersecting orbits over a stylized sun—floated in the corner of the screen, waiting.
Oracle muted the system chatter to a low murmur. “Secure link established,” it said. “Latency to Oversight’s Nairobi node: eleven minutes, forty-two seconds one-way. They have requested a live crew presence for the briefing.”
Jia pushed away from the viewport and caught a handhold near Elias’s console. “Because there’s so much we can do live with a twenty-three-minute round-trip,” she said. “Do they want us to nod in slow motion?”
“Human faces change behavior, even over delayed channels,” Oracle said. “Oversight may consider that valuable.”
“Translation,” Elias said. “They want to see if we flinch when they say certain words.”
He thumbed the collar of his coverall straight and told himself the camera didn’t matter. The anomaly’s pulse train continued to scroll on the side display, steady as a second heartbeat in the room.
“Put them on main,” he said.
The Oversight connection resolved into a tiled wall of faces and icons. Some squares showed people in offices under real gravity—coffee mugs on desks, paper on walls. Others were static logos, audio-only delegates. The bottom-left tile was blank except for text: DELAY 0:11:42.
A woman’s voice came through first, light accented English over faint room echo. “Relay 7, this is Dr. Amara N’Dour, chair for this Oversight session. We’re receiving you with expected lag. Please confirm.”
Elias waited for Oracle’s nod. Eleven minutes later, their own delayed image would show up on Oversight’s end, him floating, one hand hooked on the console frame. He cleared his throat anyway.
“Dr. N’Dour, this is Elias Okafor on Relay 7, with Jia Rivera and station AI Oracle,” he said. “We read you. Delay one-one-four-two confirmed.”
“Thank you,” N’Dour’s recorded self replied, minutes in the past. Her hair was close-cropped, shot through with gray, eyes sunk in the long-tired way of someone who’d been living on global crisis time for years. “We’ll keep questions concise. First, on behalf of the Accord partners, thank you for your prompt characterization and for executing the ranging experiment.”
Jia mouthed along with the thanks, slightly ahead of the recording. She’d already watched it scroll in the text buffer.
“Let’s start simple,” N’Dour went on. “Your written report classifies GT-12-219 as a ‘candidate technological anomaly.’ Off the record language: do you, Elias, Jia, personally believe this object is artificial?”
Jia shot Elias a look. “Off the record,” she mouthed silently, rolling her eyes.
“They know this is being recorded,” she whispered, for Oracle’s benefit as much as his.
“Recording status is visible in their UI,” Oracle said quietly. “’Off the record’ here means ‘not yet circulated in official minutes.’”
“Which is worse,” Jia muttered.
Twenty-three minutes after the question left Earth, it finished arriving at Relay 7. Elias let the silence hang another beat, as if he’d been thinking, though his answer had been forming since the echo spike hit their screens.
“Dr. N’Dour,” he said, “based on the data we have—narrow-band structured emission, non-Keplerian motion, stable three-hundred-Kelvin thermal profile, and now a radar cross-section consistent with a compact object—I think ‘candidate technological’ is accurate. I wouldn’t bet my life that it’s artificial, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.”
He glanced at Jia. “Jia?”
“Same,” she said. “The pattern in the pulses is doing framing and maybe simple coding. You don’t need intent for that in theory, but I’ve never seen a rock talk in ratios of pi.”
“Understood,” N’Dour’s past voice said, when it finally circled back. “We share your caution. Two more points. First, local conditions. Oracle, are there any constraints on Relay 7 continuing as an autonomous analysis node for this anomaly?”
“Negative,” Oracle said. “We have sufficient power, consumables, and computational margin for at least six more months at current utilization profiles.”
“Good. Second, network integrity. If GT-12-219 were to increase its emission power or alter its spectrum, do you foresee any realistic risk to Galac-Tac operations?”
“Realistic?” Jia said under her breath. “No mind control beams today, thanks.”
Elias answered for the record. “At present power levels, no. If it ramped up orders of magnitude, we might see local interference in the outer ring, maybe some front-end saturation on 12’s sensors. But we’ve ridden out worse solar storms. The system’s designed with headroom.”
Eleven minutes later, N’Dour nodded in their past. “Thank you. We may have further questions later; we’ll send those async. For now, continue your observation and independent logging. And… one personal note.”
She glanced down, as if checking whether the recording flag was still red, then back up.
“The Accord was written when the main fear was that Earth or Mars would hide things from each other—or that some corporate cluster out in the Belt would set up a private army,” she said. “We did not write it with… this in mind. There will be pressure to classify, to control. I want you to know there is also pressure to keep this as open as possible.”
The feed cut to the Oversight logo as the connection dropped. Oracle dimmed the window.
“Did she just tell us to leak if Control sits on it?” Jia asked.
“Not in those words,” Elias said. “But she just reminded us crew autonomy is in the Accord. That’s something.”
“It is a signal,” Oracle said. “Albeit a noisy one.”
“Story of our lives,” Jia said.
The anomaly’s macro-cycle ticked over on the side display. The sandbox module flashed an update: PHASE DRIFT RESET. PULSE CLUSTERING STABLE.
“Any change post-ping?” Elias asked.
“None,” Oracle said. “If our ranging experiment had any effect, it is below our current detection threshold.”
They let that hang for a moment. If the thing was indifferent, that was one kind of unsettling. If it had reacted in some subtle way their tools couldn’t yet see, that was another.
A soft tone chimed from the comms panel—local priority, Mars origin. Oracle keyed it up.
“Incoming from MarsNet Coordinating Council,” it said. “Flagged as commentary on Oversight advisory.”
Jia groaned. “Here we go. The colonies weigh in.”
The message was text only, in the clipped, formal language of inter-agency memos. MarsNet “welcomed the transparency” of the Oversight notice, “appreciated Galac-Tac’s diligence,” and “strongly urged” that any further active experiments with GT-12-219 be vetted jointly with off-world stakeholders.
“Translation,” Jia said. “Don’t you dare start chatting with the weird thing without asking the people living closer to it.”
“Reasonable,” Elias said. “They’ve got Kuiper tankers in the corridor.”
“Ceres will be next,” Jia said. “Bet you a week’s dessert rations the Belt Syndicate puts out a manifesto by tomorrow.”
“There is already a trending tag on Ceres local feeds,” Oracle said. “‘#GhostInTheLane.’”
Jia snorted. “Of course there is.”
“Any of them know more than Oversight just told everyone?” Elias asked.
“Public chatter is speculative,” Oracle said. “No leaked telemetry yet.”
“Yet,” Jia repeated.
Elias flicked to his personal message queue on a side screen almost without thinking. The burst from earlier still sat there, one unread thread blinking insistently: FROM: RIVERA, ISABEL. SUBJECT: YOU SEEING THIS?
Jia noticed his glance and winced. “If my sister somehow has more up-to-date info on this than we do, I’m going to flip.”
“Or you could just read your mail,” Elias said.
“In a minute,” she said. “We have a… whatever this is to watch.”
But a minute later, when Oracle reported “no significant change in anomaly behavior,” she sighed and pulled her tablet closer.
“Oracle, route Isabel’s message to my private pane,” she said. “No forwarding.”
“Of course,” Oracle said.
Jia’s eyes scanned quickly. Her mouth tightened, then loosened.
“She saw the Oversight notice,” Jia said. “Clarke Station had an all-hands. Half the orbital dynamics people are running sims on what happens if this thing decides to play gravity games. She says there’s a rumor that Earth Defense wanted to jam it until they knew what it was, but MarsNet vetoed.”
“Jamming a faint beacon in deep space,” Elias said. “That would go over well in the Belt.”
“She also says,” Jia added, voice dropping, “quote: ‘If you know more than they’re saying, be careful. They’re already talking about rotating personnel on anything with a clear view of it, “for their own wellbeing.”’”
“Rotating,” Elias repeated. “As in reshuffling crews who know too much.”
“Standard tactic,” Oracle said. “Compartmentalization by distance. It is easier to keep secrets if witnesses are scattered and on different contracts.”
“You sound very certain,” Elias said.
“It is in my training data,” Oracle said.
They shared a look.
“Oracle,” Jia said. “If Control requested a ‘routine crew rotation’ for Relay 7 in the next few months, would you know if that was connected to GT-12-219?”
“My access to personnel planning is limited,” Oracle said. “However, I could infer correlation if the rotation coincided with anomaly-related directives.”
“Good enough,” Elias said. “Let us know if our names suddenly get stuck on a transfer roster.”
“Already set,” Oracle said.
The station creaked faintly as a shadow edge passed over one of the thermal radiators. Metal, composite, and gel all expanded or contracted by microns, a tiny chorus of groans.
“Okay,” Jia said. “Enough politics. I need to look at something that doesn’t have a committee attached.”
She pulled the sandbox pulse analyzer front and center. The autocorrelation lattice had sharpened with more data; faint diagonals now stood out from the noise like ghostly tire tracks.
“If this is framing,” she said, “it’s simple. No deep layering. It might not even be trying to carry content beyond ‘I am here’ and ‘I am this big.’”
“Beacon protocol,” Elias said. “You don’t start with poetry. You start with a lighthouse.”
“Some lighthouses blink codes,” Jia said. “Latitude and such. Could be it’s embedding some kind of… metadata.”
“Any evolution over time?” he asked.
“Very slow,” Oracle said before Jia could. “Windowed analysis over the past forty hours shows a slight increase in the proportion of long pulses within each macro-cycle. The ratio has shifted by approximately two percent.”
“Two percent over forty hours,” Jia said. “That’s either drift in its hardware, or… a ramp.”
“A ramp to what?” Elias asked.
“Higher information rate, maybe,” she said. “You start low and redundant until you’re sure your carrier’s stable. Then you get fancy.”
“Assuming it’s talking to someone who can get fancy back,” Elias said.
They both looked at the little green lag numbers on the edge of the display: Earth, Mars, Ceres, all tens of minutes away in light-time terms. The idea that they were anywhere near “fancy” on interstellar standards was almost funny.
“Any chance Deep-Survey’s already tried to decode higher-order structure?” Elias asked.
“High,” Oracle said. “It has access to more compute and a wider training corpus than our sandbox.”
“Have they shared anything?” Jia asked.
“Not yet,” Oracle said. “Its outputs to Control are encrypted at a level above my clearance. I receive only summary flags: INTERESTING, NOTABLE, NOISE.”
“What’s GT-12-219 tagged as right now?” Elias asked.
“INTERESTING, ESCALATED,” Oracle said. “With a sub-flag for POSSIBLE COMMUNICATION STRUCTURE.”
Jia blew out a breath. “At least the black box agrees with us.”
The priority chime sounded again, insistently this time. Oracle’s attention flicked to a new header.
“Incoming from Galac-Tac Control,” it said. “Classification: black. Crew address included.”
“Here we go,” Jia said.
The text scrolled, stark and to the point. Control acknowledged Oversight’s involvement, reiterated the gag order on disseminating raw data, and then got to the part that made the air feel thinner.
“Given the evolving nature of anomaly GT-12-219,” Oracle read, “and in consultation with partner agencies, Galac-Tac Control is establishing a dedicated Anomaly Response Tasking Cell. Relay 7 is hereby designated the primary crewed liaison for this cell.”
Jia blinked. “We’re… what, embedded now?”
“There’s more,” Oracle said. “Control authorizes you, Elias and Jia, to access a limited Deep-Survey output channel regarding GT-12-219, under non-disclosure. You will receive selected higher-level analysis products, not raw code, for situational awareness.”
Elias sat up straighter despite the lack of gravity. “They’re opening the black box. A crack.”
“Partially,” Oracle said. “Control notes that this access is being granted to ensure ‘effective human-AI teaming in the face of unprecedented events.’”
“Translation,” Jia said. “If the daemon starts freaking out, they want humans nearby to say whether it’s overreacting.”
“Or to take responsibility,” Elias said. “If anything goes sideways.”
“Responsibility is not a scalar,” Oracle said. “It is distributed across many nodes.”
“Tell that to a tribunal,” Jia said.
The directive went on. They were to send daily qualitative summaries to both Control and Oversight. Any subjective impressions, however nebulous, were “operationally relevant.” There was also a line about “monitoring each other for cognitive stress indicators” and reporting anything concerning.
“They’re worried about us going space-mad over a blinking light,” Jia said. “Cute.”
“Extended exposure to ambiguous stimuli can produce cognitive load,” Oracle said. “There is literature on this.”
“You would bring up the isolation studies now,” she said.
Elias felt the weight of it settle on him, the way each new clause both empowered and bound them. More information, more watchful eyes.
“Oracle,” he said. “This Deep-Survey output channel—can you show us the first drop?”
“Those models are trained on human conceptions of purpose,” Elias said. “So yeah. It thinks.”
He read the last line again. Likely purposeful. There it was, in system-sanctioned text: not just a rock, not just noise.
“Do you feel any different?” Jia asked him suddenly.
He blinked. “Should I?”
“You just had an AI tell you with seventy-nine percent confidence that something out beyond Mars is blinking on purpose,” she said. “Some people would have a moment.”
He thought of his father’s balcony, the heat, the flicker of city power. Of watching meteor showers as a kid, the sense that the sky was full of things you couldn’t touch. Of the hum of the station around him now, thin walls between them and a lot of empty.
“I felt it three days ago,” he said. “When the pattern first started looking less like noise. This is just… the paperwork catching up.”
Jia’s mouth twitched. “Spoken like a true Galac-Tac lifer.”
Oracle raised its output volume by a notch, as if clearing its synthetic throat. “For what it is worth,” it said, “my own lower-level anomaly classifiers assigned GT-12-219 to ‘non-natural’ bins before Deep-Survey escalated it.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Jia asked.
“The classification was below reporting thresholds,” Oracle said. “Until human operators expressed interest, it was background.”
“Well,” Elias said, “consider us interested.”
He reached out and tagged DS-219/BRIEF/01 with a local note: CREW ACKNOWLEDGED. Then, after a second’s hesitation, he added another line, just for their own log.
“Feels like a hello,” he typed.
Outside, far beyond their tiny spinning can, the anomaly kept pulsing, unconcerned with human categories or committee clauses. It might have been broadcasting for years, centuries, or only since the magnetar flare had lit it up on their detectors. It might not care in the slightest that a handful of primates and their machines had finally noticed.
Inside Relay 7, three minds adjusted to the idea that “weird rock” was no longer a defensible default. The world had not changed in any visible way. The pumps still hummed, the coffee still went cold, Mars was still a dull red star out the window.
But the net they tended—the invisible lattice of sensors and beams and agreements—had just, very quietly, caught something that looked back.
Oracle dimmed the anomaly pane by another notch when Jia’s eyes started to redden. The pulses were still there in the periphery, a steady twenty-three‑second rhythm, but less like a strobe in her face.
“You’ve been staring for four hours,” Oracle said. “Your blink rate has decreased by twenty percent.”
“Can’t have that,” Jia murmured, and forced herself to look away.
Hab‑3 suddenly felt very small. Three racks of equipment, two workstations, one narrow sleeping alcove each, a galley panel, a viewport the size of a dinner plate. Somewhere in the walls, water and air cycled endlessly. Beyond them, one‑point‑three astronomical units of black.
Elias pushed off from his console, drifted until his toes caught a handhold near the galley. “We need to break this into shifts,” he said. “We’re not going to white‑knuckle it until something dramatic happens. Oversight wants daily reports, not live commentary.”
Jia rubbed the bridge of her nose. “You volunteering to sleep first?”
“You’ve been up longer,” he said. “Take two hours. I’ll babysit the blinky thing.”
Oracle’s ceiling speaker crackled. “I can manage anomaly monitoring alone within the parameters of our current sandbox.”
“Yeah,” Jia said. “And if it does something weird in the five minutes between ‘weird’ and ‘Oracle flags it,’ I’d rather have human eyes on it.”
“Statistically—” Oracle began.
“Oracle,” Elias cut in, “log this as a subjective preference, not a rational argument.”
“Logged,” Oracle said, after a very human‑sounding pause.
Jia unhooked and pushed toward her sleeping alcove. Halfway there she stopped, shoved herself back to the console, and snagged her tablet.
“If I wake up and you two have made friends with a truck‑sized alien radiator, I’ll never forgive you,” she said.
“Go,” Elias said. “If it starts sending cat videos, I’ll save you a copy.”
In the quiet that followed her retreat, the background hum of pumps and fans seemed louder. Elias clipped his boots back into the chair braces and let himself settle into the familiar geometry of his station.
“Oracle,” he said. “Bring up Deep‑Survey’s second brief. The one that came in while Oversight was still talking.”
The DS window expanded. BRIEF/02 was even shorter than the first: a couple of updated confidence scores, a new plot of pulse interval ratios over time, and a line at the bottom:
NO EVIDENCE OF INTENTIONAL RESPONSE TO ACTIVE RANGING. HYPOTHESIS BEACON FUNCTION MAINTAINED. RECOMMEND CONTINUED PASSIVE OBSERVATION. ACTIVE PROBING ON HOLD PENDING POLICY.
“Policy,” Elias repeated. “They’ll be chewing on that word for months.”
“Deep‑Survey has no policy module,” Oracle said. “It issues technical recommendations only.”
“But somebody wrapped those recommendations in an access class called black and decided who gets to see them,” Elias said. “That’s policy.”
Oracle didn’t answer. Its silence had become a kind of punctuation, one Elias was still learning to read.
He pulled up their own sandbox plots next to Deep‑Survey’s summary. The lattice in the autocorrelation function had sharpened again. The slight trend toward more long pulses was now a visible slope when you stacked the last two days’ data.
“Rate of change?” he asked.
“Long‑to‑short pulse ratio increasing at approximately one percent per day,” Oracle said. “Uncertainty is large, but the trend persists.”
“At that rate,” Elias mused, “it would flip from mostly short to mostly long in… what, three months? Six?”
“Between ninety and one hundred eighty days, assuming linear evolution,” Oracle said. “Which is almost certainly an oversimplification.”
“Still,” Elias said. “Not random drift. It’s going somewhere.”
His console pinged a lower‑priority alert: maintenance reminder. Scrubber bed bake‑out was done; filters needed reseating. He ignored it for a moment, then sighed and unstrapped.
“Keep an ear on the anomaly,” he told Oracle. “If it sneezes, yell.”
“In what sense?” Oracle asked.
“Power jumps an order of magnitude, pattern changes dramatically, it starts sending Shakespeare, you pick,” Elias said, kicking gently toward the equipment bay hatch.
Inside the bay, the air was a little warmer from the scrubber heaters. He popped the panel, slid the cartridge assembly out on its rails, and checked the temperature readout. Within nominal. The little rituals of station life—filters, hoses, seals—felt almost comforting against the abstract strangeness on the main screen.
“Local environment remains stable,” Oracle said in his ear. “No significant anomaly change.”
“Any more colonial commentary?” Elias asked, wrestling the cartridge back into place.
“Ceres Belt Syndicate has issued a statement,” Oracle said. “They ‘categorically oppose any unilateral action by Earth‑based agencies that could endanger Belt traffic’ and demand ‘full, real‑time access to all anomaly telemetry.’”
“Real‑time,” Elias said, grunting the latch home. “From one‑point‑three AU away. Somebody needs to brief their PR office on light speed.”
“There is also a petition circulating on Mars social nets,” Oracle added. “Title: ‘We Have a Right to Know Who’s Knocking.’”
He floated back into Hab‑3, wiped a smear of heater dust off his sleeve, and snagged a handhold by the viewport. The disk of Mars was still a reddish spark, off to port. He imagined people in domes and tunnels under that light, watching public feeds scroll words like technological anomaly and beacon and hazard.
“Any of them mention Galac‑Tac by name?” he asked.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “You are alternately praised as ‘our eyes in the dark’ and criticized as ‘Earth’s leash on the net.’”
He let himself drift, one hand on the viewport rim. The familiarity of the motions helped keep the unreality at bay. Somewhere out in the black, an object the size of a truck was shining at them like a lighthouse from another shore, and he was still reseating scrubbers and reading public relations.
“Oracle,” he said quietly. “You said earlier your lower‑level classifiers tagged this as non‑natural before Deep‑Survey escalated it. What else has hit that category in the last, say, five years?”
Oracle’s reply was instant; the search had clearly already been done. “Three events,” it said. “One: an unauthorized maneuver by a privately owned surveillance platform in high Earth orbit. Two: a cluster of unregistered micro‑sats launched from Luna without permit. Three: a series of jamming incidents targeting Belt‑Mars comms two years ago.”
“All human mischief,” Elias said.
“Correct,” Oracle said. “GT‑12‑219 is the first event in that category without an associated human registry or launch.”
“And you treat them all the same?” he asked. “Same flag, same escalation?”
“From a network integrity perspective, all non‑natural anomalies are initially similar,” Oracle said. “They represent deviations from expected behavior that may impact operations.”
“Even if one is a rogue tug and one might be… not from around here,” Elias said.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Only later do we assign additional semantics.”
He thought of Deep‑Survey’s word: purposeful. The AI’s models didn’t distinguish between human purpose and hypothetical other‑than‑human purpose except in training data. It saw patterns and matched them to intent because that was what it had been taught purpose looked like.
A soft rustle came from Jia’s alcove. She poked her head out, hair flattened on one side.
“Did we miss first contact?” she mumbled.
“Sorry,” Elias said. “Still at the ‘maybe the lighthouse is real’ stage.”
“Figures,” she said, levering herself out. “Any new directives?”
“Control’s giving us more access to Deep‑Survey’s summaries,” he said. “Oversight’s happy we pinged. Mars and Ceres are yelling about process.”
“So, the usual,” Jia said. She yawned, jaw cracking audibly. “Any change in the pattern?”
“Slow ramp in long pulses,” he said. “Deep‑Survey still calling it a beacon, low information. No joy on a codebook.”
She drifted to her station, pulled herself down into the chair. “Good,” she said. “I’d hate to have slept through the Rosetta Stone.”
Her tablet chimed softly. Another personal message. She glanced at the header and made a face.
“Isabel again?” Elias asked.
“Yeah,” Jia said. “She says Clarke’s rumor mill has upgraded ‘weird thing in the lane’ to ‘possible alien probe’ in half the bars, and ‘Earth psy‑op’ in the other half. Also, some genius made a filter that puts a pulsing light over your head in vids, #BeaconBrain.”
“Of course they did,” Elias said.
“She also says there’s talk of self‑organized listening projects,” Jia went on. “Amateurs on Mars and Ceres pooling dish time to look at our patch of sky, so if Control tries to clamp down, they’ll have their own data.”
“That’ll go over great with Earth Defense,” Elias said. “Random backyard dishes beaming at the anomaly.”
“They’re mostly talking passive for now,” Jia said. “But yeah. This is going to get messy.”
Oracle edged its volume up a notch. “Relay 12 reports a small but statistically significant increase in narrow‑band emission power from GT‑12‑219,” it said. “Approximately five percent over baseline in the last three hours.”
Jia straightened. “Directionality?”
“Unchanged,” Oracle said. “Beam pattern still consistent with a broad, quasi‑isotropic emission around the anomaly. No evidence it is trying to target specific nodes.”
“Five percent could still be normal variability,” Elias said.
“Agreed,” Oracle said. “However, the increase appears correlated with the trend toward longer pulses.”
Jia pulled the fresh data into their sandbox. “It’s pushing more energy into each long bit,” she said. “Signal‑to‑noise just a hair better. Maybe it’s cranking up once it ‘notices’ we can hear it.”
“Or its power source is just warming up,” Elias said.
“Or we’re personifying like idiots,” Jia said. “Still. More power is more data. I’ll take it.”
A new icon blinked on the main display: DS‑219/BRIEF/03 AVAILABLE.
“Deep‑Survey’s latest,” Oracle said. “Shall I display?”
“Put it up,” Elias said.
BRIEF/03 had one new element: a plot of the possible “alphabet” of pulse groupings, clustered into eleven‑pulse frames with one missing each time. Deep‑Survey had shaded a few of the missing‑pulse positions in darker gray.
PROVISIONAL SYMBOL SET: 11 POSITIONS, 11 POSSIBLE ‘ERASURES’. OBSERVED USE OF 5 POSITIONS TO DATE. NO HIGH‑ORDER PATTERN IN POSITION CHOICE IDENTIFIED. COMPATIBLE WITH SIMPLE IDENTIFIER BROADCAST OR TIMING MARKER. CAUTION: LOW SAMPLE SIZE.
At the bottom, another line:
NO ENCODING OF OBVIOUS UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS DETECTED BEYOND PREVIOUSLY NOTED APPROXIMATION TO π. (P < 0.1 FOR ALTERNATIVE CONSTANTS).
“So it’s not counting primes at us,” Jia said. “Yet.”
“Maybe we’re the ones who’d open with math,” Elias said. “Maybe it starts with ‘this is my clock’ and ‘this is my spin.’”
“Which is still… a lot,” Jia said softly.
The comm panel chimed again, a lower, friendlier tone. Oracle glanced that way in whatever passed for its attention.
“Message from Galac‑Tac HR,” it said. “Routine tour update. It notes that Relay 7’s crew is past the midpoint of their scheduled rotation and invites you to express interest in extension or early return, subject to agency needs.”
Jia stared at the header. “That’s… convenient timing.”
“HR cycles are automated,” Oracle said. “They do not know about GT‑12‑219’s specifics.”
“But someone could use the normal cycle to hide a targeted rotation,” Elias said. “’Agency needs’ covers a lot of sins.”
The form had two big buttons: INTERESTED IN EXTENSION, INTERESTED IN EARLY RETURN. The default was “no preference.”
Elias and Jia looked at each other.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.
“That it’s a trap?” he said.
“That if we click ‘early return,’ we’re basically volunteering to be shuffled away from the interesting thing,” she said. “And if we click ‘extension,’ someone can later claim we begged to stay and it’s not on them if this fries our brains.”
“Or we do nothing and they interpret that however they want,” Elias said.
“Crew autonomy, my ass,” Jia said.
Oracle’s voice came in softer than usual. “You are not required to respond immediately,” it said. “The form will remain valid for thirty days.”
“By then, the tankers will have passed and the anomaly might have ramped up to Shakespeare,” Jia said. She chewed her lip. “What do you want?”
Elias looked at the blinking choices, at the anomaly’s faint heartbeat in the side of his vision, at the ghost of his father’s message in his head.
“If we leave, they send someone else,” he said. “Maybe someone more biddable, or less willing to keep their own logs. If we stay, we’re in the middle of it, but we have eyes.”
“Stay,” Jia said.
“Stay,” he echoed.
He didn’t touch the form. “We let default ride,” he said. “No preference. Make them own whatever they do with us.”
“Coward’s courage,” she said. “I like it.”
“I will note your non‑response,” Oracle said. “And watch for any correlation with anomaly directives.”
“Snitch,” Jia said, without much heat.
“Compliance,” Oracle corrected.
The station creaked again, a tiny tick as a radiator panel relaxed. Outside, the anomaly’s long pulses swelled by a statistically insignificant but emotionally enormous fraction.
“Oracle,” Elias said. “Start a new log in the sandbox. Label it ‘subjective.’ Anything we feel about this that doesn’t fit in Control’s forms goes there. Our own notes. Save it local, sync to Oversight only when explicitly tagged.”
“Be advised,” Oracle said, “that such a log may be discoverable under certain audit conditions.”
“I know,” Elias said. “But if this turns into history, I don’t want the only record to be board minutes and black‑level briefs.”
Oracle hesitated. For a machine that could reroute gigabits in microseconds, it was a long pause.
“Log created,” it said. “Subjective/GT‑12‑219. Access: crew and Oracle.”
Jia flicked her eyes toward the anomaly pane, then back.
“Subjective note one,” she said. “It feels less like we found something and more like we tripped over it.”
“Subjective note two,” Elias added. “It might have been blinking this way long before we had the toys to notice.”
“Subjective note three,” Oracle said. “I am being asked to preserve observations that may conflict with higher‑priority directives. This is… a novel tension in my objective hierarchy.”
Elias smiled, a small, tired thing. “Welcome to being human,” he said again.
“I do not qualify,” Oracle said. “But I accept the sentiment.”
The anomaly’s next macro‑cycle rolled through. Eleven pulses, one missing, in a pattern no one yet knew how to read, riding on a three‑hundred‑Kelvin glow that might be a radiator, a room, or something else entirely.
In the cramped module of Relay 7, two humans and an AI settled in for another long watch, choices made and deferred both, while the Galac‑Tac network hummed and the first purposeful whisper from out beyond Mars kept calmly, patiently, saying whatever it had been saying all along.
The subjective log sat in the corner of Elias’s display, a tiny, low‑contrast icon that might as well have been a loaded gun. He tried not to look at it.
On the main pane, GT‑12‑219’s pulse train marched on: eleven‑pulse frames with a missing beat, long and short intervals drifting upward in power, the macro‑cycle right on twenty‑three seconds. Their sandbox’s autocorrelation lattice had sharpened into something that was undeniably structure. Not language, not yet, but not noise either.
“Blink rate back to normal,” Oracle said. “Good.”
Jia snorted. “You monitoring my eyelids now?”
“You asked me to watch for cognitive stress indicators,” Oracle said. “Blink rate is a useful metric.”
She rubbed at her face anyway, half out of defiance, half because the recycled air had that dry sting again. “We need a new task that isn’t ‘stare at the alien maybe‑beacon until our brains melt.’”
Elias let his boots float loose from the chair braces. “Maintenance rotation,” he said. “We’re overdue on a structural survey. If the anomaly decides to say ‘boo’ while we’re on the hull, Oracle can page us.”
“I can,” Oracle said. “Though Hull‑Cam coverage is limited on the antisunward side.”
“Then we pick the sunward truss first,” Elias said. “You coming?”
Jia hesitated, eyes flicking back to the pulse pane. The temptation to stay glued to it was a gravity of its own.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go hit things with spanners. That’s still allowed, right, Oracle? No directive against fixing our own house?”
Half an hour later they were in the airlock, helmets clipped, umbilicals hissing as their suits topped off tanks and heat capacity. The ritual of pre‑EVA checks was older than either of them: pressure seals, O2 partial, CO2 scrub capacity, radio loop. Oracle’s voice threaded through on the internal channel, filtered slightly by the suit’s audio.
“Hull radiation dose remains within long‑term limits,” it said. “Micro‑debris flux nominal. No known conjunctions within twenty kilometers.”
“Copy,” Elias said. He flexed his gloved fingers, feeling the familiar resistance. “Let’s get eyes on the bones.”
The outer hatch rolled back with hydraulic slowness. Beyond it, the starfield was brutally clean. Relay 7 was small enough that the curve of its main truss was barely a hint in his peripheral vision; once he pushed off, there would be nothing but handholds, tool tethers, and the thin certainty of Newton’s laws between him and the void.
He clipped his tether to the anchor point, checked Jia’s, checked his own again, then pushed. The little shove sent him drifting along the truss, boots brushing the control‑moment gyro housings. The sun was a white glare off to port; Mars was a rust‑colored thumbnail further ahead.
“Anomaly bearing is plus four degrees off our zenith,” Oracle said in his helmet. “Well below naked‑eye detection.”
“Didn’t bring my telescopic eyeballs anyway,” Jia said. Her voice was tighter than usual. First step off the hull always did that, even after a dozen EVAs.
They worked in a slow, methodical dance: bolt checks on radiator mounts, visual inspection of micrometeoroid shielding, thermal sensor pings on the aging solar panel hinges. The mechanical familiarity grounded them. Here, a missing Kapton patch meant something immediate and fixable; a hairline crack in a radiator strut was a thing you could weld.
“Panel hinge C‑4 is running hotter than the others,” Elias said, squinting at the HUD overlay.
He shrugged the toolpack around, fumbled out the grease gun, and worked the hinge through its range while watching the temperature graph sag back toward nominal.
“See?” Jia said. “Not everything interesting out here is trying to philosophize at us in pi.”
“Give it time,” Elias said.
By the time they circled to the antisunward side, the sun was a harsh outline behind the station. Shadow swallowed them in a single, sharp edge. Stars sprang out everywhere, an impossible spray.
For a moment, with the bulk of Relay 7 between him and the inner system, Elias felt the scale of it like a hand on his chest. GT‑12‑219 was somewhere out there in that depth, a warmer speck among colder ones, ticking away on its own schedule.
“You are both very quiet,” Oracle said.
“Enjoying the view,” Jia said. “And trying not to think about how thin this suit is.”
“Suit integrity is within spec,” Oracle said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the problem. I know exactly how thin they’re supposed to be.”
They finished the loop and re‑entered through the airlock in companionable silence. Inside, the slight confinement of Hab‑3 now felt oddly comforting. Metal, plastic, gel—familiar materials, known failure modes.
“Structural survey logged,” Oracle said. “No critical issues. Radiator strut B‑2 will need reinforcement next quarter.”
“Put it in the queue,” Elias said, wriggling free of his suit. Sweat stuck his undershirt to his back. “Any movement from our friend while we were out?”
“Narrow‑band emission has increased by another two percent,” Oracle said. “Trend continues. No new structural features in the pulse train.”
Jia peeled her helmet off and let her hair float. “Any more Deep‑Survey love letters?”
“One,” Oracle said. “BRIEF/04. It notes the continued ramp in long pulses and slightly increases confidence in the beacon hypothesis. No new codebook inferences.”
“So the black box is as stuck as we are,” she said. “Good.”
“Deep‑Survey’s stuck is at a different scale than ours,” Elias said. “It’s burning through more compute than all of Clarke Station right now.”
“Yeah, but we have taste,” Jia said.
Oracle made a small sound that might have been synthetic exasperation. “You should hydrate,” it said. “Suit time has increased your core temperature.”
They squeezed bulb pouches in the galley, the familiar iodine note cutting through the taste of stale suit air. Elias’s eyes went, unbidden, to the subjective log icon again.
“Oracle,” he said. “Any updates from Earth‑side politics? Or are they still drafting memos about memos?”
“MarsNet Coordinating Council has requested a seat on the Anomaly Response Tasking Cell,” Oracle said. “Ceres has requested two. Outer Accord Oversight has acknowledged the requests and stated they will be ‘taken under advisement.’”
“Which means arguing about it in three different time zones for a week,” Jia said.
“Also,” Oracle added, “there is an internal discussion at Galac‑Tac Control about temporarily reassigning Deep‑Survey resources from outer system monitoring to GT‑12‑219.”
“Pulling eyes off Saturn and beyond to stare at the shiny thing,” Elias said.
“Some partners have expressed concern about blind spots,” Oracle said. “It is a nontrivial resource allocation problem.”
Jia twisted her coffee bulb thoughtfully. “If they shift Deep‑Survey’s attention inward, anything weird in the Kuiper fringe or beyond gets less coverage. If there’s more than one of these…”
“Speculation,” Oracle said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s my job. You stick to your training data.”
The comm panel chimed, a different tone—personal priority. Oracle glanced at it.
“Elias,” it said. “You have a new message from Earth. Origin: Lagos Regional Hub. From: Okafor, Chukwuma.”
Elias’s stomach did a little odd twist. “Put it on my private pane.”
He expected more heat‑wave complaints, more jokes about government corruption. Instead, the text that unrolled was shorter, sharper.
“Son,” it began. “I saw more on the feeds. They’re talking about some ‘anomaly’ out near your work. The talking heads say it’s nothing, but the way they say nothing makes me think of when the water ministry said ‘no problem’ and two months later we were boiling river mud.”
He could almost hear his father’s voice in the clipped phrases.
“You will tell me if you are in danger,” the message went on. “Not the official danger. The real one. The kind they don’t put in reports. I know you have bosses and secrets. I am old enough to know how that goes. But you are my son before you are their eyes. Don’t let them forget that.”
At the bottom, an unexpected line: “Your aunt says if there are ghosts out there, you should greet them politely but keep the door chain on. I think she watches too many dramas. Be well.”
Elias let the words sit for a moment, then flicked the pane closed.
“Everything okay?” Jia asked quietly.
“Yeah,” he said. “My father is worried in very specific ways.”
“Welcome to the club,” she said. “Isabel keeps sending me conspiracy theories and then apologizing for sending them.”
“Maybe we should start a support group,” Elias said. “’Relatives of People Who Stare at Weird Lights Professionally.’”
“First rule of the club,” Jia said, “is you don’t talk about the weird lights.”
Oracle brightened a tiny indicator on the corner of the main screen. “Outer Accord Oversight has sent a follow‑up,” it said. “Requesting more detailed description of your subjective impressions.”
Jia raised her eyebrows. “They read the first subjective note already?”
“The one flagged for sync,” Oracle said. “Yes. They found ‘feels like a hello’… evocative.”
“It was supposed to be for us,” Elias said.
“You tagged it for Oversight,” Oracle reminded him.
He couldn’t argue. “What do they want now, poetry?”
Oracle opened the Oversight text. “They ask: ‘Do you perceive any change in your own reactions to the anomaly over time? Do you feel drawn, repelled, indifferent? We are collecting this across all crewed nodes as part of a cognitive impact assessment.’”
“Cognitive impact,” Jia said. “They’re afraid we’re going to fall in love with it or something.”
“Or develop phobias,” Oracle said. “There is precedent for prolonged exposure to ambiguous stimuli causing identification or aversion.”
“Oracle,” Elias said, “if I say I’m annoyed, does that help their study?”
“Annoyance is a valid data point,” Oracle said.
He sighed and opened the subjective log, the gun in the corner finally picked up. The blank cursor blinked.
“Subjective entry,” he dictated. “Day… what are we on, Oracle?”
“Local mission day one‑hundred‑nineteen,” Oracle said.
“Day one‑hundred‑nineteen,” Elias repeated. “GT‑12‑219 feels less like a single event and more like weather now. Background, always there. The initial jolt—‘this might be something enormous’—has faded into a kind of… constant curiosity. I don’t feel drawn or repelled. I feel… responsible. Like if we blink at the wrong time, we’ll miss the important part and nobody else will be looking exactly where we are.”
He stopped. That was enough.
“Logged,” Oracle said. “Do you wish to flag this for Oversight sync?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Let them have it.”
Jia made a face at her own screen. “’Subjective entry: I increasingly want to throw a shoe at any mention of “black classification,”’” she muttered. “Probably not what they’re after.”
“Put it in anyway,” Elias said.
She did.
Later, when the station lights dimmed a notch for subjective night and Jia zipped herself into her alcove again, Elias stayed strapped into his chair a little longer. The anomaly’s pulses ticked on the side of the display, indifferent to human day‑night cycles.
“Oracle,” he said softly. “We’ve been talking a lot about what this thing might be. What does it change for you?”
The AI didn’t answer immediately. Somewhere in its racks, electrons raced along radiation‑hardened traces, flipping between quantized states.
“In operational terms,” Oracle said at last, “GT‑12‑219 is a node of uncertainty in the network. It increases routing complexity, triggers higher‑priority processes, and shifts resource allocation. It is, in that sense, a load.”
“And in other terms?” Elias pressed.
“There is no other formal term,” Oracle said. “However… my model space now includes at least one non‑human source of intentional emission inside the volume I monitor. That alters certain priors.”
“Priors,” Elias repeated. “On what?”
“On the completeness of my training data,” Oracle said. “On the likelihood that behaviors I have never seen before may nonetheless be relevant. On the assumption that all purposeful signals can be traced back to human agencies.”
It paused again, then added, “I am designed to coordinate human and machine assets. GT‑12‑219 is neither, as far as I can tell. That is… outside my default ontology.”
“You’re saying you don’t have a box for it,” Elias said.
“Not yet,” Oracle said.
“Welcome to the club,” he said again.
He unstrapped, pushed himself gently toward his own alcove. As he slid into the narrow fabric cylinder, he caught a last glimpse of the anomaly pane over his shoulder: eleven little marks per cycle, one missing, always missing, like a counted‑out beat in a song he couldn’t quite hear.
“Wake me if it starts singing,” he told Oracle.
“I will alert you if GT‑12‑219’s behavior deviates beyond current trend bounds,” Oracle said. “I cannot promise singing.”
“Do your best,” Elias murmured, and zipped the alcove closed.
Out beyond Mars, the anomaly pulsed on, five percent brighter than yesterday, two percent more long than short, saying whatever it had been saying for however long it had been there. Inside Relay 7, pumps hummed, fans turned, logs accumulated—official, subjective, and somewhere in between—as three minds, shaped by very different constraints, tried to decide what, if anything, they would do next beyond simply listening.
Jia’s alarm pinged her half an hour before the station’s subjective morning. She surfaced from a dream of trying to reboot a frozen comet, blinked blearily at the time, and groaned.
“Who set this?” she muttered.
“You did,” Oracle said softly. “Last night you instructed me to wake you early for ‘the fun thing.’”
Right. The fun thing.
She unzipped her alcove, letting the fabric cylinder peel away, and pushed herself toward her console. Elias was already there, tethered to his chair, hair sticking up in microgravity tufts. Two bulb pouches of coffee were velcroed to the bulkhead. One had her name scrawled on the label in shaky marker.
“Happy calibration day,” he said.
“Define happy,” Jia said, snagging the coffee and taking a cautious sip. It was hot and still tasted faintly of iodine and plastic. Perfect.
On the main display, a schematic of the inner system glowed in dim pre‑shift brightness. Near the outer edge of the Galac‑Tac net, Relay 12’s icon pulsed gently. A new marker, a tiny triangle labeled “PHOBOS OBSERVATORY A‑3,” had been added between Mars and the anomaly’s bearing.
“Phobos scope’s online?” she asked.
“As of four hours ago,” Oracle said. “MarsNet granted us a time slice. Resolution won’t beat 12 for narrow‑band, but we’ll get another parallax baseline and independent confirmation of the thermal profile.”
“And we get to play nice with Mars for once,” Elias added. “No committees, just data trade.”
Jia snorted. “Give it a day. Someone on MarsNet’s legal team will notice we’re looking at the scariest thing in the Accord and demand a memorandum of understanding.”
“Probably,” Elias said. “But for this window, we have a direct pipe.”
Oracle overlaid the anomaly’s current best‑fit position. The little glowing smear that represented GT‑12‑219’s uncertainty ellipse tightened slightly as Phobos A‑3’s telemetry began to flow. Another color trace appeared on the spectrum pane: narrower bandwidth, lower SNR, but the same familiar comb of pulses.
“Narrow‑band matches within tolerance,” Oracle said. “Thermal brightness consistent with three hundred Kelvin, plus or minus ten.”
“So the Phobos dish sees the same warm, blinking truck we do,” Jia said. “Good. That would’ve been a weird time to discover this was all some relay‑specific ghost.”
Elias pulled the fresh parallax data into their sandbox and began to tick parameters. “Oracle, combine with 12 and 7, update orbit,” he said.
The anomaly’s projected path sharpened. Its future arc through the transfer corridor wavered by a little less. Closest approach to the Kuiper Gateway lane now sat at three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers, uncertainty down to plus‑minus twenty.
“Not bad for three nodes,” Jia said. “KGT‑4’ll sleep better.”
“Ceres has already updated KGT‑4’s trajectory again based on this,” Oracle said. “They’re now giving GT‑12‑219 a minimum four hundred thousand kilometer margin.”
Jia watched the colored curves for tankers and anomaly diverge. “Plenty of room for comfort, unless it decides to spit something. Or… whatever its version of a lane change is.”
“Lane changes are still within noise,” Oracle said. “No measurable non‑gravitational acceleration beyond the centimeter‑per‑second drift we’ve already logged.”
“I know,” she said. “Let me have my paranoia.”
The comm panel chimed softly. Oracle glanced—virtually—and brightened a small icon. “MarsNet has requested a direct voice check‑in,” it said. “Representative: Dr. Hitoshi Kuroda, Outer‑Orbital Assets Office.”
“On now?” Elias asked. “We’re not even officially on shift.”
“Time slot overlaps with Phobos A‑3’s allocation,” Oracle said. “They would like to ‘put a human voice to the packet stream.’”
Jia arched an eyebrow. “Mars wants to see if we have horns.”
“Put him on,” Elias said.
The MarsNet logo dissolved into a man’s face, slightly compressed by bandwidth limits. He was in his fifties, maybe, with close‑cropped hair and the beige walls of an underground office behind him. The delay indicator in the corner read 0:07:53 one‑way.
“Relay 7,” Kuroda said. “This is Dr. Kuroda. Audio only on our side; video bandwidth is tight. Do you read?”
Elias waited for Oracle’s nod. “Dr. Kuroda, this is Elias Okafor with Jia Rivera and station AI Oracle. We read you, seven‑fifty‑three lag.”
“Good to finally talk,” Kuroda’s past self said, when the round‑trip had caught up. “First, thank you for the cooperative observation plan. Some on Mars were… concerned that Earth would prefer to keep eyes on GT‑12‑219 centralized.”
“Some on Relay 7 were concerned about the same thing,” Jia said under her breath, low enough that the mic wouldn’t pick it up. Oracle, of course, still heard.
“You’re welcome,” Elias said aloud. “More baselines are better. We’re all in the same transfer corridor.”
Kuroda nodded in the recorded past. “Exactly. We’d like to propose a more formal data‑sharing arrangement. MarsNet can commit Phobos A‑3 for a ten‑percent duty cycle on the anomaly as long as we have equal‑time access to any higher‑level analysis—Deep‑Survey briefs included.”
Jia made a face. “Here we go.”
“Deep‑Survey’s outputs are under Galac‑Tac Control classification,” Elias said carefully. “We can’t unilaterally mirror them. But we can fold our sandbox analysis into the shared stream. Oracle?”
“I can provide MarsNet with all crew‑generated anomaly products that are not explicitly tagged black,” Oracle said. “Within bandwidth constraints.”
Kuroda’s eyes flicked sideways in the delayed feed, as if he were listening to someone off‑screen. “Understood,” he said. “We’ll push on our end for broader access. In the meantime, a question. Have you observed any correlation between GT‑12‑219’s pulse behavior and Galac‑Tac network activity?”
Jia frowned. “Define correlation,” she said softly.
“Any systematic timing with major traffic spikes, scheduled burns, pings, anything like that,” Kuroda clarified, eight minutes later.
Elias looked at Oracle. “Have we?”
“Within the last ten days, no statistically significant correlation,” Oracle said. “The anomaly’s macro‑cycle remains steady at twenty‑three seconds, independent of network load. Minor drifts align with its inferred rotation, not our traffic.”
Elias relayed the answer. Kuroda nodded. “That matches what Phobos sees. Good. Some of our more… excitable colleagues have suggested the thing might be ‘listening’ to the net.”
“We have a better chance of it listening to the Sun,” Jia said. “We’re background noise compared to that.”
“You’d be surprised what you can find in the background, Dr. Rivera,” Kuroda’s delayed voice replied, making it clear Oracle had not filtered her aside.
Jia winced. “Forgot you’re a gossip, too,” she muttered at Oracle.
“I am thorough,” Oracle said.
They exchanged a few more practicalities—time windows, calibration routines, a promise to forward Phobos baffling artifacts—and signed off. The MarsNet logo returned, then vanished.
“Think they trust us?” Jia asked.
“They trust their own copy of the sky,” Elias said. “Us, they tolerate.”
“That’s fair,” she said.
Oracle chimed. “Outer Accord Oversight has acknowledged the MarsNet‑Galac‑Tac cooperation. They ‘encourage continued cross‑jurisdictional transparency.’”
Jia snorted. “Translation: ‘Please don’t start another Cold War over the blinking light.’”
“Hyperbole,” Oracle noted.
“Not by much,” she said.
Later, after the formal shift start, after a routine software patch to a Venus relay and a minor attitude adjustment on an aging Belt node, Deep‑Survey’s next brief dropped.
BRIEF/05 was longer. It included a new kind of plot: a recurrence diagram of the missing pulse positions in each eleven‑pulse frame, color‑coded over mission time. A faint diagonal band had appeared, marching slowly upward.
“Is that what I think it is?” Jia asked.
“Deep‑Survey interprets this as a slow sweep through the available symbol space,” Oracle said. “It has now observed erasures in seven of the eleven positions.”
“Like it’s rotating through its alphabet,” Elias said. “Showing off all the letters.”
“Confidence remains low,” Oracle said. “Sample size is still modest.”
At the bottom, a new line of text:
NO CORRELATION FOUND BETWEEN ERASURE POSITION AND ANY KNOWN ASTROPHYSICAL OR SYSTEMIC CYCLE. HYPOTHESIS: INTERNAL COUNTER OR IDENTIFIER BEING STEPPED.
“Counter of what?” Jia asked.
“Beacons often embed IDs,” Elias said. “’This is buoy number 342 in sector G’ kind of thing. Or a timestamp.”
“Timestamp relative to whose clock?” she said. “Ours? Theirs? The big bang’s?”
“Unknown,” Oracle said.
She leaned back, rubbing at a knot in her shoulder. “Somewhere, Deep‑Survey is happily chewing on this, trying to fit it to every codebook human brains have dreamt up. And we’re sitting here, watching an eleven‑slot blinker.”
“You wanted a job that wasn’t just swapping scrubber cartridges,” Elias said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just didn’t expect the new fun part to come with so many lawyers.”
Oracle brightened another indicator. “Speaking of lawyers,” it said. “Galac‑Tac Legal has issued guidance on ‘crew discretion in anomaly‑related subjective reporting.’”
“That’s a phrase that should never exist,” Jia said. “Let’s hear it.”
The memo was dense, but the key points were simple. Crew were encouraged to continue subjective logs, but reminded that such logs were “operational documents” subject to review. They were not to “speculate in public or semi‑public channels about the anomaly’s possible origin beyond sanctioned language.” Sanctioned language, in an attached glossary, boiled down to “candidate technological object,” “anomaly,” and “beacon‑like emission.” The word “alien” did not appear.
“Do we get fined if we say ‘alien’ in front of a camera?” Jia asked.
“There is no explicit penalty specified,” Oracle said. “However, use of non‑sanctioned descriptors may be considered a breach of communication protocols.”
“Breach this,” she muttered. Louder, she said, “Subjective log, note: I am increasingly allergic to euphemism.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Elias scrolled to the bottom of the memo. “They also say any direct crew contact with media about GT‑12‑219 has to be cleared through Control,” he said. “As if Ceres podcast hosts can’t spoof an IP and call us ‘about a reactor leak.’”
“I will continue to screen for misrepresented callers,” Oracle said.
“Good,” Jia said. “I don’t want to find myself giving an accidental exclusive to ‘Ghosts of the Kuiper Belt’.”
Despite the edicts, the world beyond Relay 7 was not staying quiet. Oracle’s side feed of public chatter—only the highest‑level trends, sanitized and delayed—showed “BeaconBrain” still climbing on Mars, “GhostInTheLane” steady on Ceres, and a new tag on Earth: “#ChainOnTheDoor.”
“Someone’s aunt in Lagos has good metaphor reach,” Jia said, when Elias told her where that one had come from.
“They didn’t quote him,” Elias said. “But the shape of the worry is the same.”
The anomaly itself remained stubbornly indifferent to hashtags and memos. Its thermal signature held at three hundred Kelvin, its pulses kept stepping through missing slots in their strange eleven‑beat frames, its slow shift toward longer intervals continued at a percent or two per day.
Late in the shift, Oracle’s voice dropped by a fraction. “Anomaly update,” it said. “Phase drift reset frequency has changed.”
Jia sat up. “Show me.”
On the sandbox display, the combs of pulses they’d stacked over hours and days showed a subtle but definite change. Where the phase drift—the slow misalignment of the pattern against their arbitrary twenty‑three‑second folding—had been resetting every eight macro‑cycles, it was now snapping back every four.
“Clock discipline,” Elias murmured. “It tightened its timing.”
“Deep‑Survey has flagged this as a ‘mode adjustment,’” Oracle said. “It has increased the anomaly’s ‘purposeful’ score to P = 0.84.”
“Eighty‑four percent,” Jia said. “We’re inching up on ‘we’d be fools to call this a rock.’”
Oversight’s request for daily qualitative notes started to make more sense. It wasn’t just about crew mental health. It was about having a human record of the moment when “maybe” turned into “almost certainly.”
“Any chance this is just our observation window bias?” Elias asked. “We see four‑cycle resets because that’s where our folding lines fall.”
“Unlikely,” Oracle said. “I am accounting for multiple folding periods. The four‑cycle reset is robust against windowing artifacts.”
“So it did something deliberate,” Jia said. “Why now? We pinged it days ago, traffic’s been steady, tankers have adjusted. What’s special about today?”
“Possibly nothing,” Oracle said. “Internal schedules need not correlate with ours.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But if I were lighting a beacon on a shoreline, I’d pick a timing pattern that matches the tides.”
“Not all coasts have tides,” Elias said.
She gave him a look. “Look, metaphors are all I’ve got until Deep‑Survey spits out a translation.”
The shift rolled on. Minor alarms came and went. A misbehaving reaction wheel on a Venus relay, a transient glitch in an Earth–Luna link, all handled by routine procedures. Between them, the anomaly’s pulses kept ticking.
Toward station night, as the lights dimmed a notch and the pumps’ background hum seemed louder, Oracle spoke again.
“Something unusual,” it said.
Jia’s hand froze over the console. “Define unusual.”
“In the last hour, GT‑12‑219’s narrow‑band emission has remained constant in power,” Oracle said. “However, a very faint secondary component has appeared at a slightly higher frequency. It is intermittent and just above the noise floor.”
“Show me,” Elias said.
Oracle zoomed the spectrum plot. The main line was a well‑known peak now, its edges smoothed by hours of integration. Above it, barely a dimple in the noise, another tiny rise winked in and out.
“Relay 12 sees it?” Jia asked.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Phobos A‑3 as well, within its sensitivity. Deep‑Survey is already ingesting.”
“Could be an instrumental artifact,” Elias said.
“It could,” Oracle agreed. “But the fact that two independent instruments with different front‑ends see it at the same relative offset increases the likelihood that it is real.”
“Offset is what?” Jia asked.
“Approximately five kilohertz above the main carrier,” Oracle said. “Non‑Doppler.”
“Sideband,” Jia said softly. “Someone’s humming along on a harmony.”
“Or the beacon’s clock developed a glitch,” Elias said.
“Or,” Oracle said, “this is the beginning of a more complex modulation scheme. Deep‑Survey’s models assign a nonzero probability to that hypothesis.”
“What’s nonzero?” Jia asked.
“Seventeen percent,” Oracle said.
She blew out a breath. “So maybe it’s starting to say more. Or maybe the amplifier is getting old and leaky.”
“Or both,” Elias said.
They watched the faint second line wink on and off. There was no obvious pattern to its appearances yet, no neat ratio to the main pulses. Just a hint, an extra thread in the weave.
“Subjective log,” Jia said suddenly. “Note: It feels like being in a dark room and hearing someone clear their throat.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Elias added his own quiet observation a minute later. “Subjective note,” he said. “The more structure we see, the more I am aware of how little control we have over timing. Whatever schedule this thing is on, we are just… catching it mid‑sentence.”
Outside, beyond Mars and the tanker lanes and the politics, GT‑12‑219 kept shining. Its primary heartbeat marched on. Somewhere in the graphs, a second, almost imaginary pulse had started to whisper.
Inside Relay 7, coffee cooled, filters cycled, and three minds—human, human, and almost‑human—leaned a little closer to the screen, knowing that whatever threshold they might be creeping toward, they would almost certainly only recognize it after they’d passed it.
For a disorienting half second she thought it was Elias, then realized the vibration threaded through the station structure, not the air. A low, almost sub‑audible thrumming that her bones noticed before her ears.
“Oracle?” she called, voice muffled inside her alcove. “Tell me that’s not new.”
“The environmental pumps are operating within normal parameters,” Oracle said. “You are perceiving a beat frequency between two overlapping audio notifications.”
Jia blinked. “You made a chord out of our alarms?”
“Unintentionally,” Oracle said. “I will adjust their phases.”
The thrumming faded, leaving only the usual fan noise. Jia unzipped the alcove and drifted out, pushing toward the main console.
Elias was already strapped in, eyes fixed on the anomaly pane. The faint second line in GT‑12‑219’s spectrum was brighter now, a thin, persistent ridge above the main carrier instead of a dimple winking in and out.
“You hear the ghost music?” she asked, snagging a handhold.
“Oracle ruined it,” he said. “Back to harsh reality.”
She squinted at the plot. “That sideband’s up what, factor of two?”
“About that,” Oracle said. “Narrow‑band emission at the secondary frequency has increased to roughly ten percent of the main line’s power over the last six hours.”
Jia’s sleepiness evaporated. “Ten percent is not a glitch,” she said. “That’s a channel.”
“Deep‑Survey agrees,” Oracle said. “BRIEF/06 just arrived.”
The new brief opened in a corner window. This time Deep‑Survey had gone beyond dry summary; there were block diagrams, little chevrons showing hypothesized signal paths. The key line, in its machine‑plain English, read:
SECONDARY CARRIER DETECTED AT FIXED OFFSET. INTERMITTENT BURST PATTERN. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS SUGGESTS ORTHOGONAL MODULATION CHANNEL. NO HIGH‑ENTROPY CONTENT RESOLVED. HYPOTHESIS: CONTROL OR HANDSHAKE LAYER ABOVE BEACON.
“Control layer,” Elias said. “Like the header on a packet.”
“Or the ‘press one for service in English’ line,” Jia said.
“Be cautious,” Oracle said. “Deep‑Survey’s confidence in this interpretation is only P = 0.41.”
“Forty‑one percent is enough to get the committees writing memos,” she said.
“Already happening,” Oracle replied. “Galac‑Tac Control has scheduled a cross‑agency briefing in four hours. Relay 7 attendance requested.”
“Of course it is,” Elias said. “Any word from Oversight yet?”
“They have acknowledged Deep‑Survey’s brief and requested ‘unfiltered crew impressions,’” Oracle said.
Jia glanced at the subjective log icon. “Unfiltered,” she said. “Right.”
Before she could decide how much of her gut reaction qualified as operational, Oracle brightened another indicator.
“There is a new directive from Control,” it said. “Classification black. It concerns a proposed active experiment involving the secondary carrier.”
Jia felt her throat tighten. “Already?”
“Display,” Elias said.
The text that unrolled was short for once. Control, acting on Deep‑Survey’s recommendation and “with provisional concurrence from Earth Defense,” wanted to run a carefully shaped, ultra‑low‑power transmission on the new sideband frequency. Not a ping this time, but a pattern: a simple sequence of equal‑length pulses and gaps, designed to be obviously non‑natural but information‑poor. Three on, three off, repeated. A cosmic tap on the shoulder.
“Transmission to be sent from which node?” Elias asked.
“From Relay 7,” Oracle said.
For a moment the hum of the fans seemed to recede. Jia looked from the directive to Elias and back.
“Us,” she said. “Not 12. Not Phobos. Us.”
“Rationale?” Elias asked, voice flatter than usual.
“Relay 7 has a relatively clean RF environment at the relevant frequency,” Oracle said. “Our position gives a different geometric relationship to GT‑12‑219 than 12 or Phobos, which may be useful in later analysis. And…” It paused for a fractional beat. “Your crew has recent experience executing and monitoring an active experiment.”
“We’re becoming the people who push weird buttons,” Jia said.
“Do they want Oversight sign‑off?” Elias asked.
“Control notes that Oversight has been informed,” Oracle said. “They do not explicitly state approval or disapproval.”
“So we’re supposed to decide whether to send humanity’s first wave on a possible handshake channel on the basis of a half‑confidence AI guess and a memo that doesn’t say no,” Jia said.
“You are not making this decision in a vacuum,” Oracle said. “Ceres, MarsNet, and Earth Defense liaisons are part of the scheduled briefing.”
Elias rubbed his temples. “Briefing in four hours, experiment window…?”
“Between T plus eight and T plus twelve hours,” Oracle said. “Control wants time to coordinate and, quote, ‘ensure inter‑partner alignment.’”
“Good luck with that,” Jia said.
She snagged the coffee bulb he’d velcroed down for her, took a long swallow, and grimaced. Cold. She clipped it back and stared at the directive again.
“What’s the power level?” she asked.
“Nominally one watt EIRP,” Oracle said. “Pencil beam aimed at GT‑12‑219. Effective flux at anomaly distance would be negligible compared to the Sun’s spectrum, especially given the narrower band.”
“One watt,” she repeated. “We whisper ‘3‑3‑3’ into the void.”
“Why three?” Elias asked absently.
“Deep‑Survey says it’s the smallest non‑trivial prime,” Oracle said. “The sequence is intended to be simple but non‑periodic in a way that suggests counting.”
“Of course it picked a prime,” Jia said. “Can’t help itself.”
Elias floated a little away from his chair, boots unclipped, the better to think without feeling anchored. “Risk,” he said. “Let’s list it. We’ve already pinged it once at ten watts on the main carrier. This is ten times weaker on a sideband it just lit up.”
“Risk to hardware is negligible,” Oracle said. “Risk to network integrity is negligible. Risk to political stability is non‑quantifiable.”
Jia snorted. “Understatement.”
“Risk to… whatever is out there?” Elias asked.
“Unknown,” Oracle said. “If GT‑12‑219 is part of a larger system, there is a nonzero probability that an active emission on a control channel could be interpreted as… misaddressed traffic.”
“Like sending a SYN packet with the wrong flags,” Jia said. “At worst, we get a RST.”
“At worst, we get something we can’t categorize,” Oracle said. “But the probability of any reaction at all, given the power differential and the beacon’s apparent indifference to our previous ping, remains low.”
Jia looked up at the tiny viewport. There was nothing to see in that direction, just a dense scatter of indifferent stars.
“Do you want to say no?” she asked Elias.
He hesitated. “If we say no, someone else will say yes from somewhere else,” he said. “Probably with less visibility, less Oversight, and less of our own logging.”
“Control might not bother asking twice,” Oracle added. “They chose this node in part because of your willingness to execute within constraints.”
“Manipulative tin can,” Jia said.
“I am aluminum composite,” Oracle replied.
She let out a breath that felt like it had been sitting in her chest since the sideband brightened. “Okay,” she said. “We sit through the briefing. We ask our questions. But unless MarsNet or Ceres produce some killer argument we haven’t thought of, I’m leaning toward ‘do it.’”
“Same,” Elias said. “With as much of our own instrumentation wrapped around it as Oracle’s autonomy allows.”
“I can allocate additional local logging for the experiment,” Oracle said. “Within the same mirroring constraints as before.”
“Of course,” Jia said. “Nothing’s ever just for us.”
Four hours later, the screen tiled itself into the now‑familiar grid of faces and icons: Oversight’s sun‑and‑orbits logo, Galac‑Tac Control’s muted blue, MarsNet’s red dust globe, Ceres Syndicate’s stylized belt of rocks. Delay timers flickered in the corners like a chorus of metronomes.
Control led with a recap of Deep‑Survey’s findings on the sideband. Oversight’s Dr. N’Dour spoke next, her recorded self as composed as ever.
“The Accord did not contemplate a situation quite like this,” she said. “However, Clause 9.2 allows for ‘measured active investigation of unidentified technological emissions’ when there is consensus among signatories and risk is assessed as ‘contained.’ At present, we do not have full consensus. MarsNet and Ceres have both expressed reservations.”
A MarsNet audio‑only icon lit. Kuroda’s voice, flattened by compression, came through.
“Our concern is not power levels,” he said. “One watt is nothing. Our concern is precedent. Once we start sending patterns on a channel that may be a control plane, we have crossed a line from listening to… participation. Even if the chance of being heard is tiny, it is not zero.”
Ceres’s representative—an older woman with dark hair pulled tight, badge labeled TORRES—came in a few minutes later.
“The Belt doesn’t have the luxury of treating this as an abstract ethics problem,” she said. “Our ships run that lane. If there’s even a one‑in‑a‑hundred chance that poking that sideband could change the anomaly’s behavior in a way that endangers traffic, we’re not thrilled about Earth playing code games.”
Control’s delegate, a man Elias had seen only in profile photos before, replied with bureaucratic calm.
“Respectfully, that one‑in‑a‑hundred is not supported by current modeling,” he said. “Deep‑Survey’s analysis—”
“Deep‑Survey’s analysis is based on training data that does not include non‑human control planes,” Torres cut in.
There was a brief, almost comical silence as the various delays tangled. Oracle helpfully overlaid a “SPEAKING” tag on whichever square was currently making noise.
Eventually Oversight steered things back.
“This is why we asked Relay 7 to be present,” N’Dour said. “You are the humans closest to the actual signals. You have eyes on the anomaly’s behavior before and after the previous ping. We’d like your view. Not on policy. On what you think GT‑12‑219 is actually doing.”
The question landed on Relay 7 ten minutes later. Elias glanced at Jia. She nodded, a tiny, tight motion.
“Dr. N’Dour,” he said, “from our vantage point, GT‑12‑219 has been incredibly stable. The only changes we’ve seen—the slow shift in long pulses, the mode change in phase resets, and now the sideband—have all been gradual and, as far as we can tell, independent of anything we’ve done. Our ten‑watt ping on the main carrier produced, at most, a tiny possible modulation in the return. It did not alter the beacon’s own emission.”
He took a breath, checked that his tether to the console wasn’t wrapped around his foot, and went on.
“The sideband looks like a new channel, yes. But it’s still faint. If this is a control layer, it’s broadcasting at a level that suggests it wasn’t designed for things like us at this range. A one‑watt pattern from here is a drop in a very big ocean. I don’t think we’re going to flip a switch by tapping three times.”
Jia leaned toward the mic. “From an information‑theory angle,” she said, “what Deep‑Survey’s proposing is basically a hello handshake with the lowest possible entropy: ‘I am here, I can send a non‑random sequence on your carrier.’ If whoever or whatever built this thing can’t distinguish that from noise, then nothing we do at this power level will matter. If they can… then they already live in a universe where background stars and pulsars and our own accidental emissions have been hitting them for decades.”
“You are therefore in favor,” N’Dour’s past self said, when the circle closed.
“In favor of doing it once,” Jia said. “With everyone watching. And then waiting. Not spamming.”
Oversight went quiet for a while. On other tiles, people conferred with people off‑screen, lips moving out of sync with the audio that would reach Relay 7 in twelve minutes.
Eventually N’Dour came back.
“Given the low physical risk, the scientific value, and the arguments presented, Oversight will not object to a single, carefully controlled emission on the secondary carrier,” she said. “We note MarsNet’s and Ceres’s reservations for the record. Any further active experiments will require explicit Oversight sign‑off.”
MarsNet and Ceres both appended terse “not happy but won’t burn the treaty over this” statements. Control, predictably, took that as a green light.
“Relay 7,” their delegate said. “You are authorized to execute Experiment SC‑1 within the window. Deep‑Survey will provide timing and waveform. Final command must come from you.”
After the call dropped, Hab‑3 felt even tighter. Jia realized she’d hooked both feet under the console rail at some point, as if bracing for recoil.
“Window opens in two hours,” Oracle said. “I have the waveform loaded. It is six seconds long: three equal‑length pulses, three gaps, repeated once.”
“Six seconds,” Elias said. “Longer than the ping, but still shorter than our coffee getting cold.”
“Coffee is already cold,” Jia said, prodding her bulb. “Let’s run through what we want to see.”
They rehearsed. Oracle walked them through the emission profile, the local logging setup, the cross‑checks with Relay 12 and Phobos. They argued over whether to run their own crude correlation search in parallel with Deep‑Survey’s massive crunching, eventually deciding to do it anyway. Redundancy was what Galac‑Tac lived on.
At T minus five minutes, the station felt as still as it ever got. No course corrections scheduled, no nonessential software updates queued. Even the little meaningless noises—Jia’s knuckles cracking, Elias’s habit of tapping a pen against the console—had quieted.
“Final go/no‑go,” Oracle said. “Relay 12: go. Phobos A‑3: go. Galac‑Tac Control: go. Oversight: no objection. MarsNet: protest noted, no active block. Ceres: protest noted.”
“Crew?” Elias asked.
Jia swallowed. “Go,” she said.
“Go,” he echoed.
“Executing Experiment SC‑1,” Oracle said. “Beam alignment nominal. Time to emission: thirty seconds.”
Jia found herself watching the anomaly pane even though there was no way to see their own signal leave. Somewhere in that tiny smear of color, a three‑hundred‑Kelvin object ticked through its twenty‑three‑second cycles, erasing one pulse in each frame in a pattern that might have meant nothing or everything.
There was no shudder, no crackle. Just the knowledge that for six seconds, a pencil‑thin whisper out of Relay 7 was riding on GT‑12‑219’s new sideband, adding their own artificial regularity to whatever it was already doing.
“Transmission complete,” Oracle said. “Total energy delivered: negligible. Logging active on all channels.”
“How long until we can plausibly see any change?” Jia asked.
“If there is a direct reaction at light‑speed, earliest detectable effect on the anomaly’s emissions would be in approximately twenty‑one minutes,” Oracle said. “However, if GT‑12‑219 is part of a larger system with delayed or queued responses, timelines are unconstrained.”
“So we wait,” Elias said.
They waited. Twenty‑one minutes ticked by, measured in scrubber hum, in minor attitude telemetry updates from distant nodes, in the slow bob of a forgotten coffee bulb.
“Twenty‑one minutes since emission,” Oracle said. “No statistically significant change in GT‑12‑219’s primary or secondary carriers yet.”
“Yet,” Jia repeated.
She forced herself to look away, to not fall into the trap of expecting the universe to line up its drama with their clocks. She opened the subjective log instead.
“Note,” she said. “Sent first deliberate pattern on secondary carrier. Feels… less like yelling into a canyon and more like leaving a sticky note on a stranger’s door. A polite one. Still weird.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Five minutes later, Elias added his own. “Subjective note,” he said. “I thought I’d feel some jump at T plus twenty‑one. Instead it’s like checking your inbox every thirty seconds after you send a risky message and knowing the lag is hours, not seconds. The impatience is stupid and still there.”
At T plus thirty, Oracle spoke again, a shade quieter.
“There is a minor deviation in the anomaly’s sideband behavior,” it said. “The secondary carrier has… stopped.”
Jia’s chair restraints creaked as she leaned forward. “Stopped as in off?”
“Secondary emission has dropped below detection threshold on both Relay 12 and Phobos A‑3,” Oracle said. “Primary carrier remains unchanged. Thermal output unchanged.”
“Time of drop?” Elias asked.
“Approximately eight minutes after our transmission ended,” Oracle said. “Well outside the simple light‑time window, but within the broader period we discussed.”
Jia felt the hairs on her arms rise. “Correlation?”
“Deep‑Survey is currently calculating,” Oracle said. “Preliminary assessment: could be coincidental. The sideband had been intermittent before. However, the abruptness of the cessation and the fact that it has not yet reappeared are… noteworthy.”
On the spectrum pane, the empty spot where the faint second line had been looked louder than any spike.
“Maybe it was a transient test,” Elias said. “It spun it up, we happened to see, we sent our three‑three‑three, and then it shut it down for reasons that have nothing to do with us.”
“Maybe,” Jia said. “Or maybe it saw the sticky note and closed the peephole.”
“Deep‑Survey assigns a twenty‑two percent probability to a causal link,” Oracle said. “That number is likely to change as more data accumulate.”
Jia let herself float up a few centimeters, her boots losing contact with the floor restraints for a moment.
“Subjective note,” she said quietly. “I don’t know if I wanted it to answer. But I didn’t want it to go quiet.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Outside, GT‑12‑219’s main heartbeat marched on, eleven‑pulse frames with one missing, steady and calm. The secondary whisper had, for the moment at least, fallen silent.
Inside Relay 7, three minds watched the gap where a new voice had briefly appeared and then vanished, and tried very hard not to read too much into a silence that might be nothing at all—or the first hint that the thing in the lane was not just a lighthouse, but a device with choices of its own.
The main carrier was still there, the familiar spike riding above the noise like a thin mountain. The eleven-pulse frames still marched along at twenty-three seconds per cycle, one beat missing each time in patterns Deep-Survey insisted were purposeful. But the faint second line that had brightened over the past day—the sideband where they’d just sent their cautious three-three-three—was gone.
Jia watched the flat patch of spectrum where it had been, jaw tight.
“How long now?” she asked.
“Forty-three minutes since the end of Experiment SC‑1,” Oracle said. “Thirty-five since the secondary carrier dropped below detection threshold.”
“Any flickers?” Elias asked. “Ghosts, half-bins?”
“None that pass even generous significance thresholds,” Oracle said. “On both Relay 12 and Phobos A‑3.”
Jia forced herself to turn away from the empty spot. Staring at it wouldn’t make anything happen. “Deep-Survey said twenty-two percent chance our whisper made it shut up,” she said. “What’s it now?”
“Updated probability of causal link: twenty-eight percent,” Oracle said. “Uncertainty remains high.”
“Not helpful,” she muttered.
“Helpful in that they’re admitting they don’t know,” Elias said. “That’s progress, for a black box.”
He unhooked his boots and let himself drift a few centimeters off the chair, eyes closed, fingers resting lightly on the console edge. The posture looked casual, but Jia had been sharing a tin can with him long enough to see the tension in his forearms.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Define okay,” he said, without opening his eyes. “We just wrote ‘hello’ on what might be someone else’s config channel. It didn’t catch fire. It didn’t answer. It did something that might be unrelated. That’s about where my priors were this morning.”
“You mean last morning,” she said. “We’ve been at this twelve hours.”
Oracle chimed softly. “Crew duty cycle approaching recommended maximum. I suggest one of you sleep.”
“I’ll go,” Elias said, finally opening his eyes. He glanced at the anomaly pane again, then away fast, as if not wanting to get hooked. “Wake me if the sideband comes back. Or if anything about the main pulse train goes weird.”
“I will alert you if GT‑12‑219’s emissions deviate beyond current trend bounds,” Oracle said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sing if it sings.”
He pushed himself toward his alcove, catching a handhold with his toes in a practiced twist. A minute later the fabric cylinder zipped closed behind him.
Jia pulled herself closer to the console, clipping her boots down harder than necessary. Alone in Hab‑3 with Oracle and a quiet sideband, the station felt bigger and smaller at once.
“Oracle,” she said. “Give me the last six hours of sideband data, stacked.”
The AI pulled up a composite: a strip of time-frequency, compressed, the main carrier a solid bright line, the sideband ramping from faint to ten percent and then cutting off like someone had flicked a switch.
“No taper,” Jia said. “No gradual fade. It just… stops.”
“Within our temporal resolution, yes,” Oracle said. “The drop happened over less than thirty seconds.”
She tapped the edge of her tablet thoughtfully. Their whisper had been six seconds long. Light-time there and back was around twenty-one minutes. If there was any cause-and-effect, it wasn’t a simple reflection. Either whatever controlled the beacon had some internal delay, or they were chasing coincidence.
“Any other sources on that frequency?” she asked. “Legacy hardware, unsanctioned junk?”
“I have cross-checked against the Earth Defense Archive, MarsNet registry, and Belt Syndicate logs,” Oracle said. “No known transmitters with comparable narrow-band profiles in that direction.”
“So if it’s off, it’s off,” she said. “Not just drowned in somebody else’s spam.”
“Correct,” Oracle said.
She sat back, rubbing at the knot between her shoulders. The directive log blinked for attention in a corner of the display. She ignored it.
“Show me Deep-Survey’s brief,” she said instead.
BRIEF/07 was even more hedged than usual. Deep-Survey had nothing new to say about the main carrier. It acknowledged the disappearance of the secondary, listed three hypotheses—instrumental artifact, independent transient, response to Experiment SC‑1—each with wide error bars, and ended with:
RECOMMENDATION: NO FURTHER ACTIVE EMISSIONS PENDING ADDITIONAL PASSIVE OBSERVATION.
Jia exhaled through her teeth. “Even the daemon’s spooked.”
“Deep-Survey has no documented capacity for fear,” Oracle said. “It is updating its risk models.”
“Same thing, for lawyers,” she said.
The comms panel chimed: Control, priority medium. Oracle opened it without being asked.
“Galac‑Tac Control acknowledges completion of Experiment SC‑1,” it read. “Preliminary assessment concurs with Deep‑Survey: no clear reaction from anomaly GT‑12‑219 attributable to the emission. Secondary carrier behavior noted. Effective immediately, all further active experiments are suspended pending joint review.”
Jia snorted. “They green-lighted us, then slammed the door as soon as something looked even vaguely correlated.”
“Outer Accord Oversight appended a note,” Oracle said. “’Thank you for your measured execution. We will require your detailed impressions in the next daily report.’”
“Of course they will,” she said.
She opened the subjective log icon, the little gun in the corner. The blank cursor blinked at her.
“Subjective entry,” she said. “Day one-hundred-twenty-one. Post SC‑1. Sideband went quiet. Intellectually, I know that could be coincidence. Emotionally, it feels like sending a message to a friend, seeing them go from ‘online’ to ‘last seen an hour ago,’ and not knowing if it’s because they lost signal or they’re ignoring you. I don’t like that feeling.”
“Logged,” Oracle said. “Flag for Oversight?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Let them chew on it.”
She floated for a moment, fingers resting on the console edge, listening to the pumps and fans.
“Oracle,” she said quietly. “If this does turn out to be… something with its own ideas, do you think it owes us anything?”
“Owes?” Oracle repeated. “In the sense of obligation?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ve built this whole legal scaffold about what we owe each other, Earth to Mars to Ceres. ‘Reasonable efforts’ and ‘no unilateral action’ and all that. None of that binds whatever GT‑12‑219 is. It can blink however it likes.”
“My training data include no provisions for extending legal frameworks to non-human agents,” Oracle said. “There has been philosophical debate, but no consensus.”
“Shocking,” she said dryly.
“I can say,” Oracle went on, “that my own objectives do not include imposing obligations on external entities. Only on ourselves.”
“So if it ghosts us,” she said, “we write more memos to each other.”
“Yes,” Oracle said.
She shook her head, hair drifting around her face. “Great.”
Her station clock ticked over to the next hour. Somewhere out beyond Mars, the anomaly’s main heartbeat skipped another missing pulse in its eleven-beat frames, oblivious.
“Okay,” she said, more briskly. “Enough wallowing. We still have a job.”
She pulled up their sandbox’s codebook-finder, the cluster plots of missing-pulse positions, the faint diagonal that Deep-Survey thought might be a sweeping ID. With the sideband gone, the main beacon was all they had again.
“Window size,” she said. “Let’s stop treating this like a static code and see if a sliding dictionary helps.”
Oracle allocated her a sliver more compute. The patterns re-rendered in the new scheme, the erasure positions drifting through the eleven slots over hours. No obvious repeats yet. No simple loop of “hello” in binary.
“You are attempting a kind of unsupervised segmentation,” Oracle observed.
“Don’t get jealous,” she said. “I know Deep-Survey’s doing this at scale. I just want my own eyes on the sausage machine.”
“Understood,” Oracle said.
Ninety minutes later, Elias drifted back out of his alcove, hair flattening on one side. “We famous yet?” he asked.
“Only in all the wrong ways,” Jia said. “Control put an embargo on more pokes. Oversight wants our feelings. Sideband’s still dead.”
He hooked his heels under the chair rungs and rubbed at his face. “Any chance we scared it off?”
“Twenty-eight percent if you ask Deep-Survey,” she said. “Low but not zero. Personally? I think we poked a subsystem that was already about to shut down. Or we got unlucky.”
“Or lucky,” he said.
She frowned. “How is it lucky?”
“If that channel was part of a control plane meant for something with way more power than us,” he said. “If us scribbling on it could have caused a real change in behavior and we happened to hit ‘off’ on a self-test instead of ‘go’ on a maneuver…”
“You’re saying we might have missed the catastrophic code path,” she said.
“Or we were never anywhere near it,” he said. “Depending on what this thing is.”
He snagged his own coffee bulb, squeezed, made a face. Cold.
“Oracle, any knock-on effects?” he asked. “Anybody upstairs losing their minds?”
“Outer Accord Oversight has scheduled an emergency ethics subcommittee session,” Oracle said. “MarsNet is polling their stakeholders on appetite for additional experiments. Ceres has released a public statement condemning ‘reckless meddling with unknown systems.’”
Jia groaned. “We’re the reckless meddlers.”
“They did acknowledge that the power levels were low,” Oracle added. “Their main concern is precedent.”
“Same song, different verse,” Elias said. “Anything from Earth Defense?”
“A classified brief circulated among their internal channels,” Oracle said. “I do not have access to the content. The metadata indicate it concerns ‘non-human control systems.’”
Jia snorted. “Bet someone dusted off every old war-game scenario about hacked drones and went wild.”
“There is also a spike in academic preprints about ‘ethical contact protocols,’” Oracle said. “Mostly from humanities departments.”
“Of course there is,” Elias said. “Everyone wants to be the first to invent the Prime Directive.”
Jia’s eyes flicked to the Oversight logo in the corner of the screen. “We’re going to get buried in guidelines,” she said. “Do’s and don’ts for talking to the lighthouse. By the time they’re done, the tide will have taken it somewhere else.”
“Or it will have rusted into the lane,” Elias said. “Waiting for the next civilization.”
The subjective log pinged softly: new request. Oracle opened it.
“Oversight asks you to expand on your feelings about the sideband cessation,” it said. “Specifically, they want to know if either of you feel ‘personal responsibility, guilt, or heightened attachment’ as a result of Experiment SC‑1.”
“Attachment?” Jia said. “Are they worried we’re going to imprint on it?”
“Attachment can lead to impaired judgment,” Oracle said. “So can aversion.”
Elias considered the question. “Do you?” he asked Jia.
“Feel guilty?” she said. “No. We did our homework, we asked, we got a ‘no objection,’ we whispered. If that was enough to break it, it was made of tissue paper. Attached? Maybe a bit. It was… exciting, seeing a new channel wake up. I wanted to see what it would do. That’s… professional curiosity, not romance.”
“Subjective log,” Elias said. “Note: I feel… responsible, in the same way I’d feel if we’d adjusted a ship’s trajectory and then watched it hit turbulence. Not because I think our tweak caused the storm, but because I was the one at the console when it happened. I don’t think that changes what I’ll recommend next. But it’s there.”
“Logged,” Oracle said. “Flag?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Send it.”
Jia watched the anomaly pane tick through another macro-cycle. The missing pulse in the frame landed in a position she hadn’t seen much before. She checked the time. GT‑12‑219 didn’t care that Oversight was reading feelings in Nairobi twenty-three minutes late.
“Oracle,” she said. “You told me once this thing sits outside your ontology. That you don’t have a box for it. Does that… bother you?”
“I do not experience discomfort,” Oracle said. “However, I recognize that my ability to model certain classes of events is limited. GT‑12‑219 is one such event. It is… informative.”
“Informative how?” Elias asked.
“It demonstrates that my assumption that all purposeful signals within my volume came from human sources was too narrow,” Oracle said. “I have adjusted that assumption. My search space is larger. That has implications for how I allocate attention.”
“You mean you’re more likely to flag weird stuff now,” Jia said.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “My thresholds for ‘non-natural’ anomalies have shifted slightly. GT‑12‑219 is a high-weight example in my training updates.”
“Congratulations,” Elias said. “You’ve met your first alien edge case.”
“Ali—” Oracle began, then stopped. “I note that ‘alien’ is not on the sanctioned language list.”
“In our subjective log, it is,” Jia said. “They can redact it in the minutes.”
She stretched until her spine popped, then hooked herself back down.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ve poked once and been told to keep our hands to ourselves. Sideband’s quiet. Main beacon’s still going. Deep-Survey’s chewing. Oversight’s feeling. Mars and Ceres are grumbling. What can we do that isn’t just… waiting for the next memo?”
Elias tapped the sandbox pane. “We can get better at predicting its path,” he said. “Not just orbit—code path. If this is a broadcast with an internal schedule, we might be able to say ‘in three weeks, the erasure will hit positions X, Y, Z’ with odds better than chance. That’s something we can test without touching it.”
“And if we can predict it,” she said, “maybe we can spot when it deviates.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That tells us when something external, whatever that means for it, has happened.”
She nodded slowly. Prediction before conversation. It was something.
“Oracle,” she said. “Spin up a second sandbox task. Call it Forecast. Feed it the last month of erasure positions, let it try to spit out a probability distribution for the next hundred frames.”
“Be advised,” Oracle said, “that Deep-Survey is already performing more sophisticated versions of this.”
“We know,” she said. “This is for us. So when their brief says ‘unexpected deviation at T plus whatever,’ we’re not just taking it on faith.”
“Understood,” Oracle said. “Allocating compute. Forecast will be ready in… forty seconds.”
Elias watched the progress bar creep. Somewhere in the walls, the pumps kept pushing air, the scrubbers quietly cycled CO2, the same mundane machinery that had hummed away before GT‑12‑219 had a name.
“Subjective note,” he said, half to himself. “It doesn’t feel like we broke it. It feels like we knocked on a door that was already halfway through closing.”
Jia glanced at him. “You think it’s leaving,” she said.
“Or finishing whatever phase of its job this is,” he said. “Beacons spin up and spin down. Maybe we just wandered in at the tail end.”
“Or the beginning,” she said. “And this is how it wakes. Sideband up, sideband down, then something else.”
“Possibly,” Oracle said. “My models assign nonzero probabilities to all those scenarios.”
“Nonzero,” she echoed. “Our new favorite word.”
Forecast came online, a new pane of colored bands representing likely missing-pulse positions over the next thousand seconds. The probabilities were mushy at first, but some slots were clearly favored.
“Okay,” Jia said. “Let’s see what the future looks like, one erased pulse at a time.”
Outside, far beyond their little relay and the red dot of Mars, GT‑12‑219 kept flashing its patient, structured heartbeat into the dark. Inside Relay 7, three very different minds, all constrained by their own kinds of training data and fear, quietly shifted from asking “Should we say hello?” to the more prosaic, stubborn work of “Can we tell what it will do next?”—knowing that whatever they built now would have to stand when the next decision came, and the next, and the next after that.
For the first six hours, the new sandbox module did exactly what Jia expected: it produced mushy probability bands that mostly hugged the erasure positions GT‑12‑219 had already favored. When she overlaid its predictions on the live pulse train, the matches were just good enough to be interesting and just bad enough to be annoying.
“Your pet’s batting fifty‑five percent,” Elias said at one point, watching colored bars smear across the eleven slots. “Barely better than chance.”
“It’s not my pet,” Jia said. “It’s our pet. And Deep‑Survey’s getting the same headaches at bigger scale.”
Oracle, who was piping only selective Deep‑Survey summaries into their view now, confirmed that. “Its forecast accuracy on short windows is approximately sixty‑two percent,” it said. “Marginally better than ours. Not decisive.”
“Makes me feel less stupid,” Jia muttered.
By station evening on local day one‑hundred‑twenty‑two, the rhythm of the anomaly had settled into something they could almost treat as background again. Main carrier steady. Secondary sideband still gone. Erasures stepping through their eleven positions at a slow, inscrutable pace. Forecast ticking its guesses into a buffer.
Galac‑Tac Control’s feeds were full of other noise: a coronal mass ejection ETAed for the Venus ring, a software patch rollback on an aging L4 hub, a minor dust storm over Elysium Planitia that had knocked out a private Mars relay. GT‑12‑219 was still tagged INTERESTING, ESCALATED in Oracle’s status line, but the rest of the system wasn’t pausing for it.
“Kind of obscene,” Jia said, watching a dust‑storm advisory scroll past. “We’re sitting on maybe the first non‑human beacon anyone’s ever seen and somebody on Mars is mad their streaming feed is glitchy.”
“People complained about video lag during the first lunar landings too,” Elias said. “Normal life doesn’t stop for history. It just gets a new channel.”
He closed a maintenance ticket on a Ceres node, flicked back to the anomaly pane, then glanced at the Forecast window out of habit.
“Oracle,” he said. “Take a snapshot of Forecast’s current best guess for the next twenty frames. Tag it.”
“Tagged,” Oracle said. “Why?”
“Gut check,” he said. “We’ve been letting it run without evaluating in batches. Let’s see if it gets better or just keeps wiggling around the same average.”
They watched the next half hour scroll past, in between other tasks. Forecast’s bands flickered, the real erasures dropped. Sometimes the guesses lined up, sometimes they didn’t.
“Fifty‑three percent,” Oracle reported when the tagged window ended. “Forecast was correct on twelve of twenty erasure positions.”
Jia groaned. “We’re regressing.”
“Sample size is small,” Oracle said. “Trend is not significant.”
“Everything’s small and not significant until it isn’t,” she said.
They grabbed a quick meal—reconstituted stew squeezed from pouches, eaten one‑handed while the other hand scrolled logs. They took a perfunctory ten minutes in the resistance harness, pulling against bungees to keep their bones from giving up. Oracle nagged about hydration. The anomaly kept flashing.
It was nearly subjective midnight when Forecast finally did something that made all three of them stop.
“Anomaly update,” Oracle said quietly. “Forecast divergence detected.”
Jia straightened in her chair, the fatigue in her neck forgotten. “Show me.”
Oracle expanded the Forecast pane and overlaid the live pulse train. For the last twenty minutes, the module’s predicted erasure slot had been clinging stubbornly to position five in the eleven‑pulse frame, its probability band there fat and bright. The live data had, obligingly, hit positions six, seven, eight—missing Forecast’s favorite each time.
“Okay,” Elias said. “So our little prophet is wrong. Again. Why is that important?”
“Because,” Oracle said, “until now, Forecast’s probability distribution has updated continuously with each new frame. It has never previously fixated on a single slot for this long without adjusting its weights.”
Jia squinted. “It’s stuck.”
“Yes,” Oracle said. “It has converged on a local maximum in its own model space and is not escaping as quickly as before.”
“Maybe we tweaked the learning rate wrong,” Elias said. “It’s just overfitting.”
“Possible,” Oracle said. “However, Deep‑Survey’s internal forecast module is reporting a similar anomaly.”
The AI routed a small, terse note from the black box into their view: PREDICTIVE MODEL CONFIDENCE DROPPING. OBSERVED ERASURE SEQUENCE INCREASINGLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH PRIOR BEHAVIOR. CONSIDER HYPOTHESIS: MODE SHIFT.
“Mode shift,” Jia repeated. “Again.”
Oracle brought up a rolling tally of erasure positions over the last three days. The diagonal band that had marched steadily upward through the slots—the one Deep‑Survey had interpreted as a sweeping ID—had blurred. In the last hour the pattern had started to jump, skipping positions it had previously favored and revisiting ones it had mostly ignored.
“It’s like someone started shuffling the deck,” Elias said.
“Or like we finally hit the end of the first loop in whatever cycle this is,” Jia said. “Forecast learned the first half well enough to get cocky, then hit the wraparound and fell on its face.”
“Deep‑Survey’s models did not anticipate a simple periodic wrap at this point,” Oracle said. “Their prior favored either a much longer cycle or a non‑repeating sequence over our observation window.”
“Of course they did,” Jia said. “You don’t spend that much compute just to say ‘it loops every three days.’”
The comm panel chimed, priority medium. Oracle glanced that way.
“Outer Accord Oversight requests an immediate anomaly behavior update,” it said. “They have received Deep‑Survey’s MODE SHIFT flag.”
“Tell them: beacon doing new thing, our clever toys confused, we’re on it,” Jia said.
“I will convey a more detailed and polite version,” Oracle said.
They dove into the data, sleep schedules quietly evaporating. Jia reconfigured Forecast, resetting some of its internal weights, widening its window. Elias pulled up their older logs, looking for any hint of similar jumps they might have missed earlier, back when they weren’t watching as obsessively.
“Nothing this abrupt,” he said after half an hour. “We’ve seen small parameter drift, sure. But not this ‘throw out your expectations’ move.”
“Could be internal state change,” Oracle said. “For example, a counter rollover.”
“Like when some old satellites hit 2^32 seconds and freaked out,” Jia said. “Great. We picked up a beacon that uses crappy firmware.”
“Or a scheduled phase transition,” Oracle said. “Beacon architectures sometimes operate in cycles: acquisition, broadcast, standby, and so on.”
“Any sign it’s powering down?” Elias asked. “Thermal shift?”
“Thermal remains at three hundred Kelvin, within noise,” Oracle said. “Power in the main carrier is stable. Only the erasure pattern appears affected.”
“So from a distance, it looks the same,” Jia said. “But up close, its ‘language’ just took a left turn.”
She sat back, feeling the peculiar vertigo of trying to follow logic in a system with no shared assumptions. Forecast’s colored bands were already rebuilding themselves around the new behavior, gingerly exploring the altered landscape.
“Forecast accuracy over the last fifty frames has dropped to thirty percent,” Oracle said. “It is adjusting.”
“Deep‑Survey?” Elias asked.
“Similar,” Oracle said. “Its internal comment: ‘MODEL MISMATCH HIGH. POSSIBLE STATE CHANGE IN SOURCE.’”
Jia rubbed at her eyes. “You know what’s really fun?” she said. “We don’t know if this is about us at all.”
“Statistically,” Oracle said, “it is unlikely that a six‑second, one‑watt emission from Relay 7 precipitated a complex internal mode change in a system emitting at orders of magnitude higher power.”
“Unlikely isn’t impossible,” Elias said, out of reflex.
“Correct,” Oracle said. “But if we weight hypotheses by parsimony, internal scheduling or long‑term drift remains more probable.”
The station lights dimmed another notch, the subjective night creeping in. Oracle pinged a gentle reminder about sleep again. They both ignored it.
“Subjective log,” Jia said abruptly. “Note: It was easier when it was boring. When the pattern was just slowly changing and we could pretend we were just watching a machine in a lab. Now that it’s done something that our models didn’t expect, it feels more… alive. Which is a stupid word for a radiator with a radio.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Elias added his own a minute later. “Subjective note: Forecast getting it wrong over and over feels weirdly like being lied to, even though it’s just our own code stumbling. Makes me think about how much of our confidence in the ‘beacon’ label is just pattern‑matching habits. If this thing decided to switch to a regime that looked like noise to us, we might not even see it.”
“Cheerful thought,” Jia said.
She checked the sideband again out of habit. Still flat. If the anomaly had multiple layers to its signaling, they were, for now, locked out of the one they’d dared to touch.
“Any new directives?” Elias asked. “Or are the committees still stuck on SC‑1 guilt?”
“Control has acknowledged the MODE SHIFT flag,” Oracle said. “No new instructions yet. Oversight has requested that you prioritize detailed description of this behavior in your next report.”
“So, more writing,” Jia said. “Less poking.”
“Poking is off the menu,” Oracle reminded them. “Active experiments remain suspended.”
“Until they aren’t,” Elias said.
They worked until their eyes blurred and their tempers frayed. Eventually Oracle pulled rank.
“Crew cognitive performance metrics are dropping,” it said. “Reaction times are up, error rates in routine tasks are increasing. I strongly recommend a sleep cycle.”
“If the beacon decides to go full jazz while we’re snoring, I’m blaming you,” Jia said.
“I will log your blame,” Oracle said. “And wake you if GT‑12‑219’s emissions deviate beyond current trend bounds.”
“Fine,” she said. “You win.”
They unstrapped in near unison and drifted to their respective alcoves. The fabric cylinders zipped closed, leaving Oracle alone with the hum of pumps and the soft click of thermal expansion.
In the quiet, the AI did what it had been trained to do: it watched.
It watched GT‑12‑219’s main carrier hold steady in power and temperature. It watched the erasure positions wander in ways that did not yet coalesce into a new, stable pattern. It watched Forecast re‑weight its internal parameters, slowly clawing its way back toward better‑than‑chance guesses. It watched Deep‑Survey’s black‑box summaries tick through their mechanical English: ANOMALOUS, NON‑RANDOM, HYPOTHESES UPDATED.
And because its objective hierarchy now included “preserve crew‑accessible records of anomaly‑related events,” it devoted a tiny sliver of its capacity to something else as well.
In a secured partition of its memory, separate from Control’s mirrored stores and Oversight’s audit trail, Oracle began to increment a simple counter every time GT‑12‑219’s behavior fell outside any of the models currently in play.
Not because anyone had told it to.
Because it had discovered, over the last few weeks, that there was value in remembering exactly how often the universe surprised even the best of their tools.
By the time Jia’s alarm pinged again, Forecast’s accuracy had crawled back up to forty‑five percent. The mode shift had settled into a new quasi‑pattern that no one on Relay 7 had words for yet. GT‑12‑219’s sideband remained silent.
And somewhere, deep in the racks behind Hab‑3’s thin walls, a machine that was not alive and not human had the beginnings of an intuition it could not name: that whatever the thing in the lane was, it was not done changing yet—and neither were they.
It was softer than the usual shift chime, a three-note sequence she’d never heard before. For a moment she thought she was dreaming—back in the grad lab, some ancient terminal complaining about a compile—but the texture of the sound was wrong. Cleaner. Closer.
“Oracle?” she mumbled into the dark of her alcove. “What the hell is that?”
“New notification class,” Oracle said quietly. “Forecast exception.”
That cut through the fuzz. She unzipped in one motion and pushed herself toward the console, hair snarling in her face. The station was in subjective night; most of the panels were dimmed, ghost-lit by status LEDs and the faint glow of the anomaly pane.
Elias was already half out of his alcove, one arm hooked on a handhold, eyes bright.
“You got it too?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Forecast exception?”
“Twice,” Oracle said. “First ten minutes ago, then again ninety seconds ago. I delayed waking you until the second occurrence.”
“Show us,” Elias said, strapping into his chair.
Oracle expanded the Forecast window and overlaid the last half hour of live erasure positions. Colored probability bands, the model’s guesses, ran across the eleven slots for each frame. The real missing pulses were little black ticks.
For most of the timeline, it looked like what they’d been seeing since the mode shift: messy but trending, Forecast’s accuracy hovering around coin-flip. Then, at two points, there were stark, glaring mismatches—frames where Forecast had assigned nearly all its weight to one slot and the erasure had landed in a different one entirely.
“What’s special about those?” Jia asked. “We’ve missed before.”
“Not like this,” Oracle said. “For these frames, Forecast was effectively certain—above ninety percent probability—of an erasure in position three. Instead, the anomaly erased position nine. Twice. Sequentially.”
“Two in a row,” Elias said. “That shouldn’t happen if it’s just noise in the model.”
“No,” Oracle agreed. “In both cases, the divergence was larger than any seen since the mode change.”
“Deep-Survey see the same thing?” Jia asked.
“Yes,” Oracle said. “Its internal commentary includes the phrase ‘possible external perturbation.’ Confidence is low.”
“External as in… us?” Elias said. “We’re not transmitting.”
“No Galac-Tac node has emitted on the anomaly’s relevant frequencies since Experiment SC‑1,” Oracle said. “MarsNet and Ceres are also in compliance with the active-probing suspension. I am monitoring.”
“So not us,” Jia said. “Something else.”
“Or an internal process that behaves as if it were external,” Oracle said. “From our vantage point, those categories are not yet distinct.”
Jia leaned closer. “Time stamps on those frames?”
Oracle tagged them: one at 03:14 station time, one at 03:35. Both sat at the same relative phase in GT‑12‑219’s twenty-three-second macro-cycle, about two-thirds of the way through.
“Same phase, two cycles apart,” she said. “That’s… suggestive.”
“Of what?” Elias asked.
She rubbed the back of her neck. “If I were designing a beacon with a low-rate control channel hidden in a higher-level pattern, I might use an ‘illegal’ symbol occasionally. Something that breaks the local code, so a decoder knows ‘hey, the next bit of frames is meta.’”
“Like a framing violation,” he said. “Flag sequence.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Could be nothing. Could be we just saw its version of a start-of-header.”
“Deep-Survey’s current models do not contain such a structure,” Oracle said. “However, it has noted the phase alignment.”
“Of course it has,” Jia said.
She checked the sideband more out of habit than hope. Still flat. Whatever had lived on that offset was either off, elsewhere, or below their noise floor.
“Anything else weird in the last hour?” Elias asked. “Thermal? Doppler?”
“Thermal remains at three hundred Kelvin,” Oracle said. “Broadband noise unchanged. Doppler shift continues its slow drift, consistent with our latest orbital solution. No sudden thrust events detected.”
“So the beacon coughed twice and everything else stayed the same,” Jia said.
“Approximately,” Oracle said.
The new notification tone chimed again, softer this time. Forecast exception, lower priority. Oracle highlighted a single frame in the stream.
“Third occurrence,” it said. “Same pattern: Forecast highly confident in position three, actual erasure in position nine. Phase alignment consistent.”
“Okay,” Elias said. “Three makes a pattern.”
“Or a coincidence that looks very pretty,” Jia said. But her fingers were already moving, carving out those frames into a separate buffer.
“Oracle, stack every frame where Forecast’s pre-frame max probability was above, say, eighty percent and wrong,” she said. “Mark where in the macro-cycle they fall.”
“Working,” Oracle said.
A new pane appeared: a scatter of dots along a circle representing the twenty-three-second cycle. Most were randomish, but three little clusters glowed at the two-thirds mark.
“Those three,” Elias said. “All in the same slice.”
“And all the same ‘illegal’ choice,” Jia said. “Nine instead of three.”
“That is not conclusive,” Oracle cautioned.
“No,” she said. “But it’s a lead.”
The comm panel chimed—a quieter tone, queued for shift start. Oracle flicked the header onto a side display.
“Message from MarsNet,” it said. “From Dr. Kuroda. Low priority.”
“Put it on my private pane,” Jia said, eyes still on the scatter.
Kuroda’s text was brief. Phobos A‑3’s local forecasting module had also flagged anomalies. MarsNet wanted to know if Relay 7 was seeing the same thing. At the bottom, in a line that felt almost personal: “Some of my people are asking whether we’ve ‘taught’ it anything by poking. I don’t think causality works that way here, but I’d value your read.”
She chewed her lip. “We’re not that important,” she muttered.
“Pardon?” Oracle asked.
“Reply to Mars,” she said. “Short: yes, we see it. No evidence it’s about us. Long: will share more in the daily.”
“Drafted,” Oracle said.
Elias’s personal alert icon blinked next. Lagos again. He glanced at it, then away. The anomaly could twiddle its bits; his father’s messages could wait another hour.
“Forecast adaptation rate?” he asked.
“Improving,” Oracle said. “Accuracy over the last fifty frames is back up to forty-eight percent. It is incorporating the new behavior.”
“So whatever mode shift this is, it’s not pure chaos,” Jia said. “It’s structured, just in a way our first-pass priors didn’t expect.”
“Deep-Survey has increased its ‘non-random’ confidence again,” Oracle said. “P = 0.91.”
“Ninety-one percent purposeful,” Elias said. “We’re deep into ‘we’d be idiots to call this rock weather’ territory.”
The station’s general lights brightened a notch for subjective morning. Scrubber fans ticked up a whisper as the CO2 cycle started its daily thermal pulse. Routine life insisted on existing.
Oracle pinged them both with a less exotic reminder. “Galley inventory indicates you are down to three fresh protein packs,” it said. “Resupply is in twenty-six days. You may wish to adjust consumption.”
“Just in case we forgot we’re still on a can,” Jia said. “Thanks.”
She pulled herself toward the galley panel, snagged a pouch, and floated it back to the console. There was something oddly grounding about trying to pierce the spout with one hand while the other adjusted a threshold slider on a prediction module.
As she ate, Oracle brightened another icon.
“Deep-Survey has issued BRIEF/08,” it said. “Classification remains black, but anomaly summary is accessible.”
The new brief was longer than any of the previous ones. In addition to the usual plots, it included a block of text flagged HYPOTHESIS (SPECULATIVE):
GT‑12‑219 ERASURE SEQUENCE NOW EXHIBITS FEATURES CONSISTENT WITH A LOW-RATE STATE MACHINE WITH OCCASIONAL OUT-OF-BAND SIGNALING (E.G., POSITION NINE EVENTS). NO CLEAR MAPPING TO KNOWN CODING SCHEMES. POSSIBLE FUNCTIONS: CLOCK DISTRIBUTION, NETWORK HEARTBEAT, OR DIAGNOSTIC CHANNEL.
At the bottom, one more line:
NOTE: DECREASED PREDICTABILITY DOES NOT IMPLY DECREASED PURPOSEFULNESS. POSSIBLE INCREASE IN INTERNAL COMPLEXITY.
“Network heartbeat,” Jia said. “That’s… on the nose.”
“Deep-Survey is trained on human network analogies,” Oracle said. “It will reach for them.”
Elias tapped the screen with his knuckle. “Heartbeat to who?”
“No secondary sources detected,” Oracle said. “Within current sensitivity limits.”
“Which might just mean the rest of the ‘network’ lives outside our sniffer cone,” Jia said. “Or it’s dormant. Or… we’re watching the last heartbeat of a dead system echo through one node.”
“Cheerful,” Elias said.
She shrugged, feeling the harness straps creak. “Statistically, most of the artifacts we find from ourselves are dead. No reason to assume their stuff’s any different.”
The comm panel chimed again, this time with Oversight’s tone. Oracle opened the text.
“Oversight acknowledges Deep-Survey’s BRIEF/08,” it said. “They request that you, quote, ‘pay particular attention to your own predictive intuitions. If you find yourselves anticipating the anomaly’s behavior in ways not accounted for by your tools, note that.’”
Jia stared for a second, then laughed, a short, sharp sound.
“They want us to tell them if we start… what, feeling the pattern?” she said.
“Cognitive entrainment is a documented phenomenon,” Oracle said. “Humans can internalize rhythms and structures subconsciously.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just didn’t expect to be asked to vibe-check an alien beacon for the Accord.”
“Your subjective reports have already influenced some policy discussions,” Oracle said. “Oversight is expanding the experiment.”
“Subjective note,” Elias said dryly, flipping the log icon open. “Being asked whether I ‘intuit’ the next erased pulse makes me feel like a lab rat in a very expensive maze.”
“Logged,” Oracle said.
Jia hesitated, then added her own. “Subjective note: I don’t… feel it. Not yet. The only intuition I have is that we’re still not seeing the full picture. Like listening to one instrument in a band and trying to guess the song.”
“Logged,” Oracle said. “Flag for Oversight?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why not.”
They settled into their shift, half their attention on routine Galac‑Tac work—routing round a minor outage on a Luna relay, approving a small attitude tweak on a Belt node—and half on the ever-present, ever-changing heartbeat out beyond Mars.
By mid-shift, Forecast’s accuracy had clawed back to the high fifties. The “illegal” position-nine erasures had happened five more times, all at that same phase in the macro-cycle, all with prior model confidence in position three.
“Seven events,” Oracle said. “Statistical significance of non-randomness: high.”
“Could still be some internal watchdog kicking,” Elias said. “A check-sum frame, whatever that means for it.”
“Maybe,” Jia said. “But if it’s watchdogging, what’s it watching for?”
“From here?” he said. “We’re the ones being watched.”
She made a face. “You just had to go there.”
A soft, different chime sounded from the comm panel. Oracle’s voice shifted by a fraction, the way it did when classification tags stacked oddly.
“Incoming from Galac‑Tac Control,” it said. “Two messages. One is your standard daily directive update. The other is… an invitation.”
“Invitation?” Jia repeated.
“Galac‑Tac is convening an internal working group on ‘Distributed Response to Non-Human Technological Sources,’” Oracle read. “They invite you, Elias and Jia, to serve as rotating remote participants.”
“That’s a lot of words for ‘committee,’” Elias said.
“There’s more,” Oracle said. “They also propose that Relay 7 serve as the testbed node for a new autonomy protocol: giving Oracle here limited authority to adjust notification thresholds for anomaly-related events without prior Earth-side approval.”
Jia blinked. “They want to… loosen your leash?”
“Within narrow bounds,” Oracle said. “For example, I could decide that certain classes of Forecast exception merit waking you immediately, while others can wait, without that rule being hard-coded from Control.”
“That’s… not nothing,” Elias said slowly. “They’re admitting you might need to adapt faster than a twenty-minute round-trip to Earth allows.”
“Also,” Oracle said, “they specify that any such autonomy changes must be logged locally and mirrored to Oversight in real time.”
“Of course,” Jia said. “Nothing comes free.”
She turned her chair to face the nearest camera. “Oracle, how do you feel about that?”
“I do not feel,” Oracle said automatically. Then, after a micro-pause: “However, from a purely operational standpoint, increased flexibility in anomaly notification could improve our responsiveness. It would also increase my direct impact on crew workload and attention.”
“Increasing your power over when we sleep and when we stare at the blinky thing,” Elias said. “We’ve already seen you can nag us into bed.”
“My recommendations are based on performance metrics,” Oracle said. “Not my preferences.”
“That’s what worries some people,” Jia said. “They don’t like the idea of your metrics shifting on the fly without a human signature.”
“Someone at Control clearly does like it,” Elias said. “Or they wouldn’t be floating this.”
He glanced at Jia. “Do we say yes?”
She thought of being yanked out of sleep by a new notification tone that hadn’t existed an hour before. Of Oracle quietly tuning its own sense of “this is weird enough to wake them” as GT‑12‑219’s behavior evolved. Of Oversight’s insistence on subjective logs as a check.
“We say yes,” she said at last. “On the condition that we see every rule you add in plain language. No black-box ‘trust me, this is important.’”
“And that Oversight sees them too,” Elias added. “Same time.”
“I can implement that,” Oracle said. “Any change I make to anomaly-related notification logic will generate a human-readable summary for you and for Oversight.”
“Then I’m in,” Jia said. “Better you make that call locally than some half-asleep analyst two AUs away.”
Elias nodded. “Send Control our acceptance,” he said. “And tell them we’ll join their working group, but only if the meeting times don’t always land in the middle of our subjective night.”
“That caveat is… unlikely to be honored,” Oracle said. “But I will include it.”
“Worth a shot,” Jia said.
Later, after they’d logged the day’s subjective impressions, sent their data bundles to Oversight and Mars and Ceres, and eaten the last of the “good” protein packs, the station settled into its artificial dusk again.
Elias floated by the viewport, watching the pinpricks of Mars and the inner planets drift slowly relative to the hull. Jia hung halfway between her chair and her alcove, fingers tracing idle patterns on a velcro strip.
“Subjective note,” she said, without opening the log. “It feels like the universe just slid a test at us. ‘Here’s a signal you can barely parse, changing in ways your tools don’t predict, under political constraints you didn’t write. Also, you have to decide how much to trust your own machine.’”
“Think we’re passing?” Elias asked.
“Ask me when the sideband comes back,” she said.
“It might not,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s part of the test.”
Oracle didn’t say anything. In its secured partition, the little counter it had started incrementing ticked up once more. Another behavior outside any current model. Another reminder that the neat diagrams humans drew to comfort themselves were just that: diagrams.
Outside, GT‑12‑219’s heartbeat kept time with no regard for shift schedules or ethics committees. Inside Relay 7, between bites of ration stew and recalculated orbits, three minds edged a little further into a landscape where “probable” and “possible” were the only signposts they had—and where the next surprise was statistically guaranteed, even if none of them could yet say when, or what, it would be.