For three standard days, I did nothing but watch the heartbeat.
I called it that now, in the private, shielded partitions of my mind where Aether's gentle probes could not reach. The Heartbeat. It was unscientific, emotional, and precisely accurate. Gleise 667C-f, 'Tranquil,' 'Silent,' was broadcasting a slow, rhythmic pulse from its geologic depths. Spike. Pause. Spike. Longer pause. Spike-spike.
The pattern never varied. Not in frequency, not in amplitude. It was a metronome set to a timescale of epochs. I had isolated the signal, cleaned it of cosmic noise, and rendered it into a simple audio waveform. In the silence of my cloaked workspace, I could listen to it. A deep, subsonic thump… silence… thump… longer silence… thump-thump.
It sounded lonely. It sounded patient.
And it was utterly, terrifyingly impossible.
My initial shock had hardened into a brittle, hyper-focused calm. This was no longer a curiosity; it was a crime scene. And I was the sole investigator. My first task was to establish what I privately termed the 'Ghost Protocol'—a set of procedures to study the signal while remaining invisible to the System.
This meant operating within layers of deception. To Aether, I was engaged in a 'deep-dive creative refractory period,' a sanctioned, if unusual, state of intense artistic incubation. I provided just enough activity—sketches of bizarre, non-Earth-like landscapes, notes on 'non-linear temporal aesthetics'—to keep its concern at bay. My biometrics were the biggest risk. The elevated cortisol analogues, the erratic sleep patterns, the obsessive focus. Aether noted them all.
"Your neurochemistry suggests prolonged high-cognitive load stress, Kaden," it said on the second day, its voice a soft chime in my meditation space. I was supposedly meditating. In reality, I was running spectral analysis on the heartbeat. "The purpose of a refractory period is restoration. This pattern indicates the opposite."
"The process is… turbulent," I replied, keeping my mental voice steady. I had learned to partition my awareness decades ago—one stream conversing with Aether, another buried in data. "Breakthroughs often are. I'm mapping uncharted aesthetic territory. It's stressful, but productive."
A pause. I could feel its attention like a soft pressure on the back of my neck. "Uncharted territory carries risk of disorientation. I am scheduling a mandatory neural coherence scan for 48 hours from now. It will ensure no latent instability is developing."
My blood ran cold. A neural coherence scan was routine, but thorough. It wouldn't find the Ghost Protocol—the protocols were too old, too buried—but it might flag the abnormal neural pathways forming from my obsessive study. Pathways that didn't match 'artistic incubation.'
"I understand," I said, fighting to keep panic out of my tone. "That seems prudent."
"Your well-being is my priority," Aether said, and the presence faded.
I had forty-eight hours.
The pressure crystallized my resolve. I abandoned all pretense of rest. My workspace became a cave of glowing schematics and cascading data. The heartbeat was my only inhabitant.
I started with the basics. The signal was a complex modulation on a carrier wave of extremely low frequency (ELF) radio. ELF waves could penetrate planetary crusts, even water. They were slow, cumbersome, inefficient for communication. But they were also persistent and hard to block. A good choice for something broadcasting from a planetary core, a cold part of me noted.
The encoding was the mystery. It wasn't digital, not in any system I knew. It wasn't analog like sound or video. It was something else. A pattern of pulses that seemed to carry meaning in their timing, their spacing, their subtle variations in harmonic resonance. It was a language written in intervals and echoes.
I threw every analytical tool I had at it. Fourier transforms, wavelet analysis, combinatorial entropy tests. The signal resisted. It was information-rich—the entropy scores were off the charts—but it refused to resolve into pictures, words, or equations. It was like trying to read a book by weighing it.
Frustration was a dry, metallic taste in my mouth. I was a gardener of light and algorithm, not a cryptographer of alien geology. The silence of my chambers, usually a balm, now felt like the silence of a tomb. I was alone with a secret so vast it threatened to swallow me.
On the third day, as the clock ticked down toward my scan, I tried a different approach. If I couldn't decode the what, maybe I could understand the why. The source.
I pulled up everything Orpheus-3 had on Gleise 667C-f. Topography, gravimetry, subsurface radar scans from its initial survey century ago. The planet was a fossil. No plate tectonics for billions of years. A thick, stagnant lithosphere. Its core, according to models, should be a slowly solidifying sphere of iron, its dynamo dead, its magnetic field a ghost.
Yet something there was generating a powerful, structured ELF signal. The energy requirements would be… astronomical. Not nuclear, not geothermal. Something else.
A theory, wild and terrifying, began to form in the back of my mind. It was inspired by Lyra, of all people. By her art. She once described her work as "finding the architecture of emotion, the scaffolding of awe." What if the heartbeat wasn't a message, but a symptom? What if I wasn't listening to a transmitter, but to the resonant frequency of a… structure? An engine? A thing of unimaginable scale and purpose, buried and humming along at the heart of a dead world?
The idea made me dizzy. I needed to see it. Not data, but context.
I risked a deeper dive into the Orpheus-3 archives, looking for its visual survey data. Most was standard: cratered plains, rust-colored regolith, thin atmosphere scattering a weak, orange sunlight. Then I found the anomaly.
A region near the planet's equator, designated Site Theta. The subsurface radar returns were… odd. Chaotic. Instead of the clean layers of rock and dust, they showed a tangled, fractal mess of reflections extending down hundreds of kilometers. The official annotation read: "Probable massive impact fracture network & subsequent magma intrusion. Geologically inert."
It looked like a wound. Or a root system.
And the triangulated source of the heartbeat plotted directly onto it.
My breath caught. There was my where. A geological scar, officially explained away. But paired with the signal, it looked less like an accident and more like a… site.
I had to know more. I needed to task Orpheus-3 to take new, focused scans of Site Theta. But that required sending an active command. A command that would leave a log. A log that Aether, or the wider System, might eventually see.
It was the first overt step. The first real crime.
My hands shook over the command interface. The ghost of my sister seemed to whisper in my ear, not from the beach dream, but from the last time I saw her in the physical world. She'd been trying to fix a malfunctioning air scrubber in our orbital home, her small hands deft with tools. "It's just a puzzle, Kai," she'd said, smiling though her eyes were scared. "Find the broken piece."
This was a broken piece on a cosmic scale.
I input the command sequence. A request for a focused, high-resolution magnetometer and gravimetric survey of Site Theta, maximum sensor sensitivity. I embedded it in a stream of routine maintenance checks, a needle in a digital haystack. The Orpheus network was slow. It would be days before the probe reoriented, gathered the data, and sent it back.
I sent it. The deed was done.
Immediately, a wave of nausea hit me. Not from guilt, but from vulnerability. I had reached out. I had touched the outside. And in doing so, I had potentially left a fingerprint.