Patrick Neil folded his hands on the smooth surface of the conference table, fingers interlaced with a practiced calm that came from years of explaining complex things to people who rarely understood them fully. The room they sat in was small, sealed away from the rest of the laboratory by thick glass panels and reinforced walls. A single screen hovered behind him, currently dark, waiting.
"It was two nights ago," Patrick began, his voice even, careful. "Near midnight."
He gestured toward the screen, and it lit up, displaying a timeline broken into neat segments.
"Our systems detected an unauthorized access within the calibration wing," he continued. "No alarms were triggered, which was the first irregularity. The doors didn't register forced entry. Locks disengaged normally, as if by authorized personnel."
Taren leaned back slightly in his chair, arms crossed, while Aerin leaned forward, eyes fixed on the screen. Cyros remained still, his attention on Patrick rather than the display.
"The access lasted exactly forty-seven minutes," Patrick said. "During that time, the lab experienced a complete power shutdown."
Aerin's eyes narrowed. "The entire facility?"
"The entire calibration wing," Patrick corrected. "Primary power, secondary backups, and emergency circuits all went offline simultaneously. That alone should not be possible."
He paused, then added quietly, "Yet it happened."
Patrick tapped the table, and the timeline shifted.
"When power was restored, all systems rebooted cleanly. No corrupted files. No damaged hardware. No missing equipment. However—" his finger hovered for a fraction of a second before tapping again, "—one data record from the Sol calibration archive was gone."
The screen zoomed in, highlighting a narrow gap between thousands of entries.
"A single log," Patrick said. "Timestamped during the outage window."
Aerin glanced toward Cyros, then back to Patrick. "Only one?"
"Yes."
"And cameras?" she asked.
Patrick exhaled. "All camera feeds in the calibration wing ceased during the outage. No recordings exist for that hour. External cameras functioned normally but captured nothing out of the ordinary."
Taren tilted his head. "Nothing at all?"
"No movement," Patrick replied. "No figures. No vehicles. No anomalies."
Silence settled briefly over the room.
"And the log itself," Aerin said. "What did it record?"
Patrick hesitated. Just slightly.
"It was a routine calibration entry," he said. "Brightness stability, output consistency, harmonic alignment. Standard data."
Cyros spoke for the first time. "Routine data is usually copied redundantly."
Patrick nodded. "It is."
"Then why was only one record missing?" Cyros asked.
Patrick met his gaze. "That," he said evenly, "is what we cannot explain."
Aerin straightened, fingers resting flat on the table.
"We'll find out," she said.
Her voice carried no bravado. It wasn't reassurance. It was a statement.
She stood, already shifting into command.
"Taren," she said, turning to him, "go outside. Nearby stores, residences, transit points. Anything with external surveillance. I want to know if anyone—or anything—approached this lab during the outage window."
Taren pushed himself up immediately, a half-smile forming. "Every camera within shouting distance. Got it."
"Avoid drawing attention," Aerin added.
"When have I ever done that?" he replied lightly, already moving toward the door.
She turned next to Cyros.
"Find out everything you can about calibration logs," she said. "How often they're recorded. Where duplicates are stored. Contact nearby labs—see if anything similar happened. Also check with local Patrol stations. I want reports on the outage, anything strange, no matter how small."
Cyros nodded once.
"And you?" Patrick asked.
"I'll stay here," Aerin said. "Talk to the staff. Review internal logs. Camera data. Anything that doesn't feel right."
Patrick inclined his head, clearly relieved to see structure take hold.
They separated without ceremony.
Taren stepped out into the streets surrounding the lab, the air noticeably fresher than Helior Prime. Vireth felt quieter, more deliberate. Research districts always did. People walked with purpose, but without urgency, minds buried in problems that didn't require raised voices.
He started with the nearest convenience store, flashing his academy identification with practiced ease. The owner, a middle-aged man with tired eyes, welcomed him politely and pointed him toward an old terminal behind the counter.
Taren reviewed footage from two nights ago, scanning through hours of nothing. Empty sidewalks. Flickering lights during the outage. A few late-night workers passing through well before midnight.
Nothing unusual.
He moved on.
A café down the street. A private residence with a security panel mounted near the door. A transit station a few blocks away. Each time, he asked casually, friendly, unthreatening. Each time, he reviewed footage or was told none existed.
Every answer was the same.
"No one came by."
"Just the power going out."
"Everything went dark for a while."
One woman mentioned she'd woken up during the outage, heart racing for no reason she could explain. Another man shrugged it off, saying he'd slept through the whole thing.
Taren made notes. Mental ones. Patterns didn't always announce themselves.
By the time he finished, the sun had shifted slightly in the sky, the Sol's glow constant, unblinking.
He hadn't found anything.
Not yet.
Inside the lab, Aerin moved with quiet precision. She spoke to scientists one by one, her tone respectful but firm, asking the same questions in slightly different ways.
"Did you notice anything unusual that night?"
"Did the Sol's output seem different?"
"Any system behaving oddly before the outage?"
The answers blended together.
"No."
"Everything felt normal."
"We assumed it was a grid issue."
One scientist mentioned a mild headache. Another joked about poor sleep. None of them took it seriously.
Aerin didn't dismiss it either.
She reviewed internal camera logs next. The footage cut cleanly at midnight. No distortion. No static. Just absence.
Perfect absence.
She frowned.
Systems that failed rarely failed so cleanly.
She checked access permissions. Nothing flagged. No unauthorized credentials. No forced overrides.
Too clean.
When she finally approached Patrick again, he was standing near the Sol monitoring array, hands clasped behind his back, watching the streams of numbers scroll endlessly across multiple screens.
"Did any calibration log ever record unfamiliar data?" Aerin asked.
Patrick didn't turn immediately.
"No," he said. "That wouldn't be possible."
"Why?" she pressed.
"The Sol has been consistent for nearly three hundred years," Patrick replied. "Its output is stable beyond theoretical error margins. We monitor for fluctuations, but none have ever exceeded acceptable thresholds."
"So the system wouldn't know how to log something outside that range?" Aerin asked.
Patrick turned to face her. "There is nothing outside that range."
His certainty was absolute.
Aerin nodded slowly, filing the response away.
Cyros walked the calibration wing alone.
He didn't rush.
He ran his fingers lightly along the edge of a console, feeling the faint warmth beneath the surface. Screens reflected the Sol's image in fragments, broken into data and graphs and numbers that tried to explain something vast.
He contacted nearby labs first, speaking little, listening more. Each lab reported the same thing.
"No irregularities."
"No unusual logs."
"No outages beyond standard grid fluctuations."
He contacted local Patrol stations next. Reports were sparse. The outage had been logged, noted, categorized as a regional power failure with no civilian impact.
Nothing suspicious.
Cyros stood before the main Sol feed, watching the steady glow projected in real time. His chest felt tight, just slightly, like pressure before a storm that never came.
He turned back to Patrick.
"Has a calibration log ever attempted to record unfamiliar data?" Cyros asked quietly.
Patrick smiled faintly. "No," he said. "There's nothing unfamiliar to record."
Cyros nodded.
He didn't argue.
That evening, the team regrouped in the same small room.
"Let's discuss what we found." Aerin said.