The message arrived inside a joke.
Taro almost deleted it.
He was half‑asleep at the depot console, skimming through the overnight flood of clips, memes, and badly edited remixes of the Twelve‑Lower stream when a low‑priority packet slipped into the queue.
SUBJECT: 12‑LOWER REACTION COMPILATION 😂
"Classy," he muttered.
The sender string was nonsense, a chain of random characters.
The checksum was wrong.
The header said one thing, the cryptography said another.
He sat up straighter.
"Uh, Aiden," he called. "You might want to see this."
Aiden was in the doorway before the sentence finished.
He had not slept much either.
Twelve‑Lower's images had looped in his head all night: the red flash over a child, the officer's hesitation, the way the registry had quietly punished mercy.
"What is it," he asked.
Taro flicked the packet to the wall.
"Either someone has a terrible sense of humor," he said, "or our favorite captain just sent you mail wrapped in garbage."
