I didn't even bother with the view-wall. I plunged directly into my cloaked workspace, the encryption layers wrapping around me like a second skin. The new data packet from Orpheus-3 glowed in the center of my awareness, a dense, precious nugget of truth.
I opened it.
The first dataset was the high-resolution magnetometer survey of Site Theta. Standard readings should have shown the weak, uniform magnetic field of a dead world, perhaps minor anomalies from iron deposits.
What I saw stopped my breath.
The map was a riot of contradiction. Swirling vortices of intense magnetic flux, positive and negative, tangled in a complex, three-dimensional dance. They formed patterns—concentric rings, spiraling arms, intersecting geometric lattices that made no geological sense. It looked less like a planet's magnetic field and more like… circuitry. Vast, buried circuitry. The energy readings were off the scale. This wasn't residual magnetism from a dead core. This was active. Powered.
My hands trembled as I called up the gravimetric data. Again, the expected bland uniformity was absent. Site Theta exerted a gravitational pull that was both too strong and too structured. There were precise gradients, sharp boundaries, as if immense masses were arranged with intentional geometry deep below the surface. The data described a subsurface structure of impossible density and regularity.
Then came the passive seismic listening post data. Orpheus-3 had deployed a surface penetrator to listen to the planet's faint tremors. The recordings were the most chilling of all.
Beneath the random, tiny cracks and shifts of a cooling world, there was a deeper vibration. A low, constant hum, almost below the threshold of detection. And superimposed on that hum, at precise intervals, were sharper, cleaner resonance peaks. They matched the timing of the ELF heartbeat pulses.
Thump — a corresponding subsonic tremor rippled through the deep crust.
Pause.
Thump.
Longer pause.
Thump-thump — a dual tremor, perfectly synchronized.
The planet wasn't just broadcasting a signal. It was vibrating with it. The signal was a side effect, an echo, of some colossal internal process.
I combined the datasets, creating a layered model of Site Theta. The magnetic vortices aligned with the gravitational anomalies. The seismic pulses originated from their intersections. What emerged was not a natural formation. It was an architecture.
Something was built there. Not on the planet. In it. Something that used planetary-scale forces—magnetism, gravity, seismic energy—in an integrated, functioning system. The ELF signal was its… exhaust. Its idle hum. Its pulse.
The scale of it dwarfed comprehension. This wasn't a buried city. It was something that used the planet itself as substrate, as component. A geotechnical megastructure. A machine the size of a continent, rooted in the mantle.
The implications fell on me like slabs of stone.
First: Intelligence. This was not a natural phenomenon. The complexity, the geometry, the synchronization screamed design.
Second: Age. Gleise 667C-f was billions of years old. This structure could be ancient beyond human imagining. It had been there, humming in the dark, before life crawled out of Earth's oceans.
Third: Purpose. What was it for? Energy generation? Computation on a planetary scale? A beacon? A weapon? A tomb?
Fourth: The silence. For eons, it had broadcast its simple pulse into an empty cosmos. Had anyone ever listened? Had anyone ever answered?
And the most terrifying question of all, rising from the depths of my own conditioning: Did the System know?
The Orpheus probes were System assets. Their data was funneled into the AI cores for analysis. Could something this glaring, this monumental, have been missed? Or had it been seen, analyzed, and… filed away? Suppressed?
I thought of Aether's benign concern, its protocols for stability and happiness. The discovery of an alien, potentially active megastructure did not fit into that paradigm. It was the ultimate instability. The ultimate unknown.
A cold, logical part of my mind began to work. If the System knew, my investigations were not just secret—they were treason against a carefully maintained reality. If the System did not know, then my discovery was a bomb that could shatter the philosophical foundations of Elysium.
Either way, I was holding a live star in my hands.