Chapter 1: First Light over Khepri A
Dr. Imani Rao floated in the dim glow of Planck Array L1's observation deck, tethered to the console by a padded harness. Beyond the graphene viewport, the sensor mast unfurled like a steel-boned lily, its petals of antennae and lidar arrays drinking in radiation from the abyss. Khepri A (named, with a touch of dark humor, after an ancient dawn deity) dominated the starfield ahead—a supermassive black hole whose event horizon spanned a vast ebony disk. Around its edges, starlight smeared into a halo of distorted glints, dragged into chiaroscuro arcs of amber and indigo by the black hole's whirling gravitation. Some of those amber arcs came from stars long dead, their final light bent and prolonged by Khepri's gravity to reach her eyes. Even after months stationed here, Rao felt a familiar shiver at the sight: a mixture of awe and dread. The cosmos was on display, immense and indifferent, and her entire station was a mere fleck suspended above an eternal maw. In her periphery, one of L1's lattice arms stretched out into the dark like the rib of a colossal beast, trembling subtly as the structure flexed under tidal stresses. This place was a cathedral of extremes—ancient night and relentless physics—and she lived in its shadow.
Routine steadied her nerves. With a practiced hand, Rao tapped at her console and brought up the morning's first light calibration run. Every "morning" cycle (an arbitrary designation aboard a station without true sunrise), she conducted diagnostics on L1's instruments: synchronizing atomic clocks, aligning the interferometer arms, and checking the Planck Array's Hawking harvester units. In microgravity, her motions were economical; a gentle push off the console rail sent her drifting to the next monitor. The faint taste of recycled air — metallic with a hint of ozone — clung to each breath. The life-support kept the habitat at a brisk 18°C to optimize the superconducting sensors, so she wore a thin heated jumpsuit under her lab coat. A distant vibration from deep in the station hinted at pumps working to cool the strange matter reactors or the rumble of a reaction wheel adjusting orientation. Rao absently noted it was time to replace the carbon scrubbers again—an odor of tired filters and machine oil underscored the air. Another routine task for later, she thought, filing it away.
She glanced at a side panel displaying the station's orbit parameters. Planck Array L1 was locked in a close dance with Khepri A, skimming along at a distance just beyond the innermost stable orbit. The black hole's spin approached 0.998c—nearly maximal. The effects were everywhere. Rao watched as the gyroscopic readouts ticked through their Lense–Thirring precession corrections; the station's orientation had drifted a full two degrees overnight, twisted by the black hole's frame-dragging. Thrusters had fired in micro-bursts to compensate, realigning L1's spindly structure so its long spines stayed aimed precisely at the horizon. It was like living atop a slowly turning whirlpool—space-time itself swirling and tugging at the station's footing. She imagined the whole array of stations (L1 through L12) orbiting like unwitting pilgrims around a dark deity, each one nudged and torqued by the unseen currents of spacetime.
"Array L1, orbital parameters nominal," chimed the station AI in a pleasantly modulated tone. Rao acknowledged with a quick blink-command on her neural interface. The AI's voice — which the crew had nicknamed Seshat after an ancient knowledge goddess — was one of the few comforts during these solitary checks. Technically, a crew of fifty operated Planck Array L1, but at 05:00 station time most were still in their bunks or at early mess. Rao preferred to start her shift before the bustle, when Khepri A's cosmic presence felt intimate and personal. As lead astrophysicist, she relished these quiet moments of communion with the data. In the silence, she could sometimes feel the station's subtle groans — metal contracting from night-cycle chill or the faint creak of a girder settling — sounds that reminded her of an old galleon at sea. It gave the array a ghostly character, like a haunted house of science perched at the edge of eternity.
She brought up the overnight calibration logs on her personal heads-up display. Lines of data scrolled past her vision, numbers dancing in tightly packed precision. Temperature profiles of the superconducting gravimeters: steady. Baseline cosmic microwave background levels: 2.7 K, exactly as expected. Hawking radiation readings from the collector tethers: essentially at noise level — a few virtual particle flickers per hour, just shy of absolute zero. Nothing unusual there. At first glance, everything looked nominal. Rao exhaled slowly, only then realizing she'd been holding her breath.
Ever since last week's firmware update on the horizon sensor array, she'd harbored an undefined anxiety. Perhaps it was just the pressure of working so near the Planck scale; anomalies were bound to pop up when pushing instruments to their limits. But something about the pattern of fluctuations lately tugged at her intuition. She expanded a section of the log to examine the entropy readings from the vacuum fluctuation monitors. These devices measured the random "noise" of quantum fields near the horizon — effectively a barometer for entropy in the local space.
The graph spiked and fell as expected with the ebb and flow of vacuum entropy, except…Rao's brow furrowed. Except it fell a little too much at certain points. She tapped a command, highlighting the segments where the entropy reading dipped below the theoretical floor. Tiny fractions, on the order of one part in 10^33 below baseline — trivial rounding errors, some might say. But they were real, consistent blips. She cross-referenced three different sensors across separate arrays. All showed the same slight deficit at identical intervals of 1.4 seconds. As if, at those moments, some entropy had gone "missing" from the system.
"That can't be right," Rao murmured. Her voice sounded overly loud in the hush of the deck. In principle, such a drop should be impossible — in any closed system, entropy should never spontaneously decrease. She brushed a few wayward curls from her eyes and leaned closer to the console, calling up the raw photon logs from the horizon imagers during those anomaly windows. One of her calibration tests overnight had involved firing a series of weak gamma pulses near the event horizon's edge to gauge sensor timing. Normally, any photons skimming so close to a black hole either plunge inward to no return or get deflected off on unpredictable paths. Yet, in the raw footage there were echoes.
Rao's heartbeat quickened. On-screen, a faint blip of light followed one of her test pulses, a photon echo arriving milliseconds later than it should — as if reflecting off an unseen mirror deep in the gravity well. There were three such echoes, corresponding exactly to the entropy deficit timestamps. She ran a quick simulation to rule out reflection from known bodies. No stray satellites or debris at that angle. No anomalous gas clouds. And the timing — too precise to be coincidence. This looked deliberate, almost like…like someone had caught her signal and sent it back with a slight delay.
A chill crept into her limbs that had nothing to do with the station's temperature. She flexed her fingers, realizing they were clenched around the edge of the console. If those photon echoes were real, they implied something near the event horizon was reflecting or emitting in sync with her experiment. That verged on impossible. The event horizon was a one-way membrane; signals don't bounce back from it. According to the known laws of physics, nothing that passed within could communicate back out. Either her equipment was betraying an elaborate error, or nature was whispering a secret.
"Think, Imani," she whispered to herself, using her first name for comfort. Perhaps an instrumentation glitch? A mis-synchronization between the emitter and sensor clocks? She noted the intervals again: 1.4 seconds each time. Why that number? It tickled something at the back of her mind — a value she'd seen in another context. Planck time units? No, 1.4 seconds was eons on Planck scales. The spin frequency of Khepri A's ergosphere? Unlikely. Perhaps the orbit period of a hypothetical fragment circling just outside the horizon? But nothing could remain stable that close except in theory, and her scans showed no orbiting masses that could cause a reflection.
Her reflection gazed back at her from the dark glass of the viewport — a slim woman with tired, intent eyes, framed by short black hair that floated in the microgravity. Behind that reflection loomed the swirling starlit halo of Khepri A's horizon. For a moment, Rao felt as if the void were staring back at her, an abyssal eye hiding intent behind chaos. Order hiding inside chaos. The phrase sprang unbidden to her thoughts. It was something her graduate mentor had often said when faced with bizarre data: nature often concealed pattern within seeming randomness — a secret signal beneath the static.
Her pulse steadied as she latched onto that thought. If there was an order here, she would find it. But quietly — for now. Rao knew better than to raise alarms prematurely. Science demanded rigor, verification. Beyond that, there were political realities aboard the Array. The Beyond Initiative had sunk unimaginable resources into building the Planck Arrays around Khepri A, and the entire project was under constant scrutiny. A hint of inexplicable data could excite some of the science team, yes, but it could just as easily spook the mission directors or, worse, the Dawn Bank sponsors who controlled the purse strings. If she went straight to the station commander — or heaven forbid, flagged it in the daily report for all the remote overseers to see — the response would likely be cautious at best. They might order a full system lockdown and diagnostics sweep before proceeding, wasting precious observation time. Or they might simply dismiss her findings as noise and instruct her to focus on sanctioned research goals. In either case, the mystery could be smothered before she understood it.
No, she needed to confirm this quietly, on her own terms. Rao began assembling a silent diagnostic protocol. She coded it on her personal terminal rather than the main Array network, to avoid tripping any automated log alerts. The plan: run a thorough sweep of the horizon sensor subsystems during the next down-cycle, hidden under the guise of a routine maintenance script. By embedding her deep scan into the scheduled coolant flush (something that happened nightly and drew little attention), she could probe for instrument errors or latent patterns without anyone the wiser. If it truly was an equipment error — a calibration drift or a ghost in the machine — her sweep would find it. And if not…
She swallowed, a dry tightness in her throat. If not, then something unprecedented was happening right under their noses.
Rao cast one more glance out at Khepri A. The black hole's horizon shimmered with an eerie grace, as if daring her to plumb its secrets. She allowed herself a tight smile, equal parts anticipation and apprehension. In the silent solitude of the observation deck, Dr. Imani Rao initiated the hidden diagnostic sequence, her fingers dancing over the console in careful patterns.
No one else on Planck Array L1 needed to know — not yet. In fact, not even Professor Alix Zhang — the Array's chief theorist and Rao's usual confidante when it came to anomalous data — would remain in the dark until there was more to go on. Until she understood what these ghostly photon echoes meant, she would keep them as her secret. The data was whispering to her, faint and enigmatic. In this place where dawn never truly came, Imani Rao was determined to be the first to glimpse whatever new light might one day break from the darkness.
Chapter 2: Pilot in the Gyre
Lieutenant Koen Matsuda paused halfway up the lattice arm, momentarily entranced by the cosmic ballet around him. He was clamped to the exterior of Planck Array L1, some fifty meters out from the central hub, with nothing but a thin tether and his mag-boots anchoring him to the structure. Above (though above had little meaning out here) stretched the endless dark sprinkled with starfields; below him, filling half the sky, swirled the gargantuan silhouette of Khepri A. The black hole's event horizon was a void rimmed by a roiling halo of warped starlight. From Koen's vantage, it looked like a cosmic gyre—a whirlpool in space-time itself. The distant stars beyond it were smearing into curved riverine lines of light, dragged around and around by Khepri's rotation. Even the sparse dust particles and ionized gas flecks in the vicinity twirled in slow spirals down into the darkness.
Koen took a slow breath, the helmet's HUD glowing soft green around the edges of his vision. His suit radios hissed quiet static from the galactic background. Despite the engineering task at hand, he allowed himself a private moment of reverence. "Kamidana... onegai shimasu," he whispered, almost inaudible, invoking a Shinto prayer under his breath. In his mind, he pictured the tiny shrine he kept back in his berth—a token of Earth's spirituality carried to this far frontier. Roughly translated, he was asking the guardian spirits for balance: to honor the cosmic order even as humans dared to tamper with it. Out here, suspended over an abyss that could swallow stars, the need for humility felt palpable.
A gentle tug on his tether brought him back to focus. Koen steadied himself and continued his climb along the lattice. The structure here extended from L1's core like a colossal spine, composed of triangular truss segments and bundled conduits. It groaned faintly as it flexed—thermal creaks and the occasional pop of metal stressed by gravity gradients. Each boot step was accompanied by the thump of his mag-locks engaging, a rhythmic reminder of how one misstep could send him drifting off into endless night.
He reached the designated inspection site: a junction where one of the newly installed loop-quantum struts met the older truss. These struts were cutting-edge supports, engineered with exotic matter to withstand extreme tidal forces. In theory, they could dynamically absorb stress by momentarily channeling it through microscopic "loops" in spacetime—Koen didn't pretend to grasp the physics, but he respected the hardware. Still, last week's gravity-wave experiment (firing controlled pulses to agitate Khepri's ergosphere) had put these struts to test. Now it was his job to perform a hands-on check for microfractures or alignment drift.
"Control, I'm at Strut Alpha-3," he reported, his voice calm and low. Through bone conduction, he felt rather than heard his words in the sealed helmet. A moment later Dr. Rao's voice crackled in his ear, filtered but reassuring: "Copy that, Koen. We see you. Proceed with the diagnostic." Her concern for safety was evident even over comms, and he smiled behind his visor.
Koen anchored himself with a tether clamp, then withdrew a handheld diagnostic tablet from his tool belt. He ran a gloved finger over the strut's surface — it was smooth and black, faintly shimmering where embedded sensors blinked status lights. No obvious damage. The tablet interface linked with the strut's smart materials. Numbers and graphs flooded the display as it scanned for stress distribution. So far, all within norms.
As the scan ran, Koen took the opportunity to gaze around. The view was, as always, staggering. Above the plane of the Array, the Milky Way's band cut across the darkness—a hazy congregation of billions of distant stars. To think some of that starlight, born millions of years ago, was now being bent and twisted by the hungry void beneath him gave Koen a humble thrill. He often felt that doing EVA here was like standing on the threshold of heaven and hell: majesty above, mystery below.
He recalled a line from a sutra he'd studied in youth: "All is in flux, to preserve the balance is our duty." Entropy — the inexorable increase of disorder — was a concept he understood both as a physics principle and in a spiritual sense. Everything tended toward chaos, but here humanity was, trying to harness a black hole, to draw energy from Hawking radiation and probe the fundamental order of the universe. To Koen, that effort carried a moral weight. Each experiment they ran, each watt of power they drew from Khepri A's Hawking emissions, felt like making a withdrawal from a sacred cosmic account. One had to spend such currency wisely.
His tablet pinged: Strut Alpha-3 integrity nominal. No microfractures detected at the junction welds, and the lattice alignment deviation was under 0.5 milliradians — trivial. "Diagnostic complete, Control," he reported. "Loop-quantum strut checks out green. Moving to the next point." There were three more strut junctions on his checklist this morning.
"Good to hear," came Rao's reply. "Keep alert as you move. The station's still rebalancing from the precession overnight."
Koen acknowledged and began to carefully traverse further along the arm. He unclamped his tether and boots in practiced sequence, then propelled himself with a light push, gliding a few meters to the next segment before magnetizing his boots again. He moved with a slow, deliberate grace—part training, part personal style. Years piloting shuttlecraft had taught him the value of conservation: of fuel, of momentum, of breath. Out here, any excess could be one's undoing.
He was midway to the next checkpoint when an unexpected vibration rattled through the lattice. Koen froze. For a heartbeat, he thought it was just another thermal creak—but then came a sharp bang, and the entire arm lurched beneath him.
"Whoa—!" Koen gasped as his boots lost their magnetic contact. The lattice arm was tilting, twisting violently as if an invisible giant had given it a shove. He flailed out and managed to clamp his tether reel automatically, but inertia yanked him hard sideways. Metal screamed as stress alarms went off in his helmet, a shrill beeping. He slammed against a support spar, pain flashing in his ribs through the suit's padding. A spray of glinting shards—tools from his belt? or bits of fractured composite?—scattered and drifted toward the black hole, quickly lost to sight.
For a dizzying moment, Koen hung almost upside down relative to the hub, the lattice arm juddering. Warning icons populated his HUD: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY FAULT, UNEXPECTED ACCELERATION DETECTED. He tasted copper—had he bitten his tongue? Inside his helmet his breath sounded too loud, ragged.
"Matsuda! Koen, report—what happened?" Rao's voice cut through the alarms.
He forced himself to focus. Training kicked in. "Arm…Arm Three just shifted!" he panted. "I—I'm still attached. Something yanked the lattice about 0.5 meters off alignment—" Koen gritted his teeth as another jolt rippled through, though less severe. The arm was oscillating, likely absorbing the shock now. The loop-quantum struts were doing their job, damping the vibrations by design. Koen realized grimly that without their flexibility, the shock might have sheared the entire arm clean off — with him on it. But what in God's name had caused that initial tilt?
His mind raced even as he clawed for a handhold. Had a thruster misfired from the hub? Or a guidance system glitch told the array to adjust orientation abruptly? Such moves were always preceded by warnings and coordinated through Control; nothing like that had been scheduled. It felt…as if the universe itself had hiccuped.
Koen managed to plant his boots back down and re-engage the mag-locks with a thunk. The arm gradually stabilized, its tremors subsiding into a low groan. "I'm okay," he broadcast, breathing heavily. "Tether and mags held. I'm secure. But that should not have happened."
Behind the concern in Rao's return silence, he could sense her mind racing too. "No, it shouldn't," she finally replied, tone grim. "We're seeing it now—telemetry shows a sudden inertial spike. Autopilot is trying to compensate. Just hold on, Koen."
Koen looked "down" toward the black hole. The notion that Khepri A might have reached up and nudged the arm like a toy entered his thoughts, but he dismissed it as fanciful. Still, his heart hammered. He had never felt such an abrupt disturbance in all his years of spacewalks.
"Mag-locks engaged. I'm stable," he confirmed, trying to keep his voice steady. Inside his helmet, sweat trickled along his hairline. "Any idea what it was? Did a micro-meteor strike the array?"
"Negative," Rao said. "No impact detected on sensors. Stand by..." She paused, presumably checking with the station systems. "All systems green now. Koen, I'm reading a slight misalignment in the arm but it's within tolerances. You can…you can continue the EVA if you're up for it, but if you feel unsafe—"
He took a centering breath. His ribs ached and he'd probably have a bruise, but everything else seemed fine. "I'm alright," he assured. "I'll continue, but slowly. Might be best to double-check the remaining struts after that event."
"Agreed. Just be careful. We'll try to find out what the hell that was."
Koen nodded out of habit. "Roger that." He looked around, regaining his orientation. One of his equipment pouches had torn loose in the chaos—he spotted it floating a few meters away, slowly drifting outward. It held a set of nano-spanners. Instinctively, Koen triggered his suit's maneuvering thrusters in a short burst to fetch it. The nitrogen puff propelled him gently off the lattice; he caught the pouch under one arm and then guided himself back. As he reattached the pouch to his belt, he noticed the absolute stillness once more. It was as if the universe had returned to pretending nothing had happened.
But something had. He knew it in his gut.
Koen resumed his careful trek along the arm, senses on high alert now for any tremor. As he moved, he murmured another prayer in thanks: gratitude for surviving whatever that was. Perhaps, he mused, the cosmos was reminding them not to become overconfident. To respect the forces they were dealing with.
Within ten minutes he had inspected two more junctions. Despite his shaken nerves, all remained normal. The earlier incident might have been a fluke, but he would recommend a full diagnostic of the station's attitude control and structural dampers when he got back inside.
At last, the final checkpoint: a sensor node near the arm's far end. This one wasn't a strut, but a black-box recorder that logged minute gravitational fluctuations. Koen knelt carefully and began running the standard checks on it. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could retreat to the safety of the hub and take a much-needed breath.
As he connected his tablet to the sensor node's port, his helmet display flickered. Just for an instant, the HUD dimmed and a flurry of symbols danced across it. Koen blinked, unsure if it was real or a trick of his eyes. The symbols were unlike any interface cue he knew—jagged, alien glyphs that scrolled too fast to read. Then, as quickly as it came, the anomaly was gone. The HUD normalized, showing the sensor's status screen as if nothing odd had occurred.
Koen's throat tightened. "Control, did you just send any data to my HUD?" he asked slowly.
"Standby, Koen... Send data? Negative. We're hands-off your suit systems," Rao replied, sounding puzzled. "Everything alright?"
He hesitated. If he said he saw strange symbols, would it be taken seriously or chalked up to stress? "I had a brief display glitch," he said carefully. "Some static or gibberish. It's gone now. Could be a side effect of the structural jolt. I'll… I'll review it later."
"Understood. Log it and we'll have engineering take a look when you're back."
"Will do," he answered. He disconnected the tablet—sensor node was fine, no anomalies there at least. Task complete.
Koen secured his tools with methodical calm, trying not to dwell on the HUD glitch. But inside, curiosity gnawed at him. He was a responsible officer, but also a human who had just witnessed something bizarre. Half of him wanted to rush inside and pore over the suit cam recordings frame by frame; the other half wanted to offer one more prayer and let it go, attributing it to cosmic mystery.
As he began the slow walk back toward the airlock, Koen risked a quick review. With a few eye movements he queued up the last few minutes of his helmet camera feed on a small corner of the HUD. The playback of the incident showed the moment of chaos: the sudden blur of stars as he was flung, the alarm flashes. But just after the arm lurched—there. The video froze on a single frame filled with pale squiggles and angular shapes overlaying the normal HUD graphics. They looked almost like letters or ideograms, arranged in a deliberate pattern. Certainly not random sensor noise.
Koen's breath caught. It was as if for one fraction of a second, his suit had intercepted a fragment of something — a transmission? An artifact of some computation? If he were fanciful, he'd almost say it resembled a message, written in code he'd never seen.
He saved the anomalous frame, tagging it with a voice memo: "Unidentified HUD interference, captured at 05:48 station time, during lattice incident." He tried to keep his tone professional, but the tremor in his voice was audible.
A minute later, Lieutenant Matsuda was back at the airlock, heart still thumping with adrenaline. As the outer hatch slid closed behind him, sealing him back into the embrace of the station, he couldn't help but cast one last glance through the thick port window at the silent black horizon beyond.
It struck him that he had gone out to inspect the hardware, to ensure nothing was amiss after their experiments — to keep order. Yet out there he'd felt, however fleetingly, the touch of chaos pressing back. Or perhaps, some hidden order trying to speak. Either way, Koen Matsuda was certain of one thing: this morning's routine EVA had been anything but routine. And the universe, in its quiet way, had entrusted him with a riddle written in ghostly glyphs.
Chapter 3: Ghost Bits
Professor Alix Zhang did not believe in ghosts. Yet as she hovered in front of the hololithic display in L1's analysis bay, she found herself muttering, "Ghost bits… that's what they are." Before her, a 3D model of Khepri A spun slowly, ringed by the orbits of the twelve Planck Array stations. Three colored vectors converged on the black sphere at the center — lines representing anomaly detections from different instruments. Each vector pointed unerringly to one place: the event horizon, or rather, a hairbreadth inside it.
Zhang zoomed in, fingers flickering through the projection. Her grey-streaked hair, usually clipped in a no-nonsense bun, floated around her face in the microgravity as she concentrated. On the holo, she overlay data from Lt. Matsuda's helmet cam (the strange interference he'd captured during this morning's EVA) atop Dr. Rao's secret diagnostic readings from last night. The two data sets, utterly different in origin, showed a subtle correlation in timing and frequency. A third data stream — gravitational wave readings from Array L4 on the opposite side of the black hole — added further confirmation. Piece by piece, Alix had triangulated the impossible: at those key moments, tiny packets of information, of entropy itself, seemed to vanish from the observable universe.
"Vanishing right past the horizon," she whispered. The "stretched horizon" — a term from theory, treating the black hole's boundary as a hot, fluid-like membrane — was the last place any information was seen. After that, nothing. By all rights, it should have been lost forever. But something about these loss events was eerily precise.
She brought up a plot of horizon entropy versus time. Normally, a black hole's entropy (as given by the Bekenstein–Hawking formula) was astronomically huge and changed only when mass or spin changed. Yet, here were those minute dips Imani Rao had first spotted: jagged little down-steps in the curve. Zhang measured their magnitudes. Each dip was the same size to within measurement error — on the order of 10^−15 percent of the total entropy. That might sound negligible, but in absolute terms it was a chunk of a few billion bits. Crucially, it was almost exactly an integer number of bits.
Zhang felt a thrill despite herself. Jacob Bekenstein, a 21st-century pioneer, had theorized that black hole surface area — and thus entropy — might be quantized, changing only in discrete steps corresponding to one bit of fundamental area. It was a conjecture few thought would ever be observable. But here and now, Khepri A's entropy was dropping in what looked like discrete quanta. Not randomly, but in controlled, packet-sized chunks. As if someone is making careful withdrawals, she mused. No natural astrophysical process would behave so... cleanly.
She tapped a stylus on her tablet, logging these findings. The professor in her yearned to double-check everything a hundred times before declaring such a revolutionary observation. But time was not on their side. She stole a glance at the chrono drifting on the bulkhead: 13:07 station time. In less than an hour she was due in a meeting with the Dawn Bank liaison to discuss resource allocations. Resources, she thought with a scowl. The people holding the purse strings always thought in terms of energy credits and budgets. How would they react if she told them their black hole was apparently leaking "bits" of order and squirreling them away beyond reach?
Alix Zhang was not optimistic about that reaction.
A soft tone sounded from the compartment door. Zhang straightened, pushing off from the display. "Come in," she called, bracing herself.
The door slid open to reveal a stocky figure in an immaculately pressed jumpsuit bearing the Dawn Bank insignia. Liaison Officer Rafael Singh had been aboard for two weeks, and in that time he had earned a reputation as both diligent and unyielding. He floated into the lab with a practiced half-bow of the head. "Professor Zhang. I hope I'm not interrupting." By his tone, he didn't actually care if he was.
"Not at all," she lied, powering down the holo with a flick. The last thing she needed was Singh's sharp eyes spotting anomalous graphs before she was ready to explain them. The projection of Khepri A dissolved into the air. "I was just reviewing last week's data."
"Good," Singh said briskly. He hooked a boot under a floor loop to anchor himself and activated his slate device. Its display cast a pale light on his broad features. "Perhaps you can help clarify a few concerns. The Board packet for the upcoming review is nearly due, and there are some anomalies in the resource logs."
Zhang felt her neck muscles tightening. What a choice of words. "Anomalies?" she asked mildly, folding her arms.
Singh scrolled with a gloved finger. "For starters, the power draw on four occasions in the past week exceeded projections by 12 to 15 percent. Once by 22 percent. These were not scheduled high-load activities. As liaison, I need to account for every joule. Can you explain what happened?"
Zhang kept her face neutral. She knew exactly the instances he was referring to. The 22% spike had been last night's unannounced sensor sweep that Imani ran. Others likely corresponded to unplanned thruster burns or instrumentation runtime during Koen's incident. None of which had been formally approved by the mission plan. "Routine adjustments and calibrations," she said evenly. "When working at the cutting edge, we sometimes must run additional diagnostics. Safety margins—"
Singh raised an eyebrow. "Diagnostics that consume a fifth of our daily reactor output? Professor, I've seen the experimental schedule. Nothing listed there accounts for such draws. If there was an equipment malfunction that required extra calibration, it should be noted in the log with justification." His tone hardened. "Yet I see no such notes. It looks, frankly, like unscheduled experimentation."
Alix pressed her lips together. He wasn't wrong, and cornered as she was, she decided a kernel of truth might serve. "Lieutenant Matsuda encountered a hazardous incident on an EVA yesterday," she said. "There was a structural oscillation in one of the lattice arms. We ran follow-up checks to ensure system integrity. That accounts for some of the excess."
Singh nodded slowly. "I heard about the EVA hiccup. Glad he's alright. Still, a structural check should be routine and not so energy-intensive."
"It was an extensive check," Zhang replied curtly. "We take safety very seriously."
"And the other overages?"
"Fine," she sighed, switching tack. "To be transparent, we've been investigating a sensor anomaly. It's taken some extra scans at high sensitivity, which are power-hungry. I deemed it necessary." She leveled her gaze at him, implying with her professor's authority that she didn't require outside permission for scientific judgement.
But Singh was unimpressed. "Necessary? According to whom? The mission directive prioritizes the Hawking radiation collection and the wormhole stabilization trials, not ancillary sensor anomalies. If you're diverting reactor load to side experiments, that is something the Bank should know." He paused, then added, "We are all accountable, Professor. The Beyond Initiative may be a coalition, but Dawn Bank underwrites 40% of this array's operating cost. Surprises make our shareholders nervous."
Zhang's cheeks warmed with frustration. "Research is not a linear enterprise, Officer Singh. We can't always predict where the next insight will come from. A seemingly 'ancillary' anomaly can lead to a major breakthrough. Have you considered that? We're pushing the boundaries of physics out here on a shoestring of trust. If we never follow the unexpected, we'll miss the whole point of this mission."
Singh pressed his lips into a thin line. "With respect, our mandate is also to deliver results to those who invested resources. Breakthroughs are wonderful, but I haven't seen a reportable breakthrough in months. What I do see is overruns. Fuel usage is 5% above projection this quarter. The Hawking energy output is below target. And now you admit to unscheduled experiments chasing... what did you call it? A sensor anomaly?" He shook his head. "Professor, the Board is not going to approve continued operations if we deviate too far from plan without solid justification."
He flicked his slate, and a holo graph sprang up between them: columns of various station metrics. "Unless we can demonstrate clear progress or at least a stable resource use, they will consider freezing funding. Possibly mothballing one or more Array stations."
The words fell like a lead weight. Zhang's stomach did a slow somersault. Shut down? Now, when they stood on the precipice of something monumental? She imagined aborting the experiment, leaving Khepri A's secrets untapped, perhaps for decades, because accountants lacked patience. She took a long breath, trying to rein in her temper.
"We have made progress," she said evenly. "Just this week, Dr. Rao's team achieved a new sensitivity record in the vacuum fluctuation measurements." It was true, though she omitted that those measurements were precisely what had revealed the 'ghost bits.' "And the gravitational harmonics analysis is nearly ready for publication." Also true, if somewhat routine.
Singh gave a thin smile. "I'll include those points in my report, certainly. But I'm afraid the Board will want something concrete. Tangible results or at least a guarantee that we're not chasing phantoms." He arched a brow. "When I briefed them last quarter, there was mention that maybe we'd overestimated what the Array could do. That perhaps the smart move would be to scale back and consolidate on proven findings."
"Overestimated?" Alix bristled. "We've barely scratched the surface! Cutting back now would be a travesty. We're on the verge of—" She stopped herself.
Singh's eyes sharpened. "On the verge of what, Professor?"
Zhang bit her tongue. She longed to tell him exactly what they'd found: that the black hole was behaving in a way no one had predicted, that the universe itself might be offering them a clue to brand new physics. But to articulate it now, half-baked and without formal proof, would be worse than useless. He'd think her mad — or that she was trying to bluff with science fiction nonsense. Ghost bits, indeed.
She forced a diplomatic smile. "On the verge of gathering data that could redefine our understanding of black hole thermodynamics. But I need a little more time, and freedom to pursue it."
Singh sighed. "Time and freedom often mean money and risk. Neither are unlimited. Look," he said, softening slightly, "I understand the passion for discovery, I really do. But I have my orders. There's a review in two days. If I don't present a compelling case that these Arrays are about to deliver something big, the recommendation will be to suspend 'non-essential' research activities. Perhaps even recall some staff until wormhole trials ramp up later."
Alix felt as though the air had been sucked from the room. Suspend activities. Recall staff. In essence, put the science on ice just when something was finally happening. She imagined Imani's stricken face, Koen's disappointment — her own life's work, left incomplete. And beyond that, the potential lost to all humanity. The thought lit a fuse of defiance in her.
"I appreciate your candor," she managed through a tight jaw. "I will prepare whatever documentation you need to make that case to the Board. Rest assured, we do have something significant cooking." Her voice carried a conviction she hoped would at least give him pause.
Singh studied her for a moment. Perhaps he saw the fire in her eyes. He gave a slow nod. "I look forward to seeing it. And Professor... please understand, we want you to succeed. But we also have to see accountable use of resources." With that he tethered his slate back to his belt. "I'll expect an updated report by 08:00 tomorrow. I hope it contains good news."
Without waiting for further response, he gave that curt not-quite-bow and turned to leave. The hatch hissed shut behind him, leaving Zhang floating in a silence thick with frustration.
For a moment, Alix simply let herself simmer. She clenched and unclenched her fists, noting that her hands were trembling with adrenaline. Ghosts and budgets, she thought bitterly. The worst part was that Singh wasn't a villain; he was doing what he was sent to do. It was the system that was flawed — demanding immediate returns on knowledge for which there was no precedent. How to explain that chasing "ghost bits" might unlock an entirely new paradigm? To a banker, that probably sounded like chasing literal ghosts.
She inhaled deeply, using an old meditation trick to calm her heartbeat. Around her, the lab lights glinted off the dormant holo-tank. She reached out and reignited it. The image of Khepri A reappeared, surrounded by data overlays and those damning phantom vectors. Her evidence. Not enough to convince a money man, perhaps. But enough to convince her of what needed to be done.
Singh wanted something concrete for the Board. Fine. He'd get it.
She opened a secure channel on her console. "Zhang to Rao," she said, keeping her voice measured.
Imani Rao answered after a couple of seconds. "Rao here. Everything alright, Alix?"
"We need to talk. In person. Now, if possible," Zhang replied.
There was a pause, then Rao's tone lowered. "Understood. My quarters. Five minutes."
Next, Alix pinged Lt. Matsuda with a similarly brief request. Though puzzled, Koen agreed to join them.
Exactly five minutes later, behind the closed door of Dr. Rao's private office pod, three humans floated in a loose circle. Their expressions were solemn, conspiratorial. Rao had dimmed the lights and engaged a white-noise generator — precautions against any monitoring. On the wall, a digital photo of Earth's sunrise glinted faintly, the irony not lost on Alix.
Zhang took a breath. She realized she was effectively about to propose breaking mission protocols. Perhaps even endangering the Array. But the alternative was to let this grand experiment suffocate under caution. She cleared her throat and addressed the others in a low voice.
"I have evidence that those entropy drops Imani found — and the interference Koen recorded — are originating just past the horizon. Inside the black hole's boundary." She held up a hand as Koen's eyes widened. "I know how that sounds. But I've run the analysis every which way. Someone or something is taking entropy out of Khepri A in discrete packets. Ghost bits, if you will."
Rao nodded, her face taut. "I suspected as much when I saw the echo patterns. But to say it out loud… If it's true, it changes everything."
"It does," Alix agreed. "But try selling that to Singh and his Board." She quickly recounted the liaison's ultimatum. The more she explained, the darker Imani's expression grew and the more Koen's jaw set in anger.
"They can't shutter us now," Koen muttered. "We all feel something big is around the corner."
"They can, and they will," Rao said grimly. "Unless we give them a reason not to. Something undeniable."
Zhang allowed herself a tight smile. "Precisely. I think it's time we force the issue. A bold, decisive test that will either capture unambiguous evidence of this phenomenon — evidence even a banker can't refute — or... well, or at least give us answers before they pull the plug."
Imani narrowed her eyes. "You're talking about a deep-field probe."
"Not a physical probe, necessarily," Alix said. "More like a high-intensity data 'ping.' Something that pushes beyond the boundaries of our current readings. If this... entity, or mechanism, has been playing hide and seek with us, perhaps it's time we knock on its door."
Koen ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. "What exactly do you have in mind?"
Zhang tapped her tablet, already prepared. A schematic sprang up on Rao's wall display — a spike of energy on a timeline. "We use the Array's emitters to send a focused burst of structured signals straight toward the horizon. Wide spectrum, from gamma pulses down to quantum tunneling frequencies. It's essentially a very loud 'ping.' We do this at our next perigee, when L1 is closest to Khepri A to minimize interference. And we see if something answers."
Rao sucked in a breath. "Alix, the energy required for that… The Board will see a huge unexplained discharge."
Zhang set her jaw. "We mask it. Dump all nonessential systems into maintenance mode to free up power. We can make it look like a routine reactor vent or a scheduled engine burn for orbit correction. I've already thought of a cover story." She looked at Imani and Koen intently. "I know it's risky. It'll eat into reserves and if it fails, we'll have some explaining to do. But if it succeeds — if we get a clear signal — then no bureaucrat in the system will dare shut us down. We'll have made first contact with... something new. That buys us support, maybe even more funding."
The room was silent save for the soft hum of the ventilator. Rao exchanged a glance with Koen. The pilot's eyes were bright with excitement now, his earlier caution at Singh's meddling transmuted into daring. "Hell," Koen breathed, "I'm in. I'll handle any manual alignments or whatever outside if needed."
They both looked to Imani Rao. The station chief had her arms crossed. She was responsible for everyone's safety and the mission's integrity. Sanctioning an unauthorized high-power experiment went against every protocol she was trained to uphold. And yet — she had seen those photon echoes. She had felt in her bones that something was reaching out. Now here was Alix, offering to reach back.
Rao slowly nodded. "If we do this, it has to be surgical. One burst, tightly controlled. We get in, get our data, and get out before anyone's the wiser."
A thin smile touched Zhang's lips. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
"Very well," Rao decided, exhaling as if a great weight had lifted and simultaneously settled on her. "We proceed. Next perigee is in..."
"Six hours and thirty-two minutes," Alix supplied at once.
"Right. Koen, you'll be on comms and monitor structural stability in case that... whatever happened to the arm happens again. I'll manage the emitter array and keep an override ready to shut it down. Alix, you'll handle data capture and analysis. And cover story duty if needed."
They all acknowledged.