Night had once again fallen over Asgaria, draping the Amber Tower in a dazzling yet cold starry expanse. In the "Silence" suite, Isabella curled up in the corner of the sofa, the brand-new flexible-screen tablet resting on her lap. The screen glowed, displaying the vast starfield and complex orbital calculations, but her cerulean eyes were not focused on the realistic simulation. Instead, they acted like the most precise radar, fixating on an almost imperceptible area in the lower-right corner of the interface—a tiny, normally stable green "real-time deep space network base status indicator."
Her heart throbbed in her chest with an almost painful rhythm, each beat tugging at nerves stretched taut. Ever since she discovered the anomalous flicker yesterday, her entire world felt as if a stone had been dropped into it—calm on the surface, yet turbulent currents roiling beneath.
This was not a malfunction. Two flickers, nearly identical in frequency and duration, occurring at similar time intervals, could not be explained away as coincidence or software error.
This was a signal—a faint, highly covert call attempting to pierce through layers of firewalls, almost like Morse code.
She maintained a facade of composure, even deliberately making her interactions with the software appear clumsy, like a child encountering a complex toy for the first time. But all her focus was on that tiny flicker of light. She waited with a mix of intense fear and faint hope, almost a devout expectation, for the mysterious echo that might appear again.
Minutes stretched on. Outside, the city lights gradually came alive, like another starry sky laid across the ground.
Suddenly!
The tiny indicator flickered again—briefly, almost imperceptibly, the green instantly replaced by a rapid gray-white before returning to normal, so fast it seemed like a retinal illusion.
But Isabella caught it! Once more! The same pattern!
She nearly stopped breathing. A shiver raced from her tailbone to the crown of her head, her scalp tingling. She bit down hard on the soft tissue inside her cheek, using the sharp pain to force herself not to reveal any outward reaction. Her fingers even continued moving unconsciously across the screen, pretending to adjust parameters.
Was she losing her mind? Or was there truly a ghost, leaving her a mark almost impossible to detect within the vast data streams of the deep space network?
Thousands of light-seconds away, the "Wangshu-7" Deep Space Monitoring Station.
Located on the edge of the asteroid belt, the Wangshu-7 monitoring station floated in the eternal darkness of space like a silent metallic sea urchin. It was one of humanity's most remote and lonely outposts in the Deep Space Network , primarily responsible for listening to faint signals from beyond the solar system and providing calibration support for relay satellites.
Inside the station's main control cabin, the lighting was maintained at a soft brightness suitable for night work. Various screens flickered with complex data streams, instruments emitted a low hum, and technicians in blue uniforms moved efficiently, their atmosphere subdued yet orderly.
Young communications engineer Ella Curtis sat at her console, her screen displaying intricate signal waveforms and status logs. In her twenties, her hair tied simply behind her head, revealing a smooth forehead and a pair of brown eyes, slightly weary from long night shifts but still sharp and observant. Her fingers tapped rapidly on the keyboard, performing routine system checks and redundant data cleanup. Everything seemed as uneventful as countless other shifts, calm to the point of monotony.
Yet, on a seemingly insignificant auxiliary monitoring sub-screen before her, a record of an anomalous data packet striking the firewall flashed briefly, quickly categorized by the system as "low-level interference/space noise" and marked "handled." Such records were commonplace in a deep space station, typically originating from solar wind, cosmic rays, or residual signals from past probes, usually attracting no attention.
But Ella's brow furrowed ever so slightly.
Her fingers paused. Instinctively, she retrieved the record, which revealed that the anomalous packet carried an extremely old and nearly obsolete base-level checksum fragment, attempting to send a minuscule handshake request to a specific internal network address pointing to the Asgaria region, locked by multiple encryption protocols. The firewall instantly intercepted and nullified the request, causing no effect.
The anomaly itself was not inherently strange. What was odd was that this specific, "retro" structured, invalid handshake request had appeared several times over the past few days. Its frequency was low, the intervals not entirely fixed but roughly concentrated within certain periods, and the signal path seemed to have been clumsily disguised, mimicking asteroid-reflected noise, yet leaving traces that were unnaturally, deliberately adjusted.
Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times…
Ella leaned back in her chair, sipping a long-cold cup of coffee from the thermos beside her. She pulled up all similar low-level anomaly records from the past week and quickly cross-compared and analyzed them. Her expression gradually sharpened, her fatigue replaced by the particular curiosity of a technician confronted with an unsolved mystery.
This was not an attack. An attack would not be so weak, so inefficient, and… nostalgic.
This was more like a… probe. Or an extremely primitive attempt to establish contact.
Who would do something like this, and to what end? Which organization does that locked-down internal Asgaria address belong to?
Curiosity tugged at her like a little cat, lightly scratching at her mind. She had sufficient system privileges to perform a deeper-level analysis of raw logs and trace signal origins, but this was beyond her routine duties and, strictly speaking, somewhat against regulations.
She glanced at her colleagues in the control room; everyone was absorbed in their own work, unaware of the subtle activity on her side. Life at the monitoring station was so monotonous that even a minor anomaly could excite a technician like her, someone who loved diving deep into technical mysteries.
After a brief hesitation, Ella's fingers returned to the keyboard. She bypassed the standard log viewing interfaces and went straight into the deeper raw data record repository, which required secondary-level permissions. She wrote a few simple filter scripts, attempting to separate the tiny fragments of the anomalous requests from the vast sea of noise.
The process was slow. The Deep Space Network's data flow was unimaginably massive; code scrolled rapidly across the screen while progress bars crawled forward at a glacial pace.
While waiting, Ella recalled a minor project from her university days, researching redundancy protocols for early deep space probes. That old, nearly forgotten checksum structure seemed vaguely similar to the anomalous data packet fragments she had just discovered… That had been many years ago.
Could it be a long-abandoned private probe inadvertently revived, sending signals haphazardly? Or… something else?
Her thoughts were interrupted by a faint alert. The filter scripts had completed and extracted a few extremely fragmented data pieces.
Ella leaned closer to the screen, carefully analyzing the hexadecimal codes and messy timestamps. The signal source was extremely ambiguous, appearing to have undergone multiple hops and obfuscations. Ultimately, its general direction… pointed roughly to a derelict communications relay near Mars' orbit—a site long devoid of any active equipment.
Moreover, she noticed that the timestamps of these anomalous requests seemed to subtly coincide with the brief calibration windows that Wangshu-7 itself performed periodically on certain deep-space satellite arrays. It was almost as if the sender were trying to exploit the very fleeting data-flow fluctuations produced by DSN operations as cover.
A chill ran down Ella's spine.
What level of mastery over deep-space networks and knowledge of Wangshu-7's operational patterns would this require? This could not possibly be the random behavior of abandoned equipment!
She attempted to trace the signal backward, but it completely disappeared near Mars' orbit, as if a droplet had vanished into the ocean, leaving no trace. The sender clearly possessed extremely advanced anti-tracking capabilities.
Leaning back in her chair, Ella could not calm herself. Looking at the fragmented data on the screen, she felt as if she had inadvertently glimpsed a corner of a secret hidden in the cosmic dust—a secret located near Mars' orbit, sending an ancient signal through DSN calibration windows to a previously unreachable encrypted Asgaria address…
Who—or what—was behind it?
She did not know. Was it a highly classified experiment, or… a cry for help no one else had ever noticed?
Out of a mixture of professional curiosity and an indescribable instinct, Ella did not immediately submit her analysis report to her superiors. Instead, she quietly encrypted and archived the anomalous records and data fragments, labeling them "Under Observation – Low-Frequency Space Noise Interference (Special Pattern)."
She decided to continue observing, to see whether this mysterious "ghost" hidden in deep space would appear again.
Amber Pinnacle Tower, "Silence" Suite.
Isabella knew nothing of what was happening thousands of light-seconds away. All she knew was that tiny indicator light, like a faithful phantom, blinked at her once again.
Hope was no longer a fleeting illusion; it had a tangible, regular echo.
After the initial surge of excitement came deeper caution and contemplation. Who was on the other end? What were they trying to convey? How should she respond? She had no means of actively sending information outward! Every external interface on that tablet was strictly locked down; she could only passively receive filtered information.
Her eyes scanned the simulation software interface, passing over draggable planetary models, adjustable orbital parameters, and dialog boxes where basic formulas could be entered…
A bold, almost insane idea struck her mind like a bolt of lightning.
This software… it allowed user interaction and input! All operations were confined to local simulation and would not actually affect any real probes… but what if the mysterious external signal source was not merely trying to send information to her, but could… monitor certain specific states within this software?
For example, if she manipulated a simulated probe to a particular coordinate?
Or input a seemingly meaningless set of numbers into a parameter field?
Or let the probe follow a particular, unnatural trajectory?
Could these operation data be secretly recorded and transmitted back to the Kane Group servers through some backend diagnostics or user-experience enhancement program? And could that mysterious hacker be observing this software's data flow, attempting to decode her response?
The thought made her shiver, yet her fingers trembled with excitement.
This was extremely risky! It could very well be her own delusion! More likely, it was a deadly trap!
But… it was the only method she could think of right now to possibly respond.
Her heart pounded like a drum; she stared at the vast starfield on the screen, feeling as if she were standing on the edge of an invisible cliff.
Should she continue to exist numbly and safely until she completely lost herself?
Or should she gamble everything, seize this faint, nearly imperceptible echo from deep space, and make a desperate response?
Her gaze gradually hardened.
She took a deep breath, and her slender fingers slowly—but with resolute determination—reached toward the icy screen.