The data arrived in seven volumes.
Nobody had asked for seven volumes. Senior Analyst Darro Fen — no relation to Consultant Fen from the Theology Division, a coincidence he had been correcting for three days — had submitted what he believed was a standard sensor analysis report. Forty pages. Maybe fifty. The kind of document that got read once, filed, and referenced occasionally in footnotes of other documents that also got read once and filed.
Instead he had produced, apparently without meaning to, the single largest analytical document in the Bureau of Unclassified Phenomena's two-hundred-and-forty-year history.
Seven volumes.
Four thousand, three hundred and twelve pages.
And a cover note that read, in Darro's characteristically precise handwriting: I am sorry. I kept trying to stop. The data would not let me.
Director Maev Sonn stood in the analysis room on the fourteenth floor and looked at the seven volumes stacked on the central table. They were bound in the Bureau's standard grey covers. Volume One was approximately the thickness of her fist. Volume Seven was approximately the thickness of her forearm.
Pol Dren stood beside her. He had arrived eight minutes after she sent the summons, which meant he had been in the building already, which meant he had been unable to sleep, which meant he was in the same condition she was.
"He's apologizing," Pol said, reading the cover note over her shoulder. "In a cover note. For doing his job too thoroughly."
"The data would not let him stop," Maev read again. "What does that mean?"
"I've been thinking about that since I read it twenty minutes ago." Pol pulled out the chair across from Volume One and sat down. "I think it means exactly what it says. I think he sat down to write a forty-page analysis and the data kept — generating implications. Each measurement led to another measurement. Each anomaly referenced another anomaly. He couldn't close it because every time he thought he'd reached the end, there was more."
"That doesn't happen with sensor data."
"No," Pol agreed. "It doesn't."
They looked at each other.
"Where's Darro now?" Maev asked.
"Sleeping. He's been awake for sixty-one hours. I sent him home at the fourteenth hour yesterday and he came back at the third hour this morning to add an appendix to Volume Six." Pol paused. "The appendix is longer than most full reports."
Maev sat down. She pulled Volume One toward her, opened it, and read the first line.
She read it three times.
Then she looked up at Pol. "He starts with the absence."
"I know."
"He spends the first forty pages on the fact that the sensors recorded nothing."
"I know."
"How do you spend forty pages on nothing?"
Pol had clearly been waiting for this question. He leaned forward, folded his hands on the table with the air of someone who had organized their thoughts and was not sure those thoughts were going to come out in any helpful order regardless. "Because it isn't nothing," he said. "That's the thing. That's what Darro figured out in the first forty pages and then spent the next four thousand pages following the implications of." He reached out and tapped the cover of Volume One. "When a sensor records empty space, it records a specific signature. A null signature. Every null recording in history has that signature — same pattern, same values, same everything, because empty space is empty space and it reads the same way whether you're scanning the Null Corridor or your own backyard."
"And?"
"And the null signature from that space — the space he occupied — is different." Pol opened Volume One to a page he had already bookmarked, turned it so Maev could read the comparison chart. Two columns of numbers. At a glance they looked identical. On closer inspection — and Darro had annotated the differences in red ink with the meticulous grief of a man who had wanted very badly for the numbers to match — they were not. "The standard null signature and the signature from his space differ in forty-seven distinct measurements. Small differences. Microscopic. The kind of differences that would never be caught in routine analysis." A pause. "Darro only caught them because he'd spent eleven days with nothing else to look at."
Maev studied the numbers. "What does the difference mean?"
"Volume Two is entirely about that question," Pol said. "The short version is: it means the space isn't empty. The space looks empty because whatever is in it is somehow — and Darro uses the phrase 'existing at a frequency that precedes the instrument's reference frame' — operating below the level that the instruments were built to measure. Not too large. Not too powerful. Too prior. Like trying to measure the age of a building with a tool that was built inside the building. The tool has no reference point old enough."
Maev set Volume One down very carefully, the way you set down something that has unexpectedly revealed itself to be heavier than it looks. "Too prior," she said.
"Too prior."
"That's what Consultant Fen said. Pre-substrate."
"Darro had apparently reached the same conclusion independently. He references Cohren Sev's paper in Volume Three. He'd clearly never read it before because his annotation in the margin says, and I'm quoting directly: 'Why did no one tell me about this paper. Why is this paper not mandatory reading for everyone in this building. Why is this paper not mandatory reading for everyone alive.'"
Despite everything, Maev almost smiled. "Volume Three," she said. "What's in Volume Three?"
Pol's almost-smile faded. He reached for Volume Three, opened it to a section marked with three bookmarks in different colors — his own organizational system, she had learned, color-coded by urgency. He had used a color she had never seen him use before on the third bookmark. She didn't ask what it meant. She looked at the page he had opened to instead.
It was a graph.
The x-axis was labeled Time — Observation Period (Days 1–11). The y-axis was labeled Null Signature Variance — Differential from Standard.
The line on the graph started near zero on day one. It climbed steadily through days two, three, four. By day six it had moved into a range Darro had shaded in yellow, labeled Anomalous. By day nine it had moved into a range shaded in orange, labeled Significantly Anomalous. On day eleven — the day he turned and looked at the star seventeen billion light years away — the line moved so sharply upward that it left the orange zone, passed through a range Darro had shaded in red, and disappeared off the top of the graph entirely.
Below the graph, Darro had written: The variance did not stop increasing. I have extended the y-axis three times. It continues to exceed the new ceiling. I do not know where it stops. I am not certain it stops.
"It was getting stronger," Maev said.
"Not stronger," Pol said. "More present. Darro's theory — and Volume Four is entirely devoted to this — is that it wasn't increasing in power. It was — he uses the phrase 'choosing to be more legible.' Like — like it was deciding, over eleven days, how much of itself to allow the instruments to see. And on day eleven, when it turned and looked at the star —" Pol tapped the graph, at the point where the line vanished off the top — "it stopped managing how legible it was. Just for a moment. Just for the smile. And what the instruments recorded in that moment was —"
He stopped.
"Was what?" Maev asked.
Pol closed Volume Three. He opened Volume Four instead, to the very first page, and turned it to face her.
The page contained a single number.
The number was so long it filled the entire page, top to bottom, margin to margin, in the smallest font the Bureau's document system permitted.
Maev looked at it for a long time.
"What is this?" she asked, very quietly.
"Darro's best estimate," Pol said, equally quietly, "of the lower bound of what the sensors recorded in that moment. Not the upper bound. The lower bound. The minimum." He paused. "He says in his note at the bottom of the page that this number is almost certainly wrong — that the actual value is higher — but that this is the largest number he could express using the Kerevath mathematical notation system and he didn't want to invent new notation in the middle of an official analysis report."
Maev stared at the page-length number.
"He didn't want to invent new notation," she repeated.
"He felt it would be unprofessional."
"Darro Fen," Maev said slowly, "produced four thousand three hundred and twelve pages of analysis, apologized for it in his cover note, cited a pre-Dominion paper he had never read before, and then declined to invent new mathematics because it would be unprofessional."
"Yes."
"I'm giving him a commendation."
"I've already drafted it."
Maev closed Volume Four. She sat back in her chair. She looked at the seven grey volumes on the table in front of her — this accidental monument to a man who had stared at impossible data for sixty-one hours because it would not let him stop. She thought about the number that filled the page. She thought about too prior and choosing to be legible and the smile aimed at a star seventeen billion light-years away.
"Volumes Five, Six, and Seven," she said.
Pol was quiet for a moment.
"Five is the cross-reference analysis," he said. "Darro pulled every sensor reading from the entire eleven-day observation period and cross-referenced each one against every other one, looking for patterns. He found —" A pause. "He found that the readings, taken together, form a structure. Not randomly. Not coincidentally. A deliberate, organized structure that Darro describes in Volume Five as —" He checked his notes — "'a form of encoding I cannot decrypt but can prove is intentional, because the probability of it arising from random sensor variance is approximately one in a number I have declined to write because it would require new notation.'"
Maev stared at him. "It was communicating."
"Or leaving a record," Pol said. "We don't know which. We don't know if the distinction matters." He paused. "Volume Six is the appendix he added this morning. It's an analysis of the structure in Volume Five. He's managed to partially decode it."
The air in the room seemed to change.
"Partially," Maev said.
"Partially."
"What has he decoded?"
Pol reached into his jacket and produced a single sheet of paper — separate from the volumes, folded once. He unfolded it and set it on the table between them.
It contained three lines.
Maev read them.
She read them again.
She looked up at Pol.
"And Volume Seven?" she asked. Her voice was very steady. She was proud of how steady it was.
"Volume Seven," Pol said, "is blank."
She blinked. "Blank."
"Every page. Four hundred and twelve pages, all blank. Darro's note at the beginning of Volume Seven says:" Pol unfolded a second piece of paper and read aloud. "'Volume Seven represents the portion of the encoded structure I was able to identify but not decode. I am leaving the pages blank rather than omitting them because I feel it is important to document the scale of what I do not understand. The blank pages are not empty. They are full of things I do not yet have the tools to read. I wanted there to be a record of that gap. I wanted it to take up space.'"
Silence.
Outside, the city went about its business.
Somewhere below them a transit line hummed past the spire.
"He wanted the not-knowing to take up space," Maev said softly.
"Yes."
She looked at the three lines on the sheet of paper between them. She looked at them for a long time.
"We need to reconvene the full team," she said. "Theology Division. The analysts. Watch Commander Rell. All of them."
"When?"
"Now." She stood. She picked up the sheet of paper. She folded it again, precisely, and placed it in her jacket pocket. "And Pol — "
"Yes?"
"Wake up Darro Fen."
Pol raised an eyebrow. "You said he needed to sleep."
"He did. Now he needs to be awake." She moved toward the door. "Because I have questions that only he can answer and they cannot wait." She paused at the threshold. "And because whatever he partially decoded — whatever those three lines say — I want him in the room when I ask the others what they mean."
She left.
Pol looked at the seven volumes on the table. At the page-filling number in Volume Four. At the four hundred and twelve blank pages of things no one yet had the tools to read.
He thought about Darro, who had sat for sixty-one hours with data that would not let him stop, who had apologized for thoroughness, who had left four hundred blank pages rather than pretend the gap wasn't there.
He thought about the smile on day eleven.
He thought about the star, seventeen billion light-years away.
He picked up his communication device and called Darro Fen.
It rang once.
Darro picked up immediately.
"I wasn't sleeping," Darro said, before Pol could speak.
"I know," Pol said.
"I was thinking about Volume Seven."
"I know."
A pause.
"She read it," Darro said. It wasn't a question.
"She read it."
"And the three lines?"
"She has them."
Another pause. Longer.
"Pol," Darro said, very quietly. "The three lines — I need you to understand, when I decoded them, I checked my work. I checked it eleven times. I used three different decryption frameworks. They all produced the same output."
"I know," Pol said.
"The structure in the sensor data — it wasn't a message for us. I don't think it even knew we were reading it. It was — it was thinking. Out loud. In a medium it didn't realize we could partially access. Those three lines are —" He stopped.
"Darro."
"They're a thought," Darro said. "Partial. Incomplete. Like catching three words of a sentence in a language you barely speak, spoken by someone who didn't know you were listening." He paused. "But those three words — Pol, those three words imply a sentence that I cannot — I have been trying to reconstruct what the full sentence might be for the last eight hours and every time I think I have it, it gets larger. Every time I think I understand the shape of it, there is more shape."
Pol said nothing.
"Come in," he said finally. "The Director wants you in the room."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Fifteen, if you can."
A brief pause.
"I'll be there in ten," Darro said.
He was there in eight.
The three lines on the sheet of paper, decoded from the structure in the sensor data, translated from a mathematical encoding into the nearest Kerevath linguistic equivalent, read as follows:
— still becoming —
— the question has not yet finished asking itself —
— I wonder if it knows I am watching it grow —
The third line had a word in it that Darro could not translate cleanly. The nearest equivalent he had found, after eight hours of searching the entire Kerevath linguistic archive, was a word that had been extinct for six hundred years — used only once, in a poem written by a philosopher who had died without disciples, about the specific feeling of watching something you love move toward its fullest possible form, knowing you will outlive the moment but cherishing it anyway.
The extinct word meant, approximately:
Proud.