The Archive Wing was silent, as always.
Professor Lu'Ka sat alone, the dim blue of his personal console illuminating the sharp contours of his face. The rest of the chamber lay in perpetual twilight—a reverent hush befitting a place that catalogued dead languages, extinct biospheres, and planetary records long since buried by time.
It was the hum that changed first.
Then the flicker.
A single data point blinked alive at the edge of his monitor. A ping.
Subtle. Unassuming.
He wouldn't have noticed it—shouldn't have, really—except that it was tagged with an identifier no one had touched in generations.
BEACON 7-R — STATUS: ACTIVE
Lu'Ka froze.
He stared at the string, disbelieving. Pulled it up. Cross-referenced it. The metadata was legitimate. Dated. Buried. But real.
"7-R," he said aloud.
His voice echoed faintly off the archive walls.
He summoned the attached report logs. They were thin—purged of detail after classification. All he could access was location, time of loss, and an old Council seal: RESTRICTED. NO CONTACT.
EXPEDITION TERMINATED.
Dakun.
Lu'Ka leaned closer.
That name. That cursed, closed-off world. The last transmission received from the original expedition was a garbled burst, incoherent and fragmented. No one ever figured out what happened. A team of twelve researchers. Engineers. Linguists. Biologists. Gone.
No wreckage. No remains. No official explanation.
The Council locked the planet down a week later. Labeled it unstable. Dangerous.
And no signal had come from it since.
Until now.
He tapped the coordinates. The beacon was active. Stable. It was coming from the exact region mapped by the expedition's last ping.
Lu'Ka's brow furrowed.
"How?"
The beacon wasn't designed for longevity. Its power core should have failed cycles ago.
Yet here it was—clean, consistent, like it had only just awakened.
He turned toward his assistant AI.
"Confirm signal path. Full telemetry."
"Confirmed," the voice responded. "Pulse is direct. Energy signature aligns with old Council expedition tags. Estimated surface depth: minimal. Beacon appears recently reactivated."
"Reactivated..." he repeated, quietly. "By whom?"
There was no answer.
Lu'Ka stared at the scrolling data, running his hands over his scalp in slow, thoughtful strokes. He enlarged the map projection again. The terrain of Dakun rendered itself in shades of rust and bone: dunes that had shifted only slightly since the last orbital survey, a scarred land broken by rock strata and collapsed sinkholes.
And at the center of it—the pulse.
He magnified the readout, enhancing the area down to thermal resonance.
There was heat.
Subtle. Contained. Uneven, but rhythmic. A signature that fluctuated in a way only life could.
He leaned in closer, blinking slowly.
"Give me biological match scan," he said.
The AI complied. A full diagnostic rolled out across a side screen, comparing known lifeforms from multiple registries: desert mammals, reptilian fauna, warm-blooded subterraneans, even artificial constructs with biological traces.
The results flickered... then froze.
No match.
He frowned. "Run again. Isolate genetic prediction models."
Another pause.
Then, calmly, the AI responded:
"Classification: unknown."
Lu'Ka's shoulders stiffened. The fine scales of his blue skin shimmered, then tightened—a reflexive ripple of unease that crept across his forearms and neck.
"Unknown?" he repeated.
"Correct."
He stood, pacing in slow circles, boots whispering against the floor. "The planet's supposed to be dead. No functioning systems. No known species. And you're telling me there's something alive down there—something we can't even identify?"
"Correct," the AI repeated, emotionless.
His mind raced.
Could it be something left behind from the expedition? Something mutated by environment? Or worse—something that found its way there after?
But none of it explained the signal.
The beacon had been dormant for centuries. Its activation shouldn't be possible. Its energy reserves should've degraded long ago.
So what restarted it?
Who—or what—triggered the call?
He returned to his console and stared down at the pulse log. It was still steady. Not distress. Not data. Just a signal that said one thing:
Here.
Lu'Ka remained at the console for hours.
He ran the signal through every filter he knew—scrambled it, stretched it, reversed its pulse frequency, looped its timing. He compared it to ancient navigation codes, linguistic samples, early beacon prototypes, and even stray war protocols from before the Treaty of Nine.
Nothing matched.
Not a clue. Not a break. Not even a theory.
His fingertips drummed against the panel in growing irritation. Every test came back the same way: incomplete. Unclassified. Unreadable.
Finally, he snapped, "Is this a machine or not?"
"Unable to determine," the AI responded.
"Is it a lifeform?"
"No conclusive biological readings within the signal transmission. Nearby heat signatures suggest organic presence, but signal source itself is mechanical."
Lu'Ka exhaled sharply and stood, pacing in a tight circle. His cloak swirled behind him like a trailing thought. His tail lashed once—uncontrolled.
"This is a beacon, yes? Designed for contact. Designed to carry data."
"Yes."
"So where is the data? What is it saying?"
"Signal format is non-communicative. Pulse-only. No embedded message structure."
He stopped and stared at the console like it had insulted him.
"But it's not automated."
"Negative. Automation system would have failed 350 cycles ago. Current activation is recent. Estimated time since reinitialization: less than three rotations."
Lu'Ka's skin rippled again, this time not from unease—but agitation.
"I'm a ranked xenoarchivist with nine Council honors," he muttered. "I've deciphered pre-contact scripts, reclassified lost AI dialects, and reconstructed half a language from three pictograms and a pottery shard."
He jabbed a finger at the console.
"And you're telling me this signal has no pattern, no language, no structure—but it's recent. Fresh. Deliberate?"
"Correct."
He slammed his datapad on the table.
For a long moment, he said nothing. Just stood there, hands gripping the edges of the console, breathing slowly.
Then, quieter, through clenched teeth:
"I hate being outsmarted by things that don't even talk."
The archive chamber had grown darker, or maybe it only felt that way because Lu'Ka hadn't blinked in a while.
He stood there for a long moment, breathing the filtered air, lit by the faint blue glow of the console's final screen: the signal pulse, still repeating in perfect intervals. Still meaningless. Still undeniable.
He closed the scans. Locked the data. Wiped traces of the session from the Academy's open network. Everything was routed to his personal encrypted archive, accessible only by him and—if protocol demanded—one other.
His mind raced with questions he hated.
What if it wasn't a trap?
What if it was?
What if someone down there was trying to be found?
He hated not knowing. Hated the silence that came after questions like these. It echoed louder than answers ever could.
"AI," he said at last, more subdued now, "save all raw data to my clearance node. Encrypt the files under temporary lockout."
"Confirmed."
He tapped his wristpad and pulled up the local time.
His lecture was in 2 hours.
He looked back once—just once—at the steady pulse on the display.
Still calling.
Still waiting.
With a final sweep of his hand, he powered down the main console. The Archive Wing returned to its usual hush, like nothing had ever happened.
But Lu'Ka no longer felt like a man working in peace.
He felt like someone who'd just read the first word of a language that didn't want to be spoken...